The Trust you need if you want be the True You
When I was a freshman in college I told a girl on my hall some pretty intimate stuff. As she listened I started dreaming that we’d make great friends. But then, a week later she blabbed it all out to everyone over lunch. I was mortified as every face at the table turned towards me with a look of shock.
She broke my trust. I didn’t get over it and we never hung out again. Worse, I pulled on my invisibility cloak and went into hiding. It was quite a lonely while before I started opening up to the girls on my hall again.
THE TRUST MYTH
Trust is one of the most important parts of any relationship. It takes time to build and can be lost in an instant, never to return. Trust is that warm confident feeling you have when you know the other person isn’t going to intentionally hurt, expose, violate, or lie to you. Trusting the person you are with makes it so much easier to let your guard down and be your true self.
Remember a few weeks ago when we were talking about hiding under the invisibility cloak? (read more here). A lot of us hiders think that we shouldn’t come out of hiding until we’re completely sure that the ones around us are trustworthy. It’s as if we could guarantee a positive response to our true selves.
Unfortunately, there are no guarantees. When you come out of hiding, there’s no telling what will happen. You could be met with joy and love. You could be met with anger and rejection. It sucks. And it’s why so many of us prefer hiding under the invisibility cloak to risking being real with people who may or may not be trustworthy.
WHO YOU REALLY NEED TO TRUST
What you may not realize is: Coming out of hiding isn’t about trusting others, it’s about trusting yourself.
You come out of hiding for yourself, not for anyone else. You do it, so that your unique magic gets to expand in the world with confidence and boldness. That means, what you say or do as the true you is way more important that what anyone else has to say about it.
As you start to come out, you will need to build trust. But not with anyone else. You’ll need to build trust in yourself. Specifically, the trust that you will be ok no matter what happens. If your friend says something mean about you, you will be ok. If your sweetheart tells you you’re being dramatic when you were being truthful, you will be ok. It might hurt. It might suck. You might not get what you wanted out of that situation. But you will still be ok.
The way that other people respond to the real you, is not your business. It’s theirs. What’s more important is your ability to recover from whatever they say or do, and return to your center where your true you is sourced. So if there’s a painful result when you’re not hiding, your job is to center yourself in yourself. When you’re centered you can make conscious choices about how to respond.
Remember when I got outed in college? I went into hiding rather than going into my center. If I’d gotten into my center I would’ve known that I would be ok. Then I might have stood up for myself and told the other girl to stop sharing my secrets. I might have told her how bad it felt when she did that. I might have called a trusted friend from home to say how upset I was. And if I’d chosen any of these things, I would’ve felt more confident to keep being my real weird self and trying to make friends. That’s the power of trusting yourself from the center out.
BUT WHAT IF….
But what if it’s your mother (best friend, sweetie) and you know that you’re always going to be hit with negativity and judgment? This is a big challenge. You may not want to end the relationship, but it’s painful to deal with rejection over and over. So again, you might think that the best idea is to hide the true you to smooth life over. But we already know that hiding comes a great cost.
As long as it’s truly safe to share, that means you’re not putting yourself at risk for physical or emotional abuse, keep sharing anyway. Maybe that seems like weird advice, but remember, the sharing is for YOU. It’s about you owning who you are over and over again. It’s about learning to trust that you CAN be you even when you’re not met with smiley faces and gold stars.
Interestingly, once you stop letting the other person’s reactions get to you, the relationship shifts. They don’t have the power they once did. Sometimes your confidence is enough to draw them into connection in a new way. Sometimes not.
Again, it’s not about them, it’s about YOU YOU YOU YOU YOU YOU YOU YOU YOU.
TRUST YOUR WAY TO FREEDOM
When you trust yourself to handle whatever happens as fallout from being the true you, you free yourself. Suddenly what anyone else thinks of you doesn’t matter as much as what you think of yourself. You don’t worry so much about what others say or do in response to you. Yes, you’d like things to go a certain way and for your relationships to be easy. But if they’re not, you can trust that you’ll be ok.
Trusting yourself to be yourself no matter what happens is an incredibly bold way to live. It builds your confidence in every area of your life. And it grants you the freedom to create exactly the life you want to live: one built around magic, confidence and deep trust.
Need help building up trust in yourself? Schedule a FREE Connection Call here and let’s talk!
AND HEY! You’re all the way down here at the end. That means you get a sneak peak and early registration for the meditation series I’m running on Thursdays this May. Check it out and register HERE.