E317: 3 Steps To Trusting Yourself | CPTSD and Trauma Healing Podcast

Hey! What's up, Unbroken Nation! Hope that you're doing well wherever you are in the world today. Very excited to be with you today from the brand-new recording studio. Made a decision recently that I wanted to go all in on podcasting, on content creation on myself and it felt like an in order to do that effectively one of the things that I needed to do was to put myself in a position in which I had the ability to trust myself at a deeper level and that's what I want you to understand as we get into today's episode is the power of trusting in yourself.

One of the things that we speak about all the time is identity and how growing up in traumatic backgrounds. The very thing that is trauma and again this is my opinion it's not the cuts, it's not the scars, it's not the burns that are the thing that is what we carry, it's the theft of our identity that often is taken from us and as you get deeper into this healing journey, learning to trust yourself is incredibly freeing while simultaneously very daunting. And so, as you go through this process of learning, of growing, of developing, trusting yourself that you are making the right decisions for you is paramount and I know how difficult that can be because so often we second guess ourselves, we weigh all the options, we take spreadsheet and we write the pros and cons. But the truth about it is when you get deeper into this gut feeling that you have about the choices and decisions that you make, the more that you will begin to not only trust yourself but understand your capacity to be the person that you're capable of being.

For so many of us going back to the beginning of this, if you look at the causation and correlation of your childhood experiences leading up till today, what's entirely reasonable that you may not trust yourself because of the experiences that you had in your youth, because of the abuse, because every single time that you tried to be you, there was pain, there was ramifications, there was some kind of suffering and so one of the things that you learned was to instead of being you to turn that aspect of yourself off so that you could have a safety this is something we've talked about a lot. So, getting into trusting yourself is about looking at the decisions that you know that you need to make in order to make your life different than what it is today and following through on those decisions until you get the outcome that you want. So, often we'll ask together people's opinions, we'll ask the wrong questions, we'll try to get other people around us who likely they have your best interest in mind but they're not you, we try to get them to help give us some symbol of understanding in this journey. One of the things that I think is really detrimental in that is that those people while they do have your best hopefully have your best interest in mind, they aren't you.

I've gained so much in my life by not asking other people about what I should be doing, by not asking people's opinions, by not putting myself in this position in which I have to go and ask someone, do you think I should do this?

Now at first it wasn't like that and there was a huge lack of trust with myself and that lack of trust would exist in all these different facets, it'd be financially, mentally, emotionally, spiritually and dating and relationships and friendships and career, I never trusted myself because I was constantly trying to figure out and understand how to navigate this whole crazy journey that we are on and it wasn't until I really started saying you know, I'm gonna see what happens when I choose myself, did things of my life start to really change.

And so, the question I'm gonna ask you is…

Can you choose yourself?

Can you choose things that you know that you need in your life today to become the person that you want to be?

And so much of those elements of trust are about in the day to day, trusting yourself to get up on time, trusting yourself to eat healthy, trusting yourself too when the time is right invested in a deeper capacity. You know, I talk about this a lot but I mean I remember the first time I joined an online worse I was freaked out because it was like fifty bucks or something and today to be honest with you like, I think how do I spend fifty thousand dollars to get in a course? Now, I'm not there yet one I hope to be but that's part of the driving factor, right? Putting yourself in position of having that kind of thought process in order to trust that when you invest in yourself, you'll make the money back and that's I believe that to be true about the human experience; the more that you trust in yourself the more that it comes back to you. And so, deciding to put myself in this position of creating this studio, building out this office, making the decision to go into a deeper level on this show is honestly your kind of witnessing my real-life evolution.

One of the things I think is so spectacular about being able to come together to have conversations like this is I hope that you are learning from me in this process because I'll tell you right now like, there's gonna be missteps in this, there's gonna be frustrations on this. You know, when I signed on the dotted line to take over this space, for a microsecond, I was like, oh no, did I make the right decision? Then I sat and I thought about it and I just simply said, yes, I trust that I’m making the right decision. And I want you to think about how you can apply that to your personal life where are the areas in your life in which you need to not hesitate but instead sign on the dotted line and make a decision for yourself.

