You are the most important person to trust in this world. We so often do not listen to ourselves and barge into the unknown alone. But its all about you and trusting yourself.
How many times in life have you felt your inner self, your instincts tell you not to do something, but you did it anyway. Maybe you married the wrong person or became friends with an untrustworthy person.
Trusting Yourself
How do you begin trusting yourself? That is the big question I will help you determine here today.
Have you been in a situation where you knew the answer, but you let someone make you think you were wrong?
A Scenario
For example, you meet a guy on a dating site and hit it off on chat. You see a picture of him. He is so cute and sounds like a great guy according to his bio.
He visits his parents regularly. He has a dog and takes him for walks in the park. He is clean-shaven and dresses as your dream man would dress. He has a high paying job but volunteers to help at the homeless shelter.
He sounds perfect. But you don’t feel right about the situation. The hairs on the back of your neck stand up when you look at his picture.
You talk to a couple of your girlfriends and tell them how you feel. They take a look and can’t believe you would pass up this opportunity to meet an incredible guy like this.
So instead of trusting yourself, you set up a date with your so-called dream man. You plan to meet him at the local coffee shop the next day. But you still don’t feel good about it. So, why are you going to meet him?
Tomorrow comes, and you go to meet your new date. You set up to meet your date at the corner booth. When you get there, you look everywhere for the guy in the photo.
Only to find that the picture he used was of someone else. He doesn’t even closely resemble the photo.
What do you do now? Do you sit down because it is too hard to walk out or do you realize you are right and this guy lied to you the whole time then turn around and leave?
Its All About You.
Why Did You Go? Now that’s a good question. You were uncomfortable, but instead of listening to yourself, you consulted a friend. You have to think of your life like its all about you.
I don’t want you t be self centered and selfish but how will you develop in trusting yourself if you don’t put you first.
Were you afraid you would make a mistake and miss out?
Why did you need your friends to override your instincts?
Do you have low self-esteem?
These are some questions we will explore. I can’t answer them for you, but we can look at why and you can work on self-improvement.
Self-esteem
According to Wikipedia, self-esteem is an evaluation of how you view yourself. It is a group of beliefs you have about yourself and how you run them through your paradigm of life.
A paradigm of life is a set of beliefs that you run every situation through. A collection of theories you learned early in life that tell you who you are and how you will react.
Its all about you because it is your life and your paradigm. You are the only one who can change it and start trusting yourself no matter what has happened to you in life.
How Did You Misplace Self-Esteem?
If your parents gave you positive affirmations, you might have a set of positive beliefs about yourself.
If someone said you were no good, then your beliefs about yourself will be negative.
Or you may be shy or bullied or unsure from a very early age. You formed your thoughts of who you are very early in life regardless of the reason.
Let’s apply this to the dating situation with the assumption that you have negative self-worth.
You were uncomfortable meeting this guy, and you had the right to say no, but you were not trusting yourself. You second-guessed your decisions.
When the situation arose to meet this guy, you evaluated yourself, not the situation.
This Is What You Saw
You don’t believe you are capable of making the right decision for your life. You are concerned that you may make a mistake. At some point in your life, you formed a belief that you are not good enough and worthy.
Instead of evaluating your feelings on the situation, you let your senses take a back seat and sought the counsel of friends. These friends did not have your best interest at heart.
They saw an exciting opportunity for you but did not see the conversations you had with this guy that made the hair stand up on the back of your neck.
We can apply this to any scenario, and it will come out the same. You didn’t believe in yourself there for you did not trust your instincts.
How can you trust yourself?
It is a process of learning and setting new beliefs. You formed the original views based on what someone else told you. Now you need to develop them based on what you tell yourself.
When the hair on the back of your neck stood up, you set that alarm aside.
I challenge you to act on those initial feelings. Don’t continue to re-evaluate the situation based on the past formulation of your self-esteem. Instead, stop right where you are and back away.
But you might miss out on something good if your decision was not correct. Yes, you may but is it better to reset your thinking, redesign your beliefs, and trust yourself instead of walking into a potentially harmful situation. And it is better to take the time to heal your self-esteem.
It takes continuous positive affirmations to negate the bad ones that you formed early on.
Your Mirror Affirmations
Each day write down something good about yourself or something that you will accomplish that day. Like “I will stand up straight today” or “I am worthy of talking to so and so.” Start small even if it is “my hair looks good today.”
Now tape it to your mirror and repeat it throughout out the day.
How many times did someone tell you that you are worthless in action or words as you grew up? For some, it may have been one time for others; it may have been their whole childhood.
Look what it did to you. Just imagine what your daily positive words can do to turn this around.
