“If you made a list of people that you trusted would you put your name down?” -NF
Have you ever doubted your ability to reach your fitness goals? Ever doubted your ability to follow through on the commitment to go to the gym?
Maybe you’ve started and stopped so many diets that you’ve lost motivation to try again. You think you’ll fail if you start.
Maybe you’ve lost weight only to gain it all back. You went to the gym for weeks and weeks with little to show for it, so, you stopped going. “What’s the point?” you think.
It seems like you start out committed every time but stop early in the end. And that sucks. You might even have a good support system to help too.
Your wife or husband wants you to be successful and helps out however they can. Friends hear about your desire to lose weight and shower you with encouragement, or offer advice.
Sometimes though, sometimes but not always, the issue isn’t that we don’t trust what our friends or family tell us. The issue is something else: we don’t trust ourselves.
Before we even get started towards our goal, the thought appears, “You won’t make it. You’ll stop early just like you always do. You’ve failed before and you’ll fail again.”
Doubt creeps in.
We don’t trust we’ll stick with our nutritional changes, don’t trust we’ll keep showing up at the gym, and, in general, we don’t trust ourselves to do what we say we’ll do.
With that said, what can we do? How do we build self-trust so we can crush our goals?
It’s simple. Before we get to that though, we must talk about something seemingly unrelated to give us context: friendship.
Two Friends
You have a friend, who we’ll call Friend 1. They’re always five minutes late to everything, if not much, much later. You never know when they’ll finally show up. And you don’t see this person often, maybe every other week or so.
If you do make plans to see each other again, the plans often fall through or have to be rescheduled.
You also have another friend, who we’ll call Friend 2. They spend time with you consistently every week. If they say they’ll be somewhere at noon, they show up at noon—or a little earlier. They hold up their end of the bargain and follow through on plans you both talked about.
Given the descriptions above, about Friend 1 and Friend 2, it’s easy to tell who would be more trustworthy, right? To tell which friend is more reliable.
It’s Friend 1.
Okay, just kidding.
It’s Friend 2. And most of us intuitively know this, right? When someone shows up on time, consistently, we learn to rely on them. Consistency in a relationship—whether through frequency of how often we see them, the quality of the interaction, or with regard to their actions towards us—builds trust.
We feel safe with that friend because we come to expect how they will act with us. They’re reliable.
As Shasta Nelson, a friendship expert says, “…the more consistency we have, the more we feel like we can anticipate how a person will behave in different situations. That leads us to trusting someone as a result of our experience with them.”
What does this talk about consistency and friendship have to do with self-trust? Everything.
When it comes to self-trust, we build it the same way: with consistency. Just, instead of consistency with another person, it’s with ourselves.
Keeping Our Commitments
“Future trust is built on past consistency.” -Shasta Nelson
After reading the above section, maybe you feel you’re more like Friend 2. You’re consistently there for yourself; you do what you say you will do; you honor your commitments.
However, maybe you see more of yourself in Friend 1—you have a habit of starting and stopping; you rarely follow through with the commitments you start. And, because of this, because of this starting and stopping, you’ve conditioned yourself, or taught yourself, to quit. That’s okay.
There’s good news: you’ve conditioned yourself to quit, which means you can condition yourself to stay the course as well. You can learn to trust yourself again.
How do you develop better self-trust? By being more intentionally consistent in your life—acting more like Friend 2. Where you make commitments, in any part of your life, and keep them.
The easiest way to do this is to start small and build from there.
You could start by committing to floss one tooth every night before bed (if you don’t currently)…then doing it.
It could be committing to checking in with a friend via text, email, or a call, one time a week…then doing it.
It could be committing to a daily walk of 10 minutes every day…then doing it.
It could be committing to going to the gym once a week…then doing it.
It could be committing to making your bed every morning…then doing it.
The key is to start with what you know you can finish. When you commit to these smaller tasks, you’ll be more likely to follow through. This consistency of following through on commitments helps build self-trust, because you did what you said you’d do.
Know, also, that this won’t be perfect. You may forget to floss a tooth, and that’s okay. Floss it the next time. You may forget to text a friend in the morning, so text them in the evening. As with any type of practice, the more consistently you practice it, the better—this goes for practicing keeping your commitments too.
As you build self-trust through keeping your commitments—when you keep the promises you make to yourself—then you can expand to bigger commitments.
Maybe that’s committing to checking in with a friend everyday now, to go with the above example. Maybe it’s floss two of your teeth, which leads to eventually flossing all of them.
You were able to trust yourself to make it the gym once a week, so now you pull the trigger on signing up for two days a week.
Regardless of where you start, know this: just because you haven’t been successful in the past doesn’t mean you can’t be successful in the future. You can.
As the quote at the start of this section states, future trust is built on past consistency—so start being consistent now.
Keep The Next Commitment
We, as a society, tend to value the big wins over the small ones. It’s the old cliché of go big or go home. Most of us go home.
It needn’t be this way.
Instead, we can go small and stay out. Meaning, we start with small actions we can commit to, and then we do those things. We keep the commitments to ourselves.
By consistently keeping these commitments, we build self-trust. By building self-trust, we are better able to keep our current commitments and, to keep bigger, future commitments. And by keeping these bigger commitments, we crush our goals.
Consistency in the past has now built future trust. Will the doubts still be there at times—doubts that say we won’t be able to follow through, that we won’t stick with it? Yup, they likely will. But, when they do show up, we can accept the thoughts as they are, and keep our next commitment.
Our past successes—the times we kept our commitments to ourselves—help guide us towards future successes.
Source:
-The Business Of Friendship by Shasta Nelson
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