Belonging to Ourselves: Step 3 - TRUST

Baby steps toward believing in our reliability

Photo by Alex Shute on Unsplash

I'm doing a little series here on belonging to ourselves. This is Part 4 of 5. If you missed the introduction, start here. If you missed part 2 (step 1), you can read it here. Part 3 (step 2), is here.

We've cleaned out the dusty corners and gotten to know more about ourselves. We've looked everything we've found in the face and shown it love - patience, compassion, acceptance. Now, we need to learn how to trust.

Trusting My Own Voice

My  journey of self-discovery began many years ago amidst my early struggles with thyroid disease. I read book after book about thyroid disease and followed big names in the realm of thyroid healing. Somewhere amidst all of my learning I stumbled upon the suggestion of a connection between thyroid disease and holding back our voices. As a life-long people pleaser, I felt called out. I sat with the idea for long enough to start to ask the question - what is it that my voice wants to say? I journaled, I wrote, I spoke with friends and slowly I began to get to know my own voice. A voice I had held back in order to keep the peace and fit in.

After years of deferring to other people, I found myself faced with my own voice that I wasn't sure how to trust. I wasn't sure how to see my own voice as equal to the voices of others. I am learning to trust my voice. I am learning to trust myself. It is a slow, difficult, and ongoing process.

Baby Steps

Trust is built over time by demonstrating over and over again that you can be consistent and reliable. It doesn’t have to be perfect. When someone has our trust, we are able to give them the benefit of the doubt in the times when they fail to be consistent or reliable. We have gathered enough evidence to believe their misstep is an oddity and not the full representation who they are.

I've had the best luck building evidence that I am trustworthy through baby steps. I use tiny achievable steps that I practice over and over again that I can look back on to prove to myself that I can deliver. By tiny, I truly mean tiny. Some of the baby steps I've worked through have been so small that an older part of me would have exclaimed that they are no enough and don't count. The truth is, sometimes a bigger step is more likely to create evidence that I cannot, in fast, do the thing, leading me to give up trying. Over time, as trust in myself builds, I'm able to take bigger steps. Allowing myself to start ridiculously small helped me build a solid foundation of trust.

Radical Self-Trust

As you explore this idea of self-trust, you might find The Garden of Belonging Podcast Season 3 supportive. In it, I asked my guests the following questions:

• what does radical self-trust mean to you?

• what is it like when we don’t trust ourselves?

• what happens when we trust ourselves and go against the grain?

• how do we handle the naysayers?

• how do you balance the voices of experts with your own inner voice?

You can also find past episodes in your favorite podcast app, if you prefer listening outside of Substack.

Over To You

How have you learned to trust yourself? What has supported you? How do you stand in that trust when met with resistance? Feel free to share, or perhaps you simply want to share with your journal.

To your radical self-trust,