Trust Yourself

We’re looking for the world to tell us what to do. Then we’re disappointed when it doesn’t tell us to do what we feel called to do.

It’s easy to get stuck waiting for permission. It’s hard to trust ourselves.

We have these ideas about our future selves. Doing the things we’ve always imagined. But we’re afraid to start. Or maybe we don’t know what would excite us, but we know it’s not what we’re currently doing.

Before fame and the Starry Night a young Vincent van Gogh was feeling this. In a letter to his brother he wrote, “Someone has a great fire in his soul and nobody ever comes to warm themselves at it, and passers-by see nothing but a little smoke at the top of the chimney.”

It can feel soul sucking to go through life afraid to trust ourselves. Afraid to pursue what we’re actually excited about.

Epictetus would ask his students, “How long can you afford to put off who you really want to be?”

The author Parker Palmer writes about turning away from the world and looking inside to discover our vocation, which he defines, “not as a goal to be achieved but as a gift to be received.”

He continues, “Vocation does not come from a voice “out there” calling me to become something I am not. It comes from a voice “in here” calling me to be the person I was born to be…What a long time it can take to become the person one has always been! How often in the process we mask ourselves in faces that are not our own.”

We are overwhelmed with advice on finding ourselves, pursuing our passions and what we should do. We’re programmed early on to start looking outward to figure out what to do with our lives. We base it on aptitude tests, career counselors or something we think will make a lot of money.

Discovering your vocation isn’t going to happen through a book or a trip to Bali. It won’t come from listening to anyone but yourself. This can frighten us or empower us. “Self-trust is the first secret of success,” guided Ralph Waldo Emerson.

It’s risky to trust ourselves. We wipe out the excuses. Then all the results, good or bad are on us. We have no one to blame. But why do we need someone to blame? Would we rather fail at something we decide to pursue based on our own intuition. Or do we need the buffer of being able to say, “I told you so.” To have someone to blame for pushing us into something we knew we didn’t want to pursue.

Only you have access to your inner dialogue. Only you know what you think and dream and get excited about at night. No one can read your mind. If you’ve never articulated the version of yourself that you can see, that you believe you’re supposed to be, you can’t blame anyone else for not pushing you to pursue it. And if you’ve never taken an action to pursue it, the world has no evidence of you having an interest or an ability at this thing you’ve yet to pursue.

“Trust thyself,” said Emerson, “Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.”