 You know, people always say well, I can't join the program because I don't have enough money, well that's the exact reason why you should people say, I don't have enough time to start a podcast well that's the exact reason why you should like, I looked at this I said, I don't have enough community here in the city that I moved to well that's the exact reason that I should and you know when you start to step into that idea with yourself you'll discover something really fascinating that the very reason why you are holding yourself back is the very reason why you need to trust that you're making the right decision, follow through and do the thing anyway. And the more that you're willing to do that you will learn about who you are, the more that you will learn to trust yourself. You know and that's a hard thing for people to calculate at first because you go well, isn't the thing in the reason why I shouldn't do this like isn't that enough and I'm like well, wait a second if you think about it so much of that is about the lack of preparedness, so much about those decisions is a lack of trust and ourselves, so much of those decisions is just really tied into this idea of the lack of trust, the lack of confidence, lack of belief in yourself. Now of course you have to be reasonable like because you wanna Lamborghini and you push carts at safe doesn't mean you're gonna get a Lamborghini and I'm not knocking that; I'm just saying like from a financial literacy perspective that makes absolutely zero sense. In the same way that it makes no plausible sense that I should go and join the air force so, I can be you know a fighter pilot at thirty-six years old and at six foot four two hundred and twenty pounds like, I don't fit in the cockpit, right? And so, you know, you have to be reasonable with these conversations that you're having with yourself. You know, I looked at the marathon that I ran a few weeks ago and I had to train, I had to trust myself through the training that I would be able to cross that finish line and that was really uncomfortable and really difficult because one of the things that I knew if I didn't do being training there was no way gonna be successful at this and when you do not do the thing that you know you need to do to accomplish what happens is you start to lose trust in yourself.

So, gaining and building trust in your life it's in a little might new things about the day to day, it's showing up when you're gonna show up, eating what you say you're gonna eat, drinking what you're saying, sleep when you say you're gonna sleep, be the relationship that you wanna be in, so on and so forth and it's an iterative process we talk about this all the time. Especially in the beginning like, if you are deep on this journey, let's say that your kind of where I am, trusting yourself becomes a lot easier. Now look, I will say this as well like the bigger decisions like, those get scarier like for real. But at the beginning if you're where I was a decade ago seven years ago, five years ago even a year ago because it's always progressed the question that you wanna really be asking yourself here is what do I really need to do today to instill trust and confidence in myself? How do I need to show up for myself today in this moment to be able to create that capacity in my life? Because it's like this if you sign up for a marathon today and you run it tomorrow and you haven't trained, you in deep shit like, you're gonna be hurting, I'm not saying, you can't complete it probably not I've heard of it it's not uncommon but I'm just saying like, there's a process that when you instill trust in yourself it becomes much easier to face that challenge and crossing that finish line.

And so, if you start today and you're like, okay one of the things that I wanna do is I wanna leave the city that I live in, right?

So, many people I cannot tell you how many times I hear this and it just breaks my heart. So many people like, I wanna move go travel the world, I wanna go live in another city, I wanna go experience life and all these other different places well, what step one? You know, people will say, I want to do this and not do it because they're scared because they don't trust themselves to do it and that's understandable like, I was scared to the first time that I traveled the world, I was scared too at eighteen years old when I hopped the plane to New York City with five hundred bucks in my pocket, I was scared at thirty when I left Indiana and I quit fortune five hundred fortune ten company and I quit you're running businesses and I tried all these different things, there's always fear this but the one thing that I've been able to do that I want you to think about is like what are those baby steps of instill trust that you can add to your life that are gonna get you to where you want to be?

And so, let's say it is for context’s sake it's like, I wanna travel the world okay great well, financials are often the very first thing that people will turn to and looking for reasons why they can't, they're like, I can't travel the work because I don't have any money, well okay, what let's really exercise what that looks like. You don't trust yourself to have enough money to travel a world then you're not gonna change your behavioral patterns when it comes to spending your money thus, you're never gonna travel the world. You also will not change your behavioral pattern in earning more money. So, people think just saving is going to be the thing that gets them where they want to go but it's not saving alone because saving only does so much you have to make more money, right? And so, let's break this down and in real time, I'll tell you exactly what I did when I made the decision to travel the world, first I stop going out to eat ever, I put a marker in my bank account and I started I wanna have five thousand dollars to travel the world and five thousand dollars seemed like a reasonable jumping off point that was bare for me that was bare minimum, I said that is the absolute least amount of money that I think that I can go and sustainably live in the world for a year, and that's bare minimum. And let me tell you this, having done it that's probably not enough depending on where you want to go because I mean hell especially today the plane tickets gonna cost you, twelve hundred fifteen hundred bucks, so let's think about this for a second. First, you create a threshold of your bare minimum income that you need to save in order to travel so you figure out whatever that number is for you, next it's about not using money on discretionary things that don't actually move you towards your goal, right? So, this means no going out to eat, no getting five dollar coffees, no you'll go to the movies even like you might need to hit up Netflix or redbox and spend your buck or not at all like, I know people who have been so strict where it was like red box and a fast food dinner was like a date night for them when they were building something incredible you know what I mean and so you've gotta get very strict about the decisions and choices that you make because look ultimately if you don't it's not going to happen. So, let's say you do that, you eliminate all the excess spending, start saving money, now you have to look at okay, where can I take out more money? Do I really need internet at home, right? Do I really need those seventy-five bucks a month? Do I really need a cell phone that's a hundred dollars a month? Do I need to buy new clothes at all for any reason? And you'll find that for most of those things the answer is gonna be no, like think about this even like you're probably spending money for subscriptions and stuff the average person is spending over a hundred and fifty dollars a month on subscriptions, half of them they don't even use so think about, that gym membership do you need that? It's this is really about taking all these things so now you've chosen a target amount of money to have saved, you removed all the income that is being spent on non-essential things now you choose a date, right? And in choosing a date is probably one of the most important aspects of this because that's going to become the marker for okay, it's game time, so you choose your date.

