mindset on the journey from self-doubt to self-trust

Change your mindset for self-trust

Last year, I attended a course on mindset. The premise of the course was that you’d pick a goal, whatever was relevant for you, and every day for 90 days, you would do something towards that goal.

The reason that I bring it up is that during the first group call, the guy who was running the course said, “in the end, it doesn’t actually matter if you hit the goal in the time frame or not. If you hit it sooner or later, it’s actually not a big deal. What’s important is that you show up for yourself every single day because that is what develops self-trust”.

Think about how many times you have made a commitment and then backed out of it or dropped off halfway through. What that guy was saying is that what you learn about yourself when you do that is that actually, you’re fundamentally untrustworthy. You’re not a person who honours their commitments to themselves.

The next time you make a commitment, part of you will be totally into it. But the other part of you will be like, really? Will you really do that, though?

Through this, you’re teaching yourself that on some level, you don’t have your own back. On the other hand, if you make a commitment and you show up for it every single day you will gain self-trust. It doesn’t actually matter if it takes you a week or a month or a year or 10.

Your words have the power to cultivate self-trust

What you learn about yourself is that your word is gospel. That if you say you’re going to do something, you absolutely will. Now what you know is that your word has power. So I think about that often when it comes to self-trust because I think the reason we don’t follow through on our decisions is very often because we don’t trust ourselves to make the right ones.

We’re so used to being told that the correct choice will always come via a source that’s external to us, a book, a person or whatever that thing is. Although we absolutely get those nudges of insight, those intuitive prompts and those moments of knowing, we doubt those messages. Then we override them with some story about why what we want isn’t really that important.

When we ignore those internal prompts, the decisions we make in the external world will be incongruent with the reality of our internal experience. And that is why we experience doubt.

Let yoga develop your internal process of inquiry

One of the reasons I think yoga is so great is because here’s this practice that’s deliberately internally focused. It teaches us how to reverse the direction of our inquiry.

Every system that sits within yoga grew out of a bodily experience. It was codified and refined over time. Not so that we’d have yet another outside source telling us what our choices should be. But so we would have a framework that would help us access our choices and our truth from within.

I feel like those two things are really key to self-trust. The choices we make are based on an internal process of enquiry. Once we feel satisfied that we’re choosing from that place, we follow through every time. And what I love about the tradition is that it teaches us both the internal enquiry and the method to follow it through.