Be more trusting of yourself
You’ve got to be more trusting of yourself if you want to build a life you can be proud of.
by: E.B. Johnson
Would you describe yourself as someone with a great deal of faith in who you are, and what you want? Do you trust yourself to make the right decisions? Or call the right shots for yourself and your family? Holding this trust in ourselves is crucial, and it directly affects our futures. If you don’t believe in the action that you’re taking or the direction you’re going in, it’s going to to be impossible to stay focused and motivated through the adversity and the hardship.
Signs you’ve stopped trusting yourself.
Have you lost the ability to trust in yourself, or your ability to make good decisions for your life? It’s common to lose touch with this intrinsic faith, especially if we’ve made a few mistakes along the way. Mistakes, however, don’t define us. We can rebuild our trust by first learning how to spot the signs of a loss of faith in self.
Avoiding new experiences
When we don’t trust ourselves to make good decisions or choose the right course of action, it can lead to a stagnation and paralyzing fear of seeking out new opportunities. Frozen with this sense of insecurity, we stop branching out and trying new things. In turn, this stunts our personal growth and leads to greater frustrations and perception of loss.
Minimizing yourself
Those who can’t trust their ability to thrive are generally those who work hard not to stick their heads out in a crowd. They play themselves small and minimize both their needs and their space in order to accommodate others.When you do this, you can’t set boundaries and you don’t feel comfortable speaking up for what you want or what you need. You downplay and minimize everything, because it’s easier than believing you deserve more.
Failing to decide
Showing an inability to make important decisions is a classic sign of someone who has lost their ability to trust themselves. You’ll find yourself flip-flopping from trending idea to trending idea, and you can even find yourself getting bullied and pushed around by others. This is an easy trap to fall into when you hold so little confidence in yourself. When we trust in ourselves, it’s easier to take a stand and make decisions for ourselves.
Conforming to misery
Do you follow the pack — even if it leads you right into heartache or misery? It’s nice to be a part of a social group, but not if it comes at the cost of our authenticity. While conforming might feel like fitting in, what it truly does is stifle our individualism, which in turn undermines our happiness and our ability to connect with others. It is possible to be a part of a pack and still hold true to your values.
Shunning change
What does change mean to you? Do you embrace it as a source of possibility? Do you run from it as a source of fear and uncertainty? If you picked the latter, it’s probably because — ultimately — you don’t trust yourself to navigate life without messing up or hurting yourself (and others). Change is happening all the time, and it’s one of the few guaranteed aspects in this life. By embracing it, we convey a confidence in our ability to protect ourselves and our wellbeing.
Lacking in growth
How often do you challenge your thoughts, or your life in general? When someone hurts you, do you address it? Or do you just clam up and shove it into the back of your mind? If you don’t challenge people who test you, you don’t question your life or what you’re doing with it — then you usually don’t trust yourself to do those things. Instead, you go with the flow and you do what those in your bubble of power tell you to do.
Making comparisons
One of the most common signs of a lack of personal trust is a use of constant comparisons. We compare ourselves to others in the hopes that we can rate our own journey, but no two people on this planet have precisely the same experience. It’s toxic to compare yourself to others, and it indicates an insecurity or a lack of pride in what you’re doing with your own life.
Losing self-esteem
What is your self-esteem like? Do you think highly of who you are? Do you surround yourself with good people who help you believe in yourself? Or do you sell yourself short out of fear time-and-time again? These are common side effects of living with low self-esteem. Because we don’t believe we are capable of navigating the turbulent waters of life, we engage in self-sabotage and toxic coping mechanisms that make it difficult to persevere.
The best ways to rediscover your self-belief.
If you feel as though you’re getting nowhere in life, you need to take a look at where you are and recalibrate. This begins by knowing that you deserve to be happy and fulfilled. It’s a process, however, that also requires you to fall in love with yourself while taking some new, calculated risks.
1. Lead with love of self
Think about the person you love most in your life. Do you trust them? If they told you to do something — would you do it? Chances are, you’ll say “yes.” When we love someone, we tend to assume they want the best and know the best, even if they don’t. Why then don’t we have that same faith in ourselves? Could it have something to do with our low self-esteem and inability to love who we are from the inside out?
One of the earliest steps in cultivating this personal trust is falling in love with who we are. We need to love the skin that we’re in and have a passion for the person who holds us together on the inside. This alone requires confrontations, though, and it requires embracing our weak points and our uncertainties.
