Here’s another tip on building self-trust. The thing that really kind of hit home for me was I couldn’t make building self-trust based on future outcomes. I’m not going to say, “I’m going to lose 170 pounds,” because who knows if it’s going to happen exactly that way?
What I do have control over and where I could start to build self-trust was in my day-to-day actions, the things I could actually do and follow through on and begin to document.
What if you said, “I’m going to lose 50 pounds this year,” and after losing 45.8 pounds, you felt fantastic and that’s where you stopped? All that work you did day to day is where the self-trust was built, not in losing the 45.8 pounds.
The weight loss was a byproduct of you doing the work. When I started to realize that, I stopped making goals based on outcomes and more on what I could actually do today in the moment and take action on.
That was a big game-changer for me. To build self-trust, it had to be in the here and now, not future outcomes; it had to be based on actions, not results. Your body can lose weight at the rate it wants to, but you have control over how you eat, how you choose to move and all the discipline and habits necessary to lose that weight.
That’s where the self-trust will be built: day to day, not based on where you’ll be in six months to a year.
Focus on the here and now, on the actual actions you can take, not on the long-term outcome of those actions, because those aren’t set in stone but what you do today is. You can start to build self-trust on a daily basis.
That was how I finally started to move out of a place of not trusting myself at all and into realizing, wait a minute, I do what I say and I follow through on it, and the outcome is the weight loss; the outcome is my health.
All those things happened, but they were just byproducts of me doing what I said I was going to do on a daily and a weekly basis.
If you missed the first part of this three part series, go here. Next week, I’ll bring you part 3.