Opening the book…
Promises made when things are easy are the cheap ones; their entire value is revealed by whether they survive a downturn. Break one under pressure and you retroactively devalue everything else you have ever said. Keeping it costs you something real once, and buys you credibility that no speech can buy.
Write down the commitments you make in flush periods — the training budget, the promotion path, the day someone was told they could take. When conditions turn, treat those as fixed costs rather than discretionary spend. If a promise truly cannot survive, go to the person first, say plainly that you are breaking it, and ask what would make it right.
A promise that has become genuinely harmful to the person or the team is not sacred; renegotiate it face to face rather than honouring it out of vanity. Promises you never actually made, but that someone inferred, need clarifying rather than keeping.