How can we trust ourselves if we’ve made so many mistakes and/or repeated many of the same mistakes over a long period of time?
A simple question, without an easy answer. As is life.
It can be made more complicated after one begins their self improvement/personal development journey. Learning about concepts like imposter syndrome, self sabotage, the ego, the pain body, and our shadow self.
Psychology, philosophy, and spirituality can seem so overwhelming at times that many throw their hands up and dismiss them altogether. They throw the baby out with the bath water. Life can be hard and complicated enough. Life seems to get more difficult and complex with each passing year with more and more technological integration into daily life.
Self compassion is a good first step towards self trust. Self trust, seems to me, to be a middle ground, on the path towards self love.
Mistake repetition has been one of the most maddening aspects of life for me. No one’s fault but my own. Zero percent external blame. Not nature nor nurture. Yet I have repeated so many mistakes over the course of my life, it has been enough, at times; for me to throw my arms up in the air, say it is what it is, and live helpless and blameless to the whims of the universe.
But I choose not to. Repeatedly.
Self acceptance is a precursor to self compassion. I am not perfect. Nobody is. Don’t let the photo filters and video edits fool you, nobody is perfect, not even close.
The fact that so many humans feel the deep seeded need to portray a perfect image outward to people they don’t know and will never meet speaks volumes to how imperfect we all are.
Change is the only constant. Which means that there is a constant changing of variables happening, in every conceivable aspect of ourselves, and the world we are living in, that we can’t ever come close to always being right or doing the right thing. We can try. We have to try. What else is there? Giving up, doing nothing. I tried those. I found those to be mentally and emotionally cannibalistic paradigms.
So we start small. Very small. What’s below baby steps? That, there, do that. One at a time. We can identify what we have direct, immediate control of. Put all focus, energy, and effort towards those things. Then our circle of influence expands, by keeping small promises to ourselves. That is what Stephen Covey believed and preached, very successfully, for a very long time. I have found that paradigm to be true for me.
To learn to trust oneself begins with small steps but is no small undertaking. All big things have small beginnings. How we do the little things is how we do everything. From that point of view, trusting oneself truly is learning how to live.
Anarchy Journal Constitutional 