Do you trust yourself?

This is the ‘trust’ label stuck on the keyboard of my laptop. I have them all over the place including beside my bed and in my purse. Originally, the idea was to remind myself to trust that things would be ok, that everything unfolds as it is supposed to. Trust being opposite to worry, and to trying to control the things we have no power to influence.

I’ve been thinking recently, however, about another kind of trust which is also very important to cultivate if we want to worry less. The trust we should have in ourselves that we will deal with things if and when they happen, and that we don’t have to rehearse everything, think it through, plan our reactions, in advance.

If we are over-thinkers, people who worry just that bit (or a lot) more than we need to, problem-solvers, analysers, we like to plan for every eventuality. Now, I am not against planning; on the contrary I know how important it is, not only to ensure that things go as smoothly as possible, but also to relieve us of the impulse to worry because we have failed to plan! But planning is constructive, often involves a pen and paper, and when it’s done, it’s done. Worrying is not planning. We over-thinkers can be seduced into believing that going over and over the various possible outcomes of a problem, in our heads, in advance, is sensible planning. The clue is in ‘over and over’; that’s not planning, it’s compulsive thinking!

For example, I often have difficult phone calls to make or am in the middle of sensitive email exchanges. I used to spend lots of time before the phone calls, and while waiting for reply emails, thinking about what I would say or write, how I might feel according to the reaction I received, and wondering which outcome, from the many I had imagined, might become reality. Today, I have reminded myself (and, to be honest, am reminding myself again by writing this) that this kind of over-planning, or rehearsing, is not only unnecessary but also a waste of energy, time, presence, life.

I try to remember that I am well educated and fairly intelligent, and that I have, in the past 50 years, dealt with many, many difficult and sensitive situations before. Most of them have turned out ok, and even the ones I’ve messed up have eventually gone away. I practise trusting myself to deal with whatever comes up, at the time it needs to be dealt with, and not before. I may need to look something up or have a conversation in preparation, and then I put it out of my mind, let go of the thinking, and concentrate on the here and now, confident in the knowledge that I have put my best person (me) in charge of dealing with things as and when required.

Years ago, I would never have thought I could do this. But the amazing thing is this: practice enables us to achieve all sorts of things we never thought we could do! Once I have decided this is what I want to do, I can trust myself and funnily enough I can step up to the mark and deal with things well when circumstances demand, often unexpectedly. And adopting this approach means I have a whole lot more life to enjoy in between the times I am actually having to take action.

Do you have something you are ‘planning’ over and over at the moment? Do you really need to be thinking about it, or could you trust yourself to deal with it competently when you need to? And if you trusted yourself, really believed that you had put your best person in charge and they would know the right way to act and react when the time came, how would this change the here and now for you?

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