What if we just trusted ourselves?

Like some 40% of humans, I have an MTHFR gene mutation. This means, among other things, that when my stress response gets turned on I have really hard time turning it off.  This means that I take my stress management very, very seriously. But sometimes the pressure from the outside gets to be too much.  Like it did this last Friday when I was getting whiplash from the personal, professional, and social deadlines coming on top of the daily maintenance stuff and other responsibilities — like my brand new threenager.  (If you pray, please throw one my way because threenagers are no joke.)

But I digress.

Stuff was a lot, and I was feeling really, really stressed. So I tried something different. I decided to just have faith in myself. I made a physical list so I wouldn’t have to try to hold all that stuff in my head, and then I just said, “I trust you.” And then every time I felt that familiar feeling of stress and being overwhelmed I would just repeat it to myself, “I trust you.”  And you know what? It worked.

While this was a new tactic for me, it’s not a new concept. In psychology, they call this reframing, changing how you perceive something so your experience of it changes.  When I was feeling overwhelmed with all the to-dos, it was because I approaching them from a place where I felt inadequate to do it all. But that feeling of inadequacy was a false one. In my nearly 4 decades, I have tackled some pretty nasty to-dos. This was not my first rodeo or even my biggest.

But it’s so easy to forget how very adequate we are.  I see this in my clients (and in myself). We downplay our achievements, and we highlight all the ways we feel inadequate. So what if you flipped that script? What if you took a few minutes to see how far you have come, how much you have accomplished, and then just said, “I trust you?”