Trust Yourself

Trust yourself. You know more than you think you do. ― Benjamin Spock

Trusting ourselves means trusting our intuition or our gut feelings. Intuition is a great self-help tool as it is with us at all time and can tell us what we really want or don’t want in our life and what we need to be successful. After all no one knows the real us better than ourselves.

Unfortunately we ignore our intuition most of times and let our rational mind to take over. When making a decision. How many times do you ask people for their opinion? How many times a day do you second guess yourself? We all have been doubting ourselves most of times, thinking that we are not good enough. That is because we don’t trust our inner voice and instead we depend on others. In other word we tell ourselves that our opinion don’t matter and others must know better than us. The truth is that we do know something and probably know more than we think we know. But by thinking that we don’t know anything keeps us from making the right decision which our intuitive mind is telling us. And we let ourselves to be dependent on other people.

It’s time that we learn how to trust ourselves. Here are a few simple steps which can help you to build trust in yourself:

1- Be-friend yourself. The most important relationship in our lives is the relationship with ourselves. If we don’t know ourselves, are not connected and emotionally available to ourselves, we cannot be connected and emotionally available for others either. By knowing ourselves better we become more focussed on our internal processes. We have to constantly ask ourselves questions, like: “What am I feeling? What am I thinking?” “I wonder why that’s bothering me? And this process builds an inner strength and plants the seed of trust.

2- Take action. We gain trust in others when they stick to the promises they have made and have delivered them. Has ever someone let you down? Made a promise and broken it? How did it feel? Pretty horrible I suspect. What about the other way around? Have you ever broken a promise to someone else? We generally try with all our power to follow through our word, to do as we have promised we will. Promises are serious matters and by not sticking to them we create strong feelings when they are made and broken. We place a lot of value on being honest and having personal integrity. Now I have another question to ask: Have you ever made a promise to yourself which you didn’t follow it through and broke it? I think most of us have, even more than once or twice. The point is, if we have a friend who constantly made promises and let us down, what would we think of them? What value would we place on their promises? And how long would we tolerate their behaviour? When we break the promises that we have made to ourselves, we send ourselves a powerful message that we are not trustworthy. And we also go against our values around being honest and acting with integrity. By learning to be accountable to ourselves we start to trust ourselves, and with each and every commitment we keep to ourselves, we build our self-esteem and faith in our ability to deliver. Making a promise to do something that is within our limit but at the same time, leading us towards our goal, is the best way to build trust.

3- Be tough, but just. Each and every one of us make mistakes during our lives. There might be times when we break our promises to ourselves, but the important thing is to acknowledge it and find a solution for it. The best ways I found to make me keeping my promises are: To make one promise per day and stick to it. To be realistic in my daily commitment, not to let anything get in the way, To make my promise clear and specific, To write down my promise and keep it somewhere visible, To keep track of my daily success on a chart somewhere I can see regularly, and reward myself for keeping my promises for a week.

Life is about trusting yourself and your feelings, taking chances, finding happiness and learning from your mistakes. Don’t be so afraid of making mistakes as I believe that life has a way of working out. So trust your best judgment, stick to your decision, follow through, and let the cards fall where they may.

“Listen to your own voice, your own soul, too many people listen to the noise of the world, instead of themselves.” ~ Leon Brown