It is hard to trust myself when I haven’t done it before. At least not fully.
If you are somehow related to self-improvement (and I assume you are if you’re reading this) you probably encounter this trust check ALL THE TIME, as I do.
I know how much I want to upgrade my life, which possibilities await me. And I want it FAST.
The sure sign of losing this trust is when every thought, every plan becomes over-optimized.
Sometimes it feels like I’m drowning in an ocean of the things I want or “need” to do. It can get out of control very quickly.
Two weeks ago I was catching myself almost all the time on the notion that “I am not doing the most efficient thing”.
I wasn’t allowing myself to relax, worrying that I wouldn’t return back to productivity. I was writing to-do lists with 14 hours of tasks in them to be efficient.
Of course it all crashed badly. Of course I didn’t have enough time – I am not a robot. None of us are (for now).
And sure thing – while thinking about it I finally realized – I haven’t been trusting myself fully.
I thought that if I relinquished control even for a brief moment, I would immediately become lazy.
I was completely ignoring the knowledge that my internal compass is attuned enough to turn me in the right direction.
Even with live recent proof before me – I have been kinda complacent, inefficient and lazy lately – but after two months it jolted me right back on track. And I also had forums for accountability.
But, ignoring these failsafes in the pursuit of efficiency, I sacrificed my freedom – the most important thing that was giving me inspiration to actually work on all these things.
My mind was constantly on edge, unable to stop and think for even a second that there’s no rush – that we have all our life to work on this.
I put myself in a cage of my own creation. I couldn’t move, couldn’t adjust in the moment. I had to do what I planned to do while being constantly in fear of slipping up. And, in addition, took a liking for beating myself in the head using these unfinished to-do tasks (of course there were plenty).
It had to change at some point.
This trust in myself once again proven to be the bottleneck.
My thoughts imagined a cool analogy for this: It’s like a platform among the sea.
When you know you can’t swim, you will be constantly in danger of slipping up into the water and drowning. You won’t be able to move properly, you will hang on onto the railing with all you’ve got – it is the only lifeline you see.
Tunnel vision. Anxiety. Fear. Panic.
Absolutely no enjoyment even if something that you always dreamt of seeing was happening right in front of you.
Instead, when you know you can swim – even if not perfectly, but just with the ability to float for a while – you don’t even think about it.
Everything changes. You’re totally in the moment. You just know that even if something happened and you fell over, it wouldn’t be a problem at all – just a minor inconvenience. You know that you can swim back. Other than needing time to dry from the wetness, or feeling chilly for a while, you wouldn’t even care.
You trust yourself to get back to the solid ground. With this trust you can even jump into the water for the fun of it. Have no regrets. Enjoy it
Low versus High energy.
Restraint versus Freedom.
I voluntarily was constraining myself to the former.
Andy wrote a great article – This Is All Just A Big Experiment.
It was cool, I thought, to treat life as a playground, with that much fun. But it Just Didn’t Click before.
It did today.
I want to trust myself more. I am switching my brain into I want to see what happens mode.
By relying on internal fail-safe – on this TRUST in ourselves – we can use all this freed energy to create great things. To improve ourselves. And to make our world slightly better.
Join me on this path of regaining trust in ourselves and in our life-long journey.
Let’s dip into the sea of experiments.