Keep this up until you start to see a change in your confidence and an increased ability to make safe decisions. For some, it will be a month, but for others, it may be a process for years.
In the meantime, when you feel uneasy step back and listen to you. Trusting yourself and your heart shows that you care about you. Remember, its all about you. If you miss an opportunity, then step back and learn from it.
Evaluate your actions, not what you are worth. You are worthy and have the capabilities of making sound decisions.
Trust who you are.
Trust that you care for you.
Trust that you are worthy.
Trust that you are the one with the answers for your life.
There are many reasons for low self-esteem. We have to start our self-improvement somewhere in our lives.
Increasing your self-esteem with positive affirmations is an excellent place to begin.
What do you think?
Do you have other reasons for low self-esteem you would like to share with us?
Please leave comments and questions in the comment section below.
I will be back with you shortly.
Thank you for taking the time to stop by. I always appreciate you.
I agree with you that trusting ourselves is a foundation. Without this, we can not achieve anything.
It takes time and efforts to build up our self-esteem when we have spent a lifetime tearing it down.
I like Your Mirror Affirmations. Talking to ourselves in the mirror is an excellent way to build us up. I am going to practice it daily and form a habit.
Life is tough, and we face many different hurdles. It is easy to fall into the trap of feeling worthless. I need to work on this to overcome these negative thoughts and to build up my self-esteem.
It is kind of you to help me learn to overcome.
I am so happy I can help. You would be surprised how many people feel as you do and also have low self-esteem. But if you do practice you will build confidence and trust yourself.
First off, great post! So much rings true. Most of the time, you should trust yourself and your gut. This applies to pretty much everything in your life, jobs, investing, friendships/relationships and so on.
There is a gray area where prejudices, assumptions and so on can cloud that intuition. There’s where a trust but verify approach can come in handy. Take your gut feeling into consideration but, if you feel that you might be mistaken, take the first step and verify to see if what you experience reinforces what your gut is telling you or not.
A lot of this can stem from self-confidence issues or inexperience and so on. As you gain experience, you’ll gain that self-confidence and begin to trust yourself in that area.
Again, great post. I hope it helps others who read it.
Scott
Scott, thank you so much for your input. Yes, we have to trust our gut but along with that, it is important to use wisdom. Such a good point.
We often underemphasize how vital self-esteem is and how it can help us to overcome hurdles in life. With self-confidence, we tend to love ourselves more frequently and devote more time to identifying what makes us exceptional and unique.
We need to learn to identify what is good about ourselves and realize that we don’t need anyone else. We are the only ones that can make our life worthy. We have to train our minds to trust our gut. Great post!
We have to learn to trust ourselves but we are not an island. We can’t rely on someone else to make our decisions for us but we have to have people in our lives to function.
You are the only one who can improve your self-esteem. No one else can do this for you.
Wow, that is a beautiful and inspiring article.
I do find myself at times questioning my own choices and decisions. You confirmed that I need to work on my own self-confidence. I am going to take your advice and say at least one positive thing to myself in the mirror each day. This is such a good idea! Positive affirmations!
I have also had challenges in relationships and I believe this can also be related to my own life experience and feeling of self-worth. My faith is what gets me through any negative feelings.
Thank you for such a thought-provoking article!
Alisha
You are so welcome. And yes your faith will carry you farther than any other suggestion I have made. You can do this!
I believe in all you have written here. Everything in its totality depends on me and me alone. Everything I want to do or the decisions I made, it is all about me and about my self-esteem and confidence in doing what is right for me. Unbelievably right that this post enlightened me a lot about the fact that I need to respect myself more. Thumbs up on this
You have interpreted this post well. When you increase your self-esteem, it will increase your self-respect. We have to respect ourselves and learn to trust our instincts to make proper decisions.
Trust yourself – I could not agree with you more. Looking back on my younger days, I realize that if I had just trusted my gut or that little voice inside my head, I could have avoided many mistakes and tons of heartaches. Now, I l have learned that it is me who knows myself the best, not anyone else and I must stop second guessing myself.
It sounds like you have come so far and grown so much in your walk through life. Keep it up for we can continue to grow.
Thank you so much, Laura, for this article. I needed this. I had absolutely no trust in myself when I attempted to make money from home last year. I trusted strangers on Youtube instead of myself, which sounds stupid, looking back. It cost me thousands. I now know that believing in myself is one of the most important things I can do in life. Have you ever had a time in your life where your self-trust wasn’t where it should be?
You ask, “Have you ever had a time in your life where your self-trust wasn’t where it should be?” Absolutely yes. It is because of the times in my life of low self-esteem that I can write to help others. Most of us had had some point in our lives when we did not trust our gut and made the wrong decision.