Do you struggle to trust others? Have you tried to trust someone and they just confirm by their actions or words that you should never trust anyone? Do you ever wonder what it would be like if you did trust others?
What if I told you that no matter how much you trust yourself consciously, that when you don’t trust others, that you are lacking trust in yourself at the unconscious level. If you are truly honest with yourself…do you trust yourself? Can you remember a time when you did, trust yourself.
What does trusting yourself mean to you when you think about trusting yourself? How do you learn to trust yourself? For me it’s trusting my gut instincts, and yes sometimes they are a little off but overall it’s not good when I ignore the nudges I get from the unconscious level.
Self-trust is so important in developing healthy relationships, strong bonds with family and friends, and just being able to go out into the world and have meaningful interactions with people. It’s also important to have self-trust when it comes to your health. When you are focused on the negative things going on in your body and not trusting that it can and will heal, if you focus on being healed and whole it significantly increases your ability to heal and be whole. People have beat Cancer, walked after being told they would never walk again, had a full life when their family was told they would be a vegetable for the rest of their days.
How does this happen? Your body has an intelligence that runs unconsciously when you sleep, lets you know when you need to eat, keeps you breathing and your blood pumping when your busy throughout the day doing other things. It’s this intelligence that is punished every time you decide not to trust yourself. You have experiences that have been recorded and organized by this unconscious self, this intelligence see’s everything and helps you to respond to your environment the best it knows how.
This is how you can consciously want to change a behavior that is not benefiting you and then find yourself doing this behavior anyway. It’s how when you go to add a new habit it takes so many days to install it, unless you happen have a tool to install a new habit in a matter of minutes, then it takes time to make this new habit a really solid part of your routine.
What better way to start building trust with yourself but by making small easily achievable goals that are aligned with your values and that build on the life you want to achieve. One goal could be to start journaling on a regular basis, write down your thoughts…the good and the bad, your feelings…and notice if there is a pattern to the feelings, notice how you decided to do what you did or say what you said.
Another way to build that self-trust is to meditate or spend time being mindful. Spend 15-20 minutes a day just turning inward. Use a meditation app or light a candle, focus on your breathing and just notice what is going on in your body. It use to be I believed that meditation was about clearing your mind, and mine would never completely clear so I thought that it didn’t work for me. When I found out that it wasn’t necessarily about clearing your mind but more about turning inward and taking stock of where you are at mentally, emotionally, physically, spiritually that was really a game changer.
As you start to do these practices make sure and track your progress, there are some great apps out there to help you keep track of your daily routine and all the things you are working on adding to your routine. Don’t think of it as an all or nothing system, some day’s you are going to win big and some days are going to be a lesson in self-forgiveness.
Now self-forgiveness is necessary when building self-trust. You are a human being, we make choices and sometimes what we choose is excellent and sometimes it’s a lesson. If you can choose to forgive yourself for the missteps, big or small, then you are well on your way to trusting yourself. Because we are all just doing the best we can with the resources we have at the time we do a thing. Knowing this is powerful, because this is the basis for being able to forgive people…especially ourselves.
As you continue to learn to trust yourself, you will notice that the intelligence that runs your body will give you information. This usually comes as a gut feeling, the Nope don’t do this it won’t be good or the YES this is it. Though sometimes a gut feeling will be more subtle and you will have to interpret the best you can. You will have to pull on your prior experiences and this is where things can get a little less easy.
Because our experiences are so person-centric, we may be in the same experience as 9 other people but each of them may have that experience completely differently based on their own filters, their own experiences, feelings, thoughts, and the things they value. So, while your gut may tell you this is a good thing for someone else it may be an anger trigger and they completely shut down. You have to trust your gut and someone else has to trust theirs, and it’s okay when they don’t align. If you stick with listening to your instincts you will notice the subtle differences between Let’s go for it and I THINK it’s okay.
Another way to build self-trust and this is easy to do journaling or on the fly. When you have negative self-talk or you are thinking in a negative way, learn to become aware that you are doing so. Whatever you think or say out loud, the intelligence of the body takes that as information you are saying about yourself to yourself…whether that’s your conscious intention or not. Once you are aware that you are thinking or saying negative stuff, stop and consider what you are thinking and saying and ask yourself “Is this true?”
If you are saying something negative about somebody else, place it on yourself and then ask is this true. For example “Wow, that man is a real jerk.” Switch it to “Wow, I’m a real jerk…is this true?” No! However just the act of saying that about the man is confirmation to your unconscious self that you are in fact a jerk. So, maybe the next time you meet someone who is not acting how you would act, think about the fact that he might just be having a bad day, or it’s the only way he knows how to be. Honestly this just takes us back to what I said earlier about everyone is doing the best they can with the resources they have available.
To continue with ways to shift negative thinking, if you are always focused on how something could go wrong. I would like to point out that where our attention goes our energy flows, and all that focus on what could go wrong is likely to do just that, make it go wrong. Start to instead think of all the ways a thing could go right or if you can’t pull that off right away think of how it could at least end up neutral. But the more you can focus on the good, the more you can focus on the great, the better your outlook on life, the better your life will get.
The better your life gets the easier it is to trust yourself, which then leads to healthier and stronger relationships with the people around you…or the ones that aren’t meant to be there in your life will fall away, and that’s okay too. This leaves room for better quality, trust worthy, and supportive people to enter your life and you won’t worry if you can trust them or not because you just know you do. An important aspect of this is creating healthy boundaries and keeping them.
If you have healthy boundaries that you keep, when you keep these boundaries you learn to trust yourself. You also learn who you can trust to respect your boundaries, those are the people you know respect you. It’s no easy thing to trust, and to have the life we deserve we need to learn to trust, and creating and holding healthy boundaries is a great way to clear up your mind and clear out the people in your life holding you down. There are people who will try to make you doubt yourself, they will push your boundaries, they will try to make you feel guilty and those are the people that you need to prepare yourself to let go of.
This will create a huge push of self-trust, because then you are honoring yourself by holding that space. This leads to self-care and personal development. If you take care of your body and fill your personal energy cup this gives you more self-trust because you are not always running on empty. And if your energy cup is not big enough for you and all the demands that are part of your everyday life that’s when it’s time to focus on personal development.
When you grow, when you develop yourself, you basically upgrade your energy cup, you expand your ability to handle difficult situations, you are more emotionally balanced, you then have more self-trust because you are at another level of awareness and energetic vibration. So, the more you grow, the more you can give, the more you trust yourself, the better your boundaries, the more empowered you are to trust people, places, and things. Now isn’t that exciting, I trust you to do everything you can to use this information to find yourself on the path to trusting yourself and others.
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