Learning to trust is possible, one step at a time.
Last week I bought a pretty ring, it was after all my birthday. I walked in, saw it tried it on and said yes!. It all took about 5 minutes.
I know what I like and, it had all the right things (colour, style etc.) it was an easy decision. You might be asking what this has to do with trust, so I’ll explain.
I have learnt to trust myself when it comes to things like that and also with matters much more ‘difficult’. I can tell you it wasn’t always that way.
Even with something as relatively trivial as buying jewellery, before I knew what I liked and learned to trust my decisions I purchased loads of what turned out to be bad decisions because I hated them when I got home – or shortly after. (then I’m stuck thinking how much money I’d wasted)
When it comes to issues with trust connected to other people and when our trust is broken, we think it has been done by that other person, and while that someone may have created a trigger; what happens, in reality, is we stop trusting ourselves.
We think we made the wrong choice which creates all sorts of doubt.
Just like I used to back in the day with my jewellery! I couldn’t trust myself to buy anything.
Then, being down on ourselves, we believe we don’t know how to make the right choice any more.
Or, we don’t trust ourselves to make a good one, so the first person we need to learn to trust is ourselves.
Once we learn self-belief and know our decisions are made on purpose, we get to experience trusting ourselves fully.
If we don’t learn to trust ourselves, we keep doubting and judging our choices as wrong, and we begin making new ones from a place of fear.
Living from fear means our brains seek out reasons and justifications to feel fearful and because our minds are so smart they find them!! In abundance!!
Switching out the fear opens our brains to seek out what we decide to let in.
Even if a decision turns out to be “wrong” when it comes from a place of trusting ourselves; we then get to learn from our experiences and decide on purpose to make different decisions in future.
Learning and growing every step of the way builds trust in yourself.
Deciding to live by trusting ourselves means our minds seek and FIND the reasons to trust ourselves and that builds the new cycle of trust.
Ultimately, we get to choose; either live in fear and seek all the reasons to support that.
Or
Live in trust and by believing in yourself; you get to actively seek and find all the reasons to support that reality.
Just like me with the jewellery, you can learn to trust yourself, you will have the belief and get to know you are making decisions on purpose.
Because I know the reality is, how we do one thing is how we do almost everything – when we identify one area of our lives that we want to focus on building trust and apply my small steps, you will, just like me, see the difference.
The first steps are, as with most things; by noticing!
- Observe times when you do feel trust
- How do you feel when you are aware of being trusting
Next;
- Observe; notice yourself not trusting, distrusting
- How you feel when you are aware of this lack of trust
Keeping track of when trust and distrust show up and how you feel when each does
Once you start noticing when this comes up and seeing which different areas of your life it appears, you get to choose which one to work on first.
Depending on where your start point is learning to trust ourselves might seem difficult. So, like my example, I recommend to choose something simple and go with that.
The next steps are to catch your thoughts
- Notice what you are thinking when these instances occur.
Once you document this, you will be able to see the patterns, you can then learn to create new ways of thinking which will lead to new ways of feeling and taking different actions.
You will soon be on track to building your trust muscle and will be able to apply it to other areas of your life.
This is possible, with these instructions, some people will be able to do this alone while others will seek help from a trusted friend or a life coach. If you’d like some professional help, book in a free call & we can see if coaching is a fit for you.
Either way, once you set your intention to build your trust muscle; you will be able to start to feel more confident with your decisions.