Designate a journal as a personal celebration space. Each day, kick things off by writing down 3 things you love about your body and 3 things you love about your spirit. At the end of the day, write down 3–5 things that you did well (even if that’s just brushing your teeth and drinking water.) Do this for 28 days, then come back and review. Look back at the strong, accomplished person who woke up and celebrated their beauty each day
2. Uncover the newest parts
Who are you right now in this moment? Are you who you wanted to be? We often get so caught up in life that we get stuck; stagnant at whatever point the pressures started to add up. This stunting or pausing of growth is toxic, and it will leave us standing at the finish line feeling empty and without an anchor purpose. We have to find ways to expand our concept of self. We can do this by adding new facets to our interests and our personalities.
If you’re content where you are, switch things up. Look for new pastimes and activities that spark your interest, or teach you something new. Join an online course, or some sort of mutual-interest club that enables you to meet new and exciting people.
Expand your world consciously and mindfully. Follow your passions and don’t allow anyone else’s perception of who you should be temper that.Carve out new facets of self. Imagine yourself as a priceless gem, being wielded in the hands of a master jeweler. You are that jeweler. Gently shape and reshape yourself until you catch and reflect every beam of light there is to see in the heavens. Know that expanding your world — while scary — makes you better, not worse. In that discomfort there is beauty.
3. See the beauty in calculated risk
When we lose faith in ourselves or trust in our ability to thrive, one of the first things that we often do is back ourselves into a corner. We stop looking for opportunities and we stop taking risks. We shut the door on future possibilities and ensure that there’s no further growth. Taking calculated risks is a part of becoming fully who you are. In order to grow, we have to add new elements and aspects that weren’t there before.
Stop allowing your fear to rule your life. Stop letting the inner critic and all the self-doubt prevent you from reaching your highest potential (whatever that looks like to you). Start taking some calculated risks and do it by branching out into uncharted (and uncomfortable) territory.
This isn’t to say you should quit your job, cash out your savings, and start that cat-app company you’ve always wanted. Calculated risks are all about planning and doing the best you can to minimize potential failure and damages. You need to sit down and honestly determine what direction leads to your happiness. Then, you need to figure out all the potential pros and cons; selecting the path that can bring you the most potential return with the least damaging potential for failure.
4. Shifting the way you see things
Perspective is everything, and this is especially true when it comes to trusting ourselves. More often than not, we fail to trust ourselves because we get caught up in the patterns of someone else’s perspective. We force ourselves to see things through their eyes (rather than our own) and start to internalize the narrative they’ve created for us, instead of writing our own.To correct this, we have to shift the way we see things and take responsibility for our happiness.
Take yourself out of whatever story you’re in and reshape your perspective by writing a new one. Dig deep and figure out precisely who you want to be. What means the most to you? Who means the most to you? When you’re standing at the end, what life will you be able to recall with pride and a sense of accomplishment?
You are the only person who has a right to control your life. You are the only person who knows what is best; the only one who can fully understand the things you need. You alone are responsible for your journey, and for that reason you are equal with every other person around. Just as they have a right to call their shots, you have a right to call your own. And you have a right to take action in the name of who you are. Trust it and trust yourself too.
5. Don’t fall into the apology trap
Struggling with self-confidence leads to the belief that you don’t have a right to take up space, or define your own happiness. When this happens, we have a tendency to make ourselves small and engage in endless apologies whenever we put ourselves out there or do something our own way. Rather than sabotage ourselves this way, we have to embrace reality and what we want from our futures.
Drop the apologies. Stop feeling guilty for doing things you want to do, or saying the things you need to say. You have a right to be your own person. You have a right to define your own future and you have a divine right to create the parameters of your happiness.
Allow yourself to be bigger and bolder than you ever were before. Know that the only way you’re going to be able to get where you want to go is by putting yourself out there in all the best ways. Don’t allow the opinions of others to dictate your life. Leave them to pursue their joys and you take responsibility for yours. How they choose to feel about that is their own battle…not yours.
Putting it all together…
It is impossible to move through this world with any great success without trusting in who you are or what you want. When we trust ourselves, we develop the confidence to pursue our dreams and we enable ourselves to prioritize our needs. Are you tired of being buffeted along by the crowd? Are you ready to stand independently in the name of your dreams? Then start believing in yourself through action and inward reflection.
Cultivate a greater self-confidence by falling in love with who you are — inside and out. Start taking some calculated risks by branching out into new activities and pastimes that you might otherwise have avoided. Use these opportunities to expand your social horizons and the ways in which you see and define yourself. Carve out new facets of this blossoming self and discover new avenues that provide you with boosted self-esteem. Stop apologizing for who you are and what you want. You have a right to your own unique picture of meaning and no one can take that away from you.Shift the way you see things and understand that this world (all of it belongs to you just as much as it belongs to anyone else. You deserve happiness, peace, and contentment.
- Chwyl, C., Chen, P., & Zaki, J. (2020). Beliefs About Self-Compassion: Implications for Coping and Self-Improvement. Personality And Social Psychology Bulletin, 014616722096530. doi: 10.1177/0146167220965303
