Trust In Yourself and Others To Change The World
What does trusting yourself mean?
It means you make an effort to do what you tell yourself you’re going to do.
It means you try to objectively judge yourself and keep yourself accountable.
It means you take responsibility for the words you speak and the actions you take.
It means you trust that your feet, your mind, and your heart will guide you to the things that you find meaningful. It means if you follow what seems right to you at the moment and take action, doors will open for you and opportunities that you could never have imagined might be offered to you.
You might not know where it’s going and you might wander around from place to place, but you know that everything will be okay in the end. You trust that the road you are walking will eventually take you to where you are supposed to be.
It means you never lie to yourself. The voice in your head is connected to your heart — you can feel when you are not being honest with yourself or with other people. You can hear the voice in your head, trying to make you acknowledge the truth. It gets louder and easier to listen to if you continue to practice. It gets quieter and harder to listen to if you continue to ignore it.
It means you believe in your ability to get back up every time you fail. You acknowledge that things aren’t always going to work out how you’d like them to. You acknowledge that there will be days where you feel like you’ve plateaued and you question why you’ve even put effort into walking the path you’ve chosen. You acknowledge that sometimes you just want to ditch everything, lay in bed with some snacks, and lounge around all day. Even so, trusting in yourself means that you know there will always be another day where you can find the strength to move forward toward your goals.
It means you acknowledge the lies and the excuses you make every single second, minute, hour, day, month, year, but you still practice self-love and practice patience because you’re only learning and growing.
It means you make a fair and honest deal with yourself — you’ll forego instant gratification for now to improve yourself and achieve something that may have potential benefits for you in the future.
It means that if you finish the things you said you were going to do, you allow yourself to be rewarded and praised. You allow yourself to be proud of yourself and you thank your present self for thinking about your future self.
What does trusting others mean?
It means you allow them to freely make their own choices, even if they may go against your wishes. Many people live their lives dictated by the decisions of their loved ones, who usually do not know what they want. Many people are restricted in expressing themselves in all their nakedness. They are ashamed of who they are because they were taught to hide what is truly themselves.
They spend the rest of their lives having to unravel their true selves — the things they’ve been hiding from themselves will continuously try to manifest into reality and cause the individual great suffering.
To not be able to be oneself, their very true self, in all their glory and their complexity, is one of life’s greatest tragedies.
Who are you? No really, who are you? Do you arrange your personality to cater to those around you? Do you believe in the things you believe in because you’ve searched within yourself, or did you pick up other people’s opinions because they made you feel certain or smart? Are you living the life you truly want to live, or are you following your parent’s footsteps or society’s expectations?
Maybe the purpose of life is to continuously try to find out who you are and what you should be doing with your time here. It certainly seems that way for now, but then again things may change. I’m just seeing how it goes and what feels right to me as of now.
It means being able to stomach the fact that people will not always be what you want them to be.
Our friends and significant others are not who we want them to be, but that’s okay. Our mothers, fathers, brothers, and sisters are not who we want them to be, but that’s okay. Our idols, mentors, teachers, and managers are not who we want them to be, but that’s okay. Embrace them in all their strengths and weaknesses. Accept them for who they are and they will show you the same love.
It means you allow them to stumble and fall, even though it pains you to see them hurting and suffering, because that’s the only way they grow and learn and develop into great individuals who are able to face the eternal tragedies of life.
You must not try to keep a child as an infant forever. You must trust them enough to let them do things on their own, experience all the different types of emotions, go through heartache, go through mourning, go through near-death experiences; the individual experiences that they go through will shape their unique selves and they will go through their own journey of life in finding out who they are.
You are only trying to control their lives and keep them safe and sound because ultimately it will affect YOU in the end. You control people out of the guise of not wanting to get hurt yourself — which is fair but I believe is wrong. You cannot selfishly curb another individual’s growth in order to protect them from the world.
They must go out into the world and face the unknown in order to see what the world is about. They must go out and risk facing the most dangerous and tragic events that life has to offer.
Why? Because there is also potential in there.
Where there is potential for death, there is potential for life.
They might fail, but they also might succeed. There is no way to succeed or do something new if you never allow them to take a risk, to balance on a tight rope above the chasm of chaos, to leap across the darkness to see what’s on the other side.
It means you allow them to go where their hearts dictate, even when you think that death and calamity await them there.
It means you acknowledge that the person you love is also a person capable of making rational and smart choices.
It means you respect their critical thinking skills and respect their drive to live and to experience life in all its beauty and in all its chaos.
It means you tell them your truth — things in your life that you’ve been struggling with, the insecurities you deal with every day, the personal ambitions that you think is so naive, the lies you’ve been telling to yourself and to others, the regrets you hold to this day, the troubling failures that you’ve encountered throughout your life…
You tell them all of this knowing that there is a possibility that they can do something with the information that you wouldn’t want them to do.
Now obviously this one you should approach with caution and you should be careful with which friend you are sharing with, and you should go into this knowing that there is always a possibility of people hearing something they shouldn’t have heard.
To control is to limit the potential of the individual. To try and repress the individual is to destroy the endless possibilities of human achievement.
Learn to trust yourself and learn to trust in others. When you trust yourself first, others will trust in you, and in turn, they will trust in themselves.
The ripple effect of you trusting yourself and changing your life may in fact change the whole world for the better.
