Читать книгу Trusting Yourself - M. J. Ryan - Страница 9

I am larger and better than I thought. I did not know I held so much goodness.

—Walt Whitman

The other day, I was driving down a country road in upstate New York when a giant billboard for a car dealership caught my eye. It had a picture of a smiling infant with the legend “You Were Born . . . Preapproved.” Tears sprang to my eyes. How would the world be different if I, if you, could claim this basic trust as our birthright? How much pain would we have avoided, how much feeling odd and different, how much loneliness and fear? How less overwhelmed and more joyful would we be? How much more successful?

As I work with clients, as I hear from readers, as I go about my day as a mother, a friend, a partner, I am constantly in awe at the unique magnificence of each and every one of the human beings who cross my path, what incredible resources of mind, body, and spirit each of us possesses. And I feel great sadness at how unaware so many of us are about the riches we hold or how to use them to be happy and contribute our gifts to the world. It is to begin to address this terrible blindness that I'm writing this book.

You and I were preapproved at birth. Each and every one of us is a miracle of creation. Your particular mind/body/spirit has never been replicated in the more than seventy billion human beings who have lived on this planet. From the possible combination of genes of your parents, three hundred thousand billion different humans could have been created. But you were. Your brain is the most sophisticated structure ever created, with “thirteen billion nerve cells, more than three times as many cells as there are people on the planet,” as Og Mandino writes in The Greatest Miracle in the World. And science is just beginning to understand that our minds are not located solely in our brains; other cells in our bodies seem to have intelligence as well.

Through these genetic resources and our personal histories, each and every one of us has precious unique attributes to draw upon, sterling qualities that we were born with or have developed, as well as a lifetime of experience that is our treasure store of personal wisdom. No matter how much we've been wounded, how defeated or unworthy we've been made to feel, those inner resources lie in wait, ready to be used on our behalf at any moment in our lives. But we have to believe that they are there and know how to open the treasure chest. In other words, we need to trust ourselves.

Self-trust is a virtue, like patience, that has been all but lost in the externally focused society that has increasingly evolved over the past fifty years or so. It is a combination of three emotional and spiritual qualities: self-awareness, the accurate assessment of who we are and what we care about; self-acceptance, the embracing of who we are in all our complexity; and self-reliance, the ability to use what we know about ourselves to get the results we want in our lives without constant worry about the approval or disapproval of others.

That's what you'll learn in this book—the attitudes and behaviors that support self-awareness, self-acceptance, and self-reliance, as well as the benefits you'll reap by committing to the process of trusting yourself.

Genuine self-trust, in the words of psychologists Carol D. Ryff and Burton Singer, “is not narcissistic self-love or superficial self-esteem, but a deep form of self-regard built on awareness of one's positive and negative attributes. . . .” In other words, it's not thinking, I'm great. It's about coming to understand how I am great, where I want that greatness to manifest, and how to use that greatness when I encounter the big and little difficulties of life. If we know these things, we can move through life like a regal schooner rather than a tippy canoe. For the more we come to understand our unique capacities and how to use them, the less overwhelmed we will be no matter the circumstances.

Self-trust is not the same as self-confidence. “Confidence is more cerebral,” writes Jack Gibb in Trust, “more calculated, and based more on expectations than trust is. Trust can be and often is instinctive. . . . It is something very much like love.”

Self-trust has always been an important quality of heart and mind, but it is even more crucial in these fast-paced, challenging times. Here's how James C. Collins and Jerry I. Poras put it in Built to Last: “With the demise of the myth of job security, the accelerating pace of change, and the increasing ambiguity and complexity of our world, people who depend on external structures to provide continuity and stability run the very real risk of having their moorings ripped away. The only truly reliable source of stability is a strong inner core and the willingness to change and adapt everything except that core.”

According to Webster's, the first meaning of trust is “Assured reliance on the character, ability, strength, or truth of someone or something.” When we trust ourselves, we're in touch with that inner core Collins and Poras are talking about. We have self-possession—an ease under stress that reflects a command of our powers. Consequently we know we can handle what life throws at us—we can complete the assignment, juggle our schedules, organize our desks, handle the difficulty with our boss.

When we trust ourselves, we can better navigate the waters of challenging emotional times—when we feel lost or grieving, angry, or afraid—believing somewhere in our hearts and souls that we will make it, even if we're not sure how or when. We're safe in our own care. We treat ourselves well, kindly, as a loving mother would nurture her beloved child. We learn from our mistakes instead of beating ourselves up about them, because we understand that life is about learning and therefore seeing errors as valuable information about how to go forward. We don't consider ourselves bad when we screw up, just not yet as skillful as we would like to be.

Precisely because we accept ourselves exactly as we are, we are more able to change. Shame and guilt loosen their grip. We may be in difficult or challenging circumstances, but rather than getting mired in them, we see ourselves like the lotus flower. The lotus's roots are deep in mud, yet its flower is one of the most beautiful in the entire world. Each and every one of us is like that lotus—precious and whole, despite the mud of our lives.

The ideal of self-trust has been around for centuries—it was Shakespeare who said, “This above all: To thine own self be true.” And it was the belief in themselves that the founding fathers of the United States relied on when declaring independence from England.

One hundred and sixty-two years ago, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote his famous essay “Self-Reliance,” a treatise on the crucial importance of self-trust. Here's a bit of it: “A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his. . . . Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string. Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind. . . . I am ashamed to think how easily we capitulate to badges and names, to large societies and dead institutions. . . . My life is for myself and not for a spectacle. . . . Insist on yourself; never imitate. . . . Nothing can bring you peace but yourself.”

Inspiring words, but somewhere along the way from then to now, we've lost our sense of their importance. So much so that when I proposed self-trust as the topic for this book, some people questioned whether it was a concept that readers would even understand! We have been so indoctrinated into looking outside ourselves for the answers and to consider ourselves unreliable that we have very limited notions of what it means to approach life from this perspective. As author Jaya Sarada writes, “You can observe how deeply conditioned the self is to seek the stamp of approval from outside sources. From an early age we are told we are good or bad according to the judgments of others, so life begins a cycle of imitation.”

Given the training we've had in listening to everyone but ourselves and believing we are broken and bad, how do we begin? We start by understanding that the capacity to trust ourselves is not a fixed state we either have or don't, like straight hair or violet eyes. Rather it is a quality of heart and mind we can cultivate. Like a muscle, it grows or shrinks with practice. Trusting ourselves will wax and wane depending on life's challenges. For each of us, particular things will shake our sense of self-trust, but each time we realize we've lost faith in ourselves, we can incorporate what we learn and grow our capacity to trust ourselves more.

To begin to cultivate greater trust of ourselves, we must turn inward and look at ourselves without fearing what we will discover, without minimizing our gifts—oh, that old thing—or beating ourselves up for our learned self-destructive patterns. The good news is that we can begin right where we are, as we are. It doesn't matter how much the world has told you you're wrong, stupid, screwed-up. You don't need to bring anything except all of who you are, because every scrap can be used on behalf of what you want in your life and who you want to become.