The Key To Everything: Learning to Trust Myself

The biggest lesson for me and for many of my clients in 2019 was learning to trust myself completely. It was a consistent theme throughout the year and the more I personally explored the nuances and found the edges of what it meant to really trust oneself, the more in naturally found its way into my work with clients.

Countless times I found myself post events, in conversations with executives, telling me how powerful it had been for them to examine their capacity to trust themselves. Often it was their biggest take-away from our time together.

As we roll into 2020, the New Year serves as a beautiful arena to flex our trust muscle. This, of course, is the time of year many of us make our biggest commitments to ourselves about who we're going to be, what we’re going to do, and what we want to have.

Many of us write down or shout out to the world our resolutions, goals, and vision for the year ahead. Marketers and influencers champion, “New Year New You” campaigns. We all collectively find ourselves getting swept up in the excitement and hope for bigger, bolder and brighter futures for ourselves.

Unfortunately, what’s often left out of the conversation is the reality that when many of us write down our resolutions or make bold declaration across social media, we are often confronted with the inner critic that says, “HA! You are not going to do it and you will never follow through!” 

Conditioned from years of making and then breaking promises to ourselves, as soon as our resolution is spoken, a little tremor of doubt reverberates through our bodies.

If you’ve experienced this, you’re not alone. We’ve all been there. Don’t take that signal as an opportunity to continue to punish yourself but rather recognize it as an indication that there’s work to do on expanding your capacity to trust yourself.

What does it mean to trust yourself? 

Trusting yourself is like trusting other people.

Think about what makes you trust another person. What do they do? How do they show up in the relationship?

As my good friend Ryan Estis always says, Trustworthy people do what they say they’re going to do, when they say they’re going to do it, all the time.” They’re consistent in how they show up. They’re always there when you need them.

If that’s what a trustworthy person does, then the question we have to ask in self-reflection is, do I do that for me? Do I follow through for me? Do I consistently show up for myself? Do I have my own back? Do I stand up for me?

As I began to examine this theme and contemplate these questions in early 2019, with a heavy heart, it occurred to me, I don’t trust myself.

And then I was struck by a secondary question, “What is not trusting myself costing me?”

What is not trusting yourself, all the way, costing you?

In short, the answer for me was a lot.

To fully understand this, we have to consider what happens in any relationship when we don’t trust another.

In the absence of trust, what creeps in?

Doubt.

Tension.

Conflict.

And with the weight of doubt, tension, and conflict, over time, we begin to distance ourselves from the individual.

How does this manifest within ourselves?

When you have all of that going on inside of you, not only do you limit your own capacity for connection, creation, impact, and transformation for yourself, it makes it really difficult to deeply connect with others.

The same way we must learn to love ourselves in order to truly love another, to deeply trust those around us, we must learn to trust ourselves completely.

What I learned in 2019 was that my capacity to bring my vision into reality and rise to meet defining moments with confidence rose and fell with the quality and intensity of my trust for myself.

So as we move into the start of a new decade, if you find yourself feeling a tinge of doubt about your ability to fully trust yourself, the best thing you can do is start small.

New Year’s resolutions and commitments to have your best year yet, often set us up for failure, fatigue, and frustration. They accelerate the continuous cycle of negative self-talk and the amplification of the inner critic.

Silencing those dark monsters is accomplished not through some massive radical transformation but through small acts of self-service and love consistently deployed.

Start small. Commit to doing something today and follow through. Commit to executing on the little things that support your vision this week. Next week we’ll do the same. And the following.  And when we experience a setback, we’ll show ourselves grace and recommitment for the day ahead.

As you embark on this journey, what will happen for you is the same thing that has happened for me. I’ve started to become the person I’ve envisioned in my mind. My future-self, the version of me that loves himself completely and shows up for himself consistently. The version of me strong enough to silence the inner critic telling me I’m not a real writer. The one who feels worthy and willing to hitting publish. The one who shares this article for you to read today instead of hiding it away.

And this I believe is the magic. When you trust yourself and begin to show up as the highest expression of you, you give everyone around the courage to do the same