Trusting The One Thing You Can Control
This post was first sent to my newsletter subscribers, and I thought I’d share it here as lots of people found it was what they needed to hear at the start of the year. If you’d like to get more pep talks like this to your inbox once a month (as well as a reading/listening list of resources) then you can sign up to my mailing list here
I’m not really sure what to write to you this month – not because of a lack of thoughts or happenings, but from so many. Over last few weeks I’ve published my 2019 year review and Goals and Word of the Year for 2020, as well as recorded a podcast on the whole process that will go out this Friday. I’ve been writing a lot about where things are in the business, and I don’t want to just repeat myself here. But you know what? There have been so many newsletters I’ve started with ‘I don’t know what to write to you about this month’, but then I kept writing and something always came.
This is something I hold onto a lot, actually. The idea that something will always come. That things will come together, they’ll sort themselves out. It started when I was at university, when I’d start to feel overwhelmed around the middle of a term about all the deadlines that were in the same week. “It has to be done so it will” I’d tell myself as I crossed the grass to the library. Last year when it felt our house-buying process was stagnating and I was scanning documents and chasing emails I breathed the thoughts “it will all come together, piece by piece”. During a period of writer’s block last summer when I was in the middle of a storm of personal circumstances and couldn’t think how to fill the blank page in front of me, “it will come back” whispered behind the winds raging in my mind.
Because trust is important. Trust, yes, that cosmically the universe will somehow pull things together for you at the last minute like the climax of a Mission Impossible film. I have said before that there is nothing like running your own business to make you believe that there is some sort of higher power, an energy working outside the realms of our conception. There are too many things that drop into place, too many thoughts that materialise in your head the moment you need them to, like the ads you get served because your Alexa or phone is listening in to your conversations.
More than trusting the universe, though, we need to trust ourselves. This is the un-doing of so many great men and women – they doubt their capabilities and, worse, their right to do this thing. While I was reviewing my year I realised that somewhere in 2019 I started to lose trust in myself, which triggered an avalanche of faulty decisions, lack of confidence and the feeling of free falling backwards through the air. That’s why building back of that trust, listening to my intuition and working from the inside out is such a focus for me this year.
“But how do I know I can trust myself?” you might be asking. You don’t. You don’t know, for absolutely 100% sure, that you can do this. Just like for absolute 100% sure that you don’t know that your ceiling won’t fall down – you just trust that it won’t. We trust so many things in our lives – the bus timetable, the supermarket having what we need, the postman with our packages – but we tend not to trust the one thing in our lives we can control. Ourselves. We decide what we do, so we have more cause to trust that we will do the thing than whether the buyer in Tesco has chosen to order sesame seeds.
Because action is the partner to trust. If you trust yourself, you take more action; if you take more action, you have more cause to trust yourself. That was what was important about the examples I gave earlier – yes I was trusting that something will come, but I was also going to the library, doing the paperwork, at my computer writing. Even if you don’t quite trust yourself yet, do something. Change your Instagram bio, write a sales page that may never see the light of day, send that email. Do something tiny to show yourself you can trust yourself. Then do something else. And something else. And then you’ll just be doing it. That’s all there is.
