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Learning to Trust Yourself

Let’s begin by recalling what trust is. These are quotes from the dictionary, friends, and myself. 

Trust /trəst/ noun.

a firm belief in the reliability, truth, ability, or strength of someone or something.

Trust means not second-guessing someone or something. 

It means being able to depend on the words and actions of someone else. 

Without trust, we are unable to open our minds and hearts to others. It is a beautiful thing and is so important to maintain. 

Trust can easily be broken and must be earned. 

Trust is falling asleep next to someone and not worrying that they'll judge your hair or morning breath when you wake up.

Trust is having absolutely zero invasive self-awareness, feeling no fear of judgement, allowing yourself to be your most unfiltered and unapologetic self.

Trust is total comfort. 

Trust is the foundation of healthy relationships. 

Trust is simply the faith that you have in something. 

Trust is easy. It's reliable. When all else fails, you have what/who you trust. 

Trust is letting go of every little worry in the world, and truly confiding everything in another person.

It's the best feeling in the world. 

Why this is important to me:

Recently I have found that I second guess myself more than I should. I’ve had this idea in my head that for some reason my thoughts and ideas are not as valid as other people’s because “I’m just not creative enough”, “I’m not funny enough”, or “I’m not smart enough” to share my thoughts. I have been internally and blindly degrading myself for no good reason. I do not trust my own voice. 

As a theatre major, I think it is important for me to trust my art, and trusting my art essentially means trusting myself. It is important that I can look at a scene or song, make choices, and stick with them. My mind races like crazy, and sometimes it’s difficult to believe that I’m making the right choices in my art and it is because I have a hard time trusting myself. I am terrified of interviews because I’m afraid of what I’ll say. I prefer texting to calling, and I prefer memorized scripts to improv because it feels safer and gives me more time to think. But life will not always give you a script or lots of time to answer. Sometimes you have to act impulsively. So I’ve started a journey of learning to trust my ideas, words, art, and opinions. I am tired of living a life full of fear.

Here are 5 ways that you can strengthen your self-trust:

1. Start with doing everything for YOU. 

Sharing your thoughts and opinions can be terrifying at first. What if someone doesn’t agree with you or doesn’t like what you said? First of all, let me just state right now that you will NEVER please everyone. There will always be someone who disagrees with you, and THAT IS OKAY. You are not here to make every single human being on this planet agree with what you have to say.  You must learn to let go of this idea.

I also want to point out, however, that when learning to trust yourself it is best to begin by doing so on your own. When I started this journey of self-trust, the first thing I did was start a journal. Whenever I had free time, was inspired, or was about to go to sleep, I would write in my journal, or on a google docs page. I would jot down everything that was going through my mind. I wrote about my day, things that I was grateful for, things that upset me, etc. To be honest, it felt kind of pointless at first. But then after a while, it became routine and almost meditative. It was amazing to read these journal entries back and learn more about the way I think, feel, and express myself in writing. It’s also very interesting to read your entries months later.

One of my struggles has been visualizing what I sound and look like to others. I’m trying to do a better job of blurring the line between what I am viewed as and how I think I am on the inside. A tip for this? VIDEO YOURSELF. Sometimes when I don’t feel like writing I’ll sit in front of my webcam and talk about my day. This is also something that has helped me appreciate my own sense of humor.

All of these forms of personal expression are special because no one has to see them. There are no rules. There are no expectations. It’s simply a time for you to connect with yourself, and that may be one of the most beautiful things that we are able to do.

2. Understand that you are one-of-a-kind. 

No one, and I mean NO ONE has your train of thought. Your thoughts are unique to you based on your own personal experiences, environments, opinions, and writing/speaking patterns. If you are scared that your poem, song, or idea is not special enough, you are wrong. Is everything that you create going to start a movement or become a top hit on iTunes? Nope. But everything that you create will be unique to you and only you. Isn’t that weird to think about? That you have this amazing power to CREATE and there will always be at least something different about the way you went about the work because YOUR THOUGHTS ARE UNIQUE TO YOU. 

3.  Let go of your fear of failure.

There is no right or wrong answer when it comes to expressing yourself. I mean, of course, be respectful of others. Do not murder someone and say that it’s art because you are “expressing your feelings”. That’s just common courtesy. What I’m trying to get at, is that once you let go of this idea of perfectionism, that is when you will begin to flourish.  As I mentioned before, not everything that you create or say is going to be ground-breaking. Sometimes it takes hundreds, thousands, hundreds of thousands of tries to spread the message that you want to spread, to develop the invention that you have imagined, or to get the feedback that you have been hoping for. It is okay to fail. It is okay to fail. It is OKAY to fail. 

4. Trick yourself into believing in yourself.

It’s important to understand that confidence can be worked on from the outside in. Appearing confident and believing that you are confident in yourself can trick your mind into actually being confident. Do you think that every famous writer, artist, or Youtuber, has been 100% sure of themselves every time they have posted something? The answer is no. Even though they seem really confident right? 

That’s the point. 

5. Do not express yourself for validation. Express yourself to share.

Write a song about something that happened to you. It doesn’t even have to rhyme. Make a Youtube video about something that’s on your mind. You don’t have to have millions of followers for it to matter.

Once you are able to share with others with the same confidence that you journal with, you will open up doors that you didn’t know existed. You’ll see yourself in a different light. Others will see you for who you really are. That may sound intimidating, but the best and most honest way to be remembered is to be remembered as the purest form of who you are, not as a copy or idea of someone else. 

Tell the world what you think.

Share your thoughts. Yell them from the rooftops. Your opinions are valid. 

Now go back and read the definitions of trust. Can you say you trust yourself?

xoxo, Ana