Building trust with yourself

It’s up to you.

First, I’d like to celebrate this anonymous note from a fellow self-care seeker, received after last week’s post titled “How’s your body doing?”:

“Just a comment to say how timely this email was for me today. I work a full time job and part time in [another job] and had today off. I slept until almost 11:00. I have felt guilty about it since I got up hearing my husbands often comment “you slept half the day away!” rattling around in my head. I pushed back and remembered how poorly I’ve slept the last week and reminded myself that my body wouldn’t have slept that long if it wasn’t tired. I had an event scheduled for this weekend that got canceled. Someone else called and wanted me for another event, and I lied and said I had made plans already. I felt guilty for the money I’m giving up but also empowered by being honest that I just can’t do another 6-7 day work week. I’m 61 years old and just tired. So thank you for the affirmation that told me that my choices were indeed OKAY. I AM ENTITLED TO REST.”

Thank you so much for sharing this experience – I loved reading your empowering and inspiring words! Keep telling yourself the truth, listening to your body, and honoring what it needs and wants! And celebrate when you do.

Now, on to building trust with ourselves …

There are different ways we learn how to trust (or not trust) ourselves. One of these ways is by doing (or not doing) what we say we’ll do – especially when it comes to ourselves. 

Most of the time, we do what we say we’ll do for other people. This is because we know the consequences of not following through: the other person will feel let down and disappointed and possibly change how they think about us, and then we’ll feel guilty for having disappointed them and think we need to make up for it somehow.

But what happens when we say we’ll do something for ourselves and then we don’t do it? Let’s say we put an hour on our calendar to do one of the following things: go to the gym, do a yoga class, take a walk, read for leisure, or cook a healthy meal. 

But we end up blowing ourselves off during that hour by using that time to keep working, scroll on social media, go out for drinks instead, or do something else besides what we had planned for ourselves. 

When we’re the ones not keeping our commitment to ourselves, we feel a double whammy – we’re the ones who are let down and disappointed AND we’re the ones feeling guilty about letting ourselves down. That feels doubly bad. And yet we might not even feel the need to make up for it.

Knowing this feeling, the next time we go to make a commitment to ourselves, we might avoid disappointing ourselves and feeling guilty about it ahead of time, so we might think, “Why bother? I’m not gonna do it anyway.” 

And then nothing moves forward with keeping commitments and building trust with ourselves. 

That’s how a defeating mindset begins when we think about making commitments to ourselves. We diminish our trust with ourselves when we don’t follow through on what we say we’re going to do for ourselves.

To build trust with ourselves, we can take small steps. “Today I’m going to walk around the block at 3pm.” 

And then at 3pm, we do what we say. We get up and walk around the block. 

When we do this, there’s a sense of empowerment, a sense of accomplishing something and fulfilling a promise to ourselves – no matter how small. “It feels good to do what I said I would!” Celebrate that and remember the feeling. 

This is how we start to strengthen the muscle of trusting ourselves more, knowing that we can have our own back. We can continue to make another small commitment to keep each day – it could be the same one! – until it’s just automatic for us to keep our word to ourselves. Until it feels uncomfortable when we don’t keep our word to ourselves. 

When we get even better at keeping commitments to ourselves, we build even more trust with ourselves. We start to know what it truly feels like to have our own back – no matter what. 

Your turn: What is one small commitment you want to make to yourself today that you’ll do tomorrow? When tomorrow comes, are you willing to build trust with yourself and do the thing? If you still find yourself not doing the thing, are you open to asking yourself if this is something you truly want to do for yourself or is something else telling you “you should” do it?

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What’s on your mind? It can be powerful to learn from each other and our common struggles when it comes to our practice of self-care–or just being a human being. If you have something you’re struggling with and would like some perspective, share it here. Your issue may be chosen and addressed in the next post–it’ll be totally anonymous.