Can You Trust Yourself?

Trust yourself. It’s easy to say, hard to do. This is because self-trust has to be earned.

How does anyone earn your trust? Is it by always getting things right? Probably not. It’s not mistakes that cause you to mistrust someone. It’s his lying about those mistakes, his covering of tracks. You don’t even have to like someone in order to trust her. You just have to believe she is being honest with you — especially when it comes to her shortcomings.

The same goes for earning your own trust. You have to be honest with yourself. Take a long, unflinching look inside, trying to be aware of the ways in which you deceive yourself. Do you rationalize? Do you misremember strategic items? Do you habitually focus on someone else’s issues? When you’ve earned your own trust–not by being perfect, but by practicing honest self-reflection — something interesting happens. What you say begins, more and more closely, to match what you do.

Practicing what you preach isn’t always about trying harder to live up to your preaching. It’s also about dialing down your preaching to accurately reflect what you do, and what you do not, know.