Trust, continued.
If you’ve been reading along, you know that I’m on a journey to find joy and an evolution of myself. I started my story sharing some of the largest hurdles I’ve faced in my life – some that almost took my life. Sharing these stories allowed me to own them and not be ashamed of them. It was freeing and I was flying high, no pun intended. Over the last six months I’ve shared some of my more day-to-day challenges – being in funks, struggling with piecing together all that I’ve learned on my journey, so far. I’ve shared a lot about perfectionism and control, as well as having a hard time trusting myself.
Today, after a hard week where I felt pulled in so many directions that I could hardly keep up, I sat down to meditate, journal and reflect. I had not done this all week and I was starting to feel anxious inside about this fact. Part of me was worried – maybe even a little superstitious – thinking that if I was not doing these certain things, that everything I had built would crumble and I’d be right back into the depressed state I had just come out of. As I reflected, I remembered a few things my sister said (in my words not hers).
Sometimes things are just going to suck
Everything is temporary
You can trust yourself to flow through times
That last one is a big one, for me. I touched on it last week, about not trusting myself. It came up again in my reflection and journaling today. Some people I trust more than myself and I generally don’t have a hard time trusting people. But, I keep getting hung up on trusting myself. Here are some ways that this shows up in my life:
Parenting: Creating boundaries and rules for my kids and then sticking to those, how I diffuse arguments and tantrums and how I rally myself for bedtime routine when I just want to be finished with the day.
Relationships: How I’m able to maintain relationships with friends and family, even when I can’t fathom doing one more thing. Being a trusted human in their lives when they’re having a hard time or facing a difficult decision.
Work: Being ok with ‘this is my best right now’ vs the best ever (that would mean it’s perfect!). Knowing that the outcome of something doesn’t reflect on my efforts, abilities or my worth as a human.
As someone who is striving to be a better person day in and day out, this can also make it hard to trust myself. The emphasis being on “How could I have done this differently, shown up better, said this thing more kindly.”. I do believe that if we’re not seeking to evolve then we’re not keeping up with every other thing that’s evolving – humanity, people, work, parenting, family. Nothing stays the same, ever, so evolving is necessary, and, in my opinion, healthy. Where I can take it to an unhealthy place is when the only place I’m living is a future state of evolution and the dreaded perfection. When I’m living in a state of how I could have / should have shown up it becomes overwhelming and defeating. It also ties right back to reinforcing that I can’t trust myself. When in reality, the simple fact that I’m wondering how I could have shown up differently might be a way to create a deeper trust in myself versus driving my efforts into a space of ‘not good enough’. I may not do something well the first time, but if I keep trying, that is still evolution! This is where self compassion plays an important role. Oftentimes we overlook it because we desperately want things to be different. The simple ways we speak to ourselves can change the trajectory of a situation that didn’t go well (or how we would have liked it to go). Self compassion can be as simple as saying to ourselves “What happened does not make me a bad person or a failure in XYZ. I tried my best in the moment. I can trust myself to continue this journey.”.
There is a deeper intuition and trust. The kind that comes into play when big decisions are on the table. Often we can be frozen because we’re scared. We’re ok with the devil we know, even if our hearts are elsewhere. We’re comfortable but not where we want to be. These are the areas that trust in ourselves can catapult our lives!
What I’m feeling is that I can trust myself to not be stuck. To be fluid with life and all of its changes and challenges. When we know that things constantly change we also remove the possibility that we will never be able to change. This then means that we’re evolving, sometimes, without even trying and this is more proof that we can trust ourselves on our own journeys. I can trust myself. Period.
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