12. “As soon as you trust yourself, you will know how to live.” ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
A foundation of trust
Over the last few issues, I’ve been building up to writing about the importance of self-trust: trust in one’s own abilities, qualities, or judgement and self-confidence. The elements of the self are, of course, interconnected and feed into each other, and self-trust is, in my opinion, the most important and the most difficult one to cultivate. This explains why I struggled to manage this by myself and needed my coach to guide me through the process. It is truly life changing to now know I can count on myself to get through a difficult patch, by knowing how to manage my emotions, mood, energy levels, my time and even my environment.
A good example of this is when I was at the hospital with my daughter. I would normally be worried, tense, stressed, and very impatient with myself. The difference between last month’s surgery and the previous ones is that I focused on what I could control: my nutrition, hydration, movement, sleep and recovery. By controlling just these basics, I had more energy, space for reflection, and access to the rational part of the brain. It was important that I prove to myself that I could trust myself to handle this difficult situation. When I started to worry about the aspects I couldn’t control, I would bring my focus back to what I had control over.
Powerful internal shift
Over the past year, the feeling inside me has changed so strikingly. When I had little trust in myself, I worried what other people thought of me. I felt I needed others to validate me, both personally and professionally. I constantly felt unsure about myself, my work, even about my relationships. With hindsight, I believe I lived in a perpetual state of low-level anxiety. Which explains why I couldn’t handle tough situations well. My emotions were heightened already and so high stress would exacerbate my anxiety and worry. In that state, I couldn’t make logical, rational decisions, I would feel paralysed and end up not making any decisions, which needless to say, made my anxiety and mood worse!
At peace finally
Now I have a better mindset, mental toughness, alertness and prepared for some life situations, much better emotion regulation, and I have an amazing support network. I feel peaceful knowing I can handle difficult situations. There is space. Quiet and peaceful space in my mind. I have also cut down on consumption of every kind and I’m finding that helps with this too. Now I can hear myself think and write. I have access to ideas, thoughts and options that didn’t exist before. They were probably there before but I couldn’t hear them.
My biggest lesson in 2024
To say learning to trust myself has been a game changer is an understatement. It’s made the most profound difference in all areas of my life. This was the biggest lesson in 2024. If I had to pick one thing out of all the elements that develops a good relationship with ourselves, I would pick self-trust. Because it impacts every other element in our lives. If we have self trust, we have more self-belief, confidence, respect, self-esteem, and more likely to take action, experiment, course-correct, iterate, be courageous, be driven, be ambitious, be productive, be patient, make new friends and other connections, have clarity, energy, add value, and more likely to grow and be able to contribute and influence our loved ones, at work, and possibly the society at large.
There’s a virtuous cycle that goes like this: when we have self-belief, we’re more likely to take action towards our goals; the more we do, the more self-respect we have; when we have more self-respect, we take the right action steps and achieve more of our desired outcome, and our self-trust and confidence grow; when we trust ourselves and have more confidence, we know we can handle any situation; which means we feel more expansive and curious when looking at a problem; we’re more likely to take calculated risks and action steps. We’re also less concerned with making mistakes, and when we do make mistakes, we’re less likely to panic or crumble; our emotions are stable and can be easily regulated back to baseline; we’re more likely to be able to pick ourselves up and go again, in other words we’re more resilient. When we know we can handle any situation, we grow confident in problem-solving and can tolerate the sense of discomfort and uncertainty.
How to cultivate self-trust:
Recognise and acknowledge where you are currently. If your trust in yourself is low, it’s okay, we will build it up.
Engage your self-belief. Bust through your limiting beliefs (I wrote about this in the previous newsletter here).
Know that even if you make a mistake, you will be okay and be able to handle the situation. You will get back on your feet because you’re resilient. Tell yourself that.
Prove to yourself that you can keep a promise to yourself over and over again with small things first and then bigger things.
If you do this with hard tasks, your trust grows very quickly. For example, if you keep a promise to yourself that you will workout everyday, it will grow significantly because it’s hard at first to workout daily. Same goes for eating healthily, hydrating well, sleeping consistently well, reading, meditating, journaling, etc. It’s hard to do something once, it’s harder to do them consistently.
When you repeat this with only hard tasks, you will notice the difference quickly. For example, if you keep a promise to yourself to only eat healthily, without any cheat days; to workout daily even when you’re tired, stressed, overwhelmed, or you didn’t sleep enough; to keep calm and in control of your emotions everyday even when someone wrongs you, you’re tired or didn’t sleep enough or overworked. This step is undoubtedly the hardest step. Of course we feel like we can have cheat days or moody days or get angry etc when we have been working hard on a daily basis, and nobody knows, nobody cares or pays attention to that. But if you do this when nobody knows, you build your self-trust even more because you’re doing it for yourself, it’s a relationship with yourself.
Now, let’s recap:
Self-trust is built on top of self-belief and self-respect.
Build it with easier smaller things first, then harder bigger tasks.
Prove to yourself that you can do hard things, that you can keep your promises to yourself.
This is for you, nobody else. You must still do this when nobody is looking.
Now over to you:
Will you take action on this?
What would you do if you trusted yourself more?
What experiment will you run first?
Until the next issue, take good care of yourself and your loved ones,
Ikuko 💌