What have you got if you can’t trust yourself?

How do you build trust in yourself? 

“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.”

Richard Feynman (Nobel prize-winning physicist)

It’s hard to like someone you don’t trust

Would we like to have relationships or do business with people who are unreliable and rarely do what they say they will do? No one knows what we promise ourselves and how often we let ourselves down. Mostly we are far better at delivering for others than for ourselves, but nothing undermines self-esteem and confidence more than the angst and even hatred we can feel for ourselves if we continually cannot deliver to ourselves because it is hard to like someone that we cannot trust at all.

Promises to yourself

How often do you feel rubbish about yourself because you promised to yet continuously fail to:

• Eat better 
• Exercise more
• Prepare better
• Monitor your reactions
• Be kinder
• Meditate
• Be less angry
• Spend more time with your kids, partner, or friends
• Call your parents, siblings, etc

This list is endless……

Yet the solution can be simple

• Set goals from your heart, goals that you know in your mind that you can and will achieve.
• Not those which are expected or sound good.
    

This is the reason New Year resolutions often fail. Pledging that you will go to the gym five times a week when you know full well, this is an unrealistic promise. It’s a mountain to climb. You will let yourself down. It will make you feel like a failure.

Excuses

Failure cultivates an excuse mentality, which leads to frivolous wishes. When your own words cannot be taken seriously, you will have little trust in yourself. Athletes who make excuses often over time learn that these justifications and feeling sorry for themselves are the actual reasons for slow improvement. 

The key is honesty

Honesty is vital in facing difficulties and in finding solutions to overcome problems and building trust in yourself. 

Something you can achieve

Set a goal that you can and will achieve, such as:

“I will do planks at home three times a week and aerobic exercise for twenty minutes once a week.”

When this goal is achieved for a sustained period, you will feel good about yourself and start building trust in yourself. Your goal setting will become increasingly accurate and your follow through close to 100%. 

Increased Motivation

This trust will lead to increased motivation and a desire to add extra to your programme. Imagine setting a reading goal of 30 minutes per day with 100% focus and no distractions. Refuse to do more than half an hour, no matter how much you want to. When 30 mins becomes normal, it becomes something you achieve with ease. Goals from the heart succeed because they build belief and pride in your own word. It gives you confidence to do more, motivated by streaks of constant success. 

No Magic bullet

In sport, excellent coaches know that there is no magic bullet. Small gains with good habits over time underpin outstanding achievement.

(Read the “Play to Gain” chapter in the book Locker Room Power)

Mastering the little things is to master the big things.

What you’re doing every day, getting a mastery of little things, builds trust in yourself, which is how you become a role model to yourself” (from LRP) 

Long-term goals become obsolete

I discourage long-term goals set in stone, for the world is ever-changing. An ambition such as becoming an architect is fantastic but keep your mind open to the fantastic adventure of life. 

A healthy focus on short-term goals

Imagine that an architect designs a house for a TV producer, who asks for advice on the design for a movie set. Through this project, a realisation that her skills can be used in set design, which she thoroughly enjoys, suddenly leads to the idea of changing career. Although it means less money, less certainty, she takes the plunge and a couple of years down the line she receives an invitation to work at Disney and moves to California where she meets her future husband… A healthy focus on short-term goals from the heart that gives you a wow factor, makes even the hardest challenges fun. If the focus is too future based and wrapped up in achieving a goal no matter what, even when your heart is telling you it is no longer what you want, then your mind can be blinded to new and wonderful opportunities. This mind-set encourages a growing fear of change. What we want out of life is very personal and can grow. This is not failure. 

“It is good to have an end to journey toward; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.”

Ernest Hemingway 

It’s not about logical progression

Goal setting has traditionally been based on a logical progression, something that has always disturbed me because everyone is different. A rational goal, set to a realistic time span, sounds great and is usually the obvious next step, but a goal from the heart is not always the logical next step. Sometimes the goal can be as small as consolidating a current gain. It can be very helpful to consider that time is a measurement and useful for inspiration, not a goal. If a target is not reached in a set period, this is not an indicator of failure, but a miscalculation of the time needed to reach the goal. How often other, then by pure luck, can anyone bullseye a goal and hit it in the exact time set? Mostly you will hit it before or after.

“Time is a ‘motivator’, not a goal”

David Sammel

 

Separate the goal from the dream

It is equally important to separate shorter-term goals from a dream or vision. Having a clear picture of your dream is important because that will provide the motivation for doing the labour of love (work) to get there, but a dream or vision must be seen as a destination that will require many goals along the way. The dream is usually so far ahead in the future that it is best to choose it and then forget about it and focus on each step needed until you are close enough to see the summit which then becomes the next natural target. Constant focus on the peak at the start can lead to daydreaming and a belief that it is easy to achieve, not too far away, which, in turn, can encourage delusion. 

Full concentration

Another factor is that each goal will require full concentration and allowing the mind to wander too far into the future will affect the quality of the work needed to take place in the present to accomplish each small step forward. Although this is another huge subject on its own, it is helpful if early on there is perspective and acknowledgement that achieving a dream is not a destination. Once realised, life will go on and new targets will need to be set, or the deflation of finally achieving a dream will be significant, especially if it has been a long-term life ambition. 

Chasing the dream

“Dreaming about being an actress is more exciting than being one.”

Marilyn Monroe 

There are rare individuals who know from a young age what they want and have a burning passion for the career that never changes, but others are serial go-getters in many fields with varied interests and talents. 

“Changing a goal constantly when the work gets difficult is a recipe for disaster and we all know the difference, which is why we need to consider carefully what dream fires our passion and allows us to truly set goals from our heart.” David Sammel.

TAKE AWAY:  

• Build trust by setting goals from the heart: Constant success builds trust and confidence in your ability, not only in setting achievable goals but also in your dependability to follow through and succeed 
   
• Passion is an energy: Follow things that give you great energy and avoid people and things that deplete your energy.  
  
  
• Take the narrow path: You need to be mature enough to know the difference between avoiding the hard yards to achieve a goal and taking the easy route pretending you are following a passion, from a genuine shift in yourself that has a burning desire to pursue something different as part of your evolution as a person.

Written by

David Sammel