Now here's what's really interesting when you choose that date, you buy your plane ticket, right? You have to have something on your calendar pulling you into the future and so, if you estimate okay, I'm gonna save five thousand dollars in eight and a half months and then I'm gonna take a year off and I'm choosing the flight date October first then you buy the damn plane ticket for October first, commit, get in there and then what will happen is that you will find yourself moving towards that goal.

So, the same way that I picked a marathon and I had people tell me, I was crazy because it was two months after surgery and they were oh, man not gonna run a marathon two months after surgery like yeah, I am that's what I'm deciding so, I bought the damn ticket for the marathon, I started the training regimen, I hired a coach, I got a nutrition and I just started making sure I did all the things every single day to build trust in myself that move me towards the goal of being able to cross the finish line on the day of the marathon because I was moving towards something that was in my future calendar, I was doing things on the day to day that we're building and instill trust in myself about my capacity to effectively be able to navigate that thing in front of me. And so, this is an analogy at its base but it's also practical because this applies to everything, because anything that you wanna do is going to be difficult it's probably going to be scary if you wanna progress in life you have to understand the truth that the things that you're doing today are not the things that are going to bring you to the place that you want to be in the future because you've only been able to get to where you are with what you know and understand about yourself. And the only way that you learn know and understand more things about yourself by doing things that you've never done before and in the process of doing those things you build trust. Look, for many people and I will include myself in this at the beginning it was okay, I need to sign up for a coaching program and spend a lot of money, I need to go to conferences and spend a lot of money, I need to read and spend a lot of time, I need to move my physical body and exert a lot of energy and effort. And as I continually did these things, I started trusting myself more and more and more and the more I trusted it myself the more I push myself and so that holds true even today where I'm like, okay, I've done all these things they're very difficult but what's next? Most people will bulk at difficulty and say, well I don't want that. If you want an easy life, you should stop listening to this because if you want an easy life there's nothing of value that you're gonna get from me ever, you're just not because I don't want you to have an easy life in fact, I want you to actually like Bruce Lee says have the tools to be able to navigate a difficult life because we're faced with every difficulties every single day.

And so, to build who you are through this process of facing these difficulties you begin to trust and the more that you trust the more that you push yourself forward. And you know, it's easy there are two camps on this, right? On one hand, one of the things that you could do that's very simple, you could quit your job, hop on the plane and see what happens. As someone who will survive a crazy amount of trauma in my life who gets disassociated pretty easily, who can get lost in the chaos of the speed of life that for me is dangerous, I could never do that because it'll imp everything around me. And so, I have to that four thought on it so that's one camp, that is not my camp now will that work for people yeah, it will and I've seen it work before I know people that it works for all the time, I apply that to quitting the job, leaving the city, getting into a different early relationship like whatever that thing is and then the other camp which is the step by step that I just laid out for you about creating the goal, identifying the action steps that you need to take, choosing the date and committing. I think that applies to so much, I mean even people be like well you know what about the things that aren't time restricted everything's time restricted like time is the one thing that surrounds all of us at all time and so if you're not involved in understanding the truth of that you're deep fucking trouble because then that means that you're leveraging this idea that you get tomorrow and I know you've heard me say this before but there's no tomorrow, there's no guarantee of that that's not real, so instead of asking yourself what can you do tomorrow why don't you just address the thing that needs to be done right now today because if you do chances are you're gonna progress more quickly, you're gonna learn about yourself faster.

So, ultimately this is all about putting yourself in a position to be the most successful person that you can be with where you're at today knowing that you have the ability to create and navigate greatness in your life over the course of time by showing up.

And so, I'm gonna leave you with this…

There's a lot to be said about the people who are willing to commit to doing incredibly difficult things to create the capacity to build a trust and confidence in themselves because you can measure that and those are the people who are going to be the most successful and I want you to be one of the people who are going to be the most successful, I want me to be one of the people who are going to be the most successful but it's not going to happen if you're not willing to push yourself into what is next.

So, Unbroken Nation, thank you so much for listening my friends, I appreciate it.

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So, with that said my friends.

Until Next Time.

Be Unbroken.

I'll see you.