Self-trust issues: did you know your inability to commit to insignificant tasks influences how well you trust yourself?

How do I learn to trust myself?

You committed to completing that project, but it’s still half finished. You swore you’d lose the weight, but you’ve ended up adding to it. You promised yourself you would get up earlier, but the snooze button has been smacked just as many times as before you made that promise. Exercise programs, house renovations, your taxes, the paperwork and admin tasks, your procrastination list is endless, matching your Netflix queue.

Why do you so often commit and then fail to bring yourself to account? Are you lazy, lacking discipline? Are you weak, unable to stay the course when the road gets steep? Are you scared of either failure or the possibility of success?

While any or all those factors might play a role, the true issue is beneath all of those. You don’t hold yourself accountable because you don’t feel motivated for whatever it is that you are failing to do. You don’t feel motivated because you aren’t looking at it through a values-based lens. You must find the connection between the task and your intrinsic motivation.

I can’t clean out my closets (the open-the-door-slowly-and-duck kind of storage) not because I am lazy, undisciplined, weak, or scared, but because a clean closet is not relevant to my top core values. Cleanliness does not bring me closer to godliness; in my mind, hanging off the side of a cliff with the wind singing in your hair brings me closer to a divine experience. And I am going to spend time doing that rather than cleaning closets. Do I want cleaner closets? Yes. Without a doubt, I would feel more on top of things, less bothered, if I didn’t have to shovel heaps of things off the floor and repack it every time I opened a cupboard. But the only time you’ll find me cleaning those shelves is when my mother is coming, or I am working hard to avoid something.

Cleaning out closets, maintaining an exercise program, or getting up earlier, require you understand how to intrinsically motivation yourself, otherwise, you will struggle to hold yourself accountable. Sticking with the closets example, if I want to motivate myself to clean those closets, I need to look at that mess through my lens of newness/adventure, connection, and compassion. These three values are key to finding the inspiration I require to commit and hold myself accountable to tidy cabinets.

If I look at organized storage as a duty, a should, I can feel the obstinateness and procrastination set in immediately. Because it’s not my duty. It’s not my should. It’s a learned value from growing up in a house of clean closets. This task actually makes my top value of newness and adventure shudder. So how do I get past my aversion and clean those closets? Does it really matter?

Determine if tidy spaces is actually something you want, not just something you think you should want, or you grew up wanting.

Where a thankless task doesn’t accord with your current values iteration, you may have to practice accepting that. Do the messy cabinets only bother you when someone comes to visit and then you begin to see your space through what you imagine is their view? If this is the case, perhaps accepting that tidiness is not truly necessary for your ultimate sense of satisfaction and fulfillment is a more logical route to take. Focus instead on accepting all of yourself. Accept that your closets are stuffed to overflowing and don’t hide them. Live your truth, however messy.

If tidy spaces, however, is something you choose then undertake the life admin that you’ve been avoiding in such a way that you are able to see the value behind the task. Personally, with my value of connection, I have a much better chance of enjoying clean cabinets, if I make a game out of it; if I enlist an OCD friend and make a connection working side-by-side; if I tie it to compassion by finding things to donate and calling on friends to do the same; or being creative and trading tasks with someone: take on something in service of them, in trade for organized wardrobes!

Linking the action to your values or intrinsic motivation makes it more likely that you will accomplish what you set out to do by activating your brain’s reward and pleasure centers.

So, you linked it to your values. You understand how it relates to your intrinsic motivation, but you are still falling off the horse so much that you are bruised.

Go back to the beginning – your values.

Are you are still struggling to commit after linking the task to your values and your who? It’s possible you haven’t become acquainted with the current iteration of your who and have aligned the thankless project to an outdated version of your current values and priorities.

Have you taken the time as an adult, in your NOW, to reflect on what is important to you? Can you list your top three to five values in order of priority, off the top of your head? If not, you won’t be able stay on the horse because you are trying to align an unrewarding task or project with a who that you don’t actually know in the here and now of this present moment. If you can’t enumerate with total clarity, your values, and why your first value comes before your second value, then you can’t understand the how of why you are not able to incite yourself to action. So, go back and see if you are still intrinsically motivated by security or empathy. Are these still truly core values in your today? If not, get curious, what are they?

Continuously link your value-based actions in the present to the grand scheme of life.

How does your (in)action affect not only you, but also your friends, kids, parents, colleagues? Play out in your mind’s eye the scenario in which you achieve your ideal and the scenario in which nothing changes, and connect to the feelings each scenario brings up. The weight you lost and how you look and feel in 5 years in terms of feeling, physical ability, and other benefits versus the scenario with the weight you wanted to lose, but didn’t accompanied by the shame, dissatisfaction, reduced mobility, impact on health, general outlook on life. When you continuously remind yourself that it isn’t about the weight, it’s about playing with your child or teaching them healthy body norms and habits, it’s about your feeling of self-satisfaction, it’s about understanding how weight loss/gain affects your larger life purpose.

Linking the unrewarding or seemingly insignificant action to your larger life purpose and understanding the impact your actions in the present will have on your future satisfaction and fulfillment, alongside the effect it will have on kids, partners, colleagues, will help you summon the inner motivation when you most need it.

Practice.

Find a way to disrupt your current habit to create a new habit. Play the impossible game – in the moment where you can choose to stick with an old habit that is no longer serving you or take a useful action, the game begins. It is in that small moment that you can decide to remain in your comfort zone, which actually isn’t truly comfortable, but is reassuringly familiar, or you can choose to challenge yourself and do what feels impossible. This means you allow yourself to feel the feeling that it seems impossible and you allow yourself to hear the negative self-talk that says you are going to fail, and you do exactly what your mind says you cannot do, thus doing the “impossible. Every time you disrupt a pattern or a habit, even if only for a moment, you are succeeding. A year of moments like this, each a little longer than the one the day before, adds up to an ability to do the impossible.

Recommit and hold yourself accountable.

Developing a new habit is not an overnight task. As you start, remind yourself that if you spent years and years (in some cases almost a lifetime) developing a way of doing things, you will need to put some time and effort in to “undoing and redoing” before it sticks. It is critically important that when you fail, a universal experience, you get back on the horse. For when you try, fail, and quit, you erode your self-trust.

Why it matters-

And eventually that continual erosion becomes a distrust of self. How well would you trust someone who promised over and over to do something and were continuously unreliable? How much do you appreciate someone who says they’ll help you and then prioritizes something else? What happens when that person letting you down is yourself? Trust in self is part of the self-belief and self-worth equation. Over time, those individual instances of unreliability become a part of your character, rather than a one-off behavior. It’s part of how the insidious belief that you are not worthy or not enough is born or sustained. After enough instances of failing to be accountable to yourself, you no longer trust that you are capable of succeeding, that you are going to try your best, or that you are worth recommitting for. If your faith in self has been worn away, you will never be able to achieve your deepest desires permanently and sustainably. So, get back on the horse, clean those closets or accept that clean closets is not part of your value system, and make the impossible possible!

What starts out as an insignificant exasperation ultimately has a much larger impact: when you believe in yourself and accept all of yourself, and when you practice daily discipline in service of your values, you rebuild your belief that you matter.

If you want to learn to show you for yourself, schedule a free call with me and we’ll explore what learning to have your own back looks like.