EPISODE 8

TRANSCRIPT 

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Hi guys, welcome to A Lifelong Habit of Exercise. I'm Coach Kendra, and this is episode eight. Today we're going to be talking about trust. Most of us probably never truly thought about trusting ourselves. I know for me, it's not something that came up much growing up, and even in my early adulthood, it didn't really come up much. One of the things about it is I think that we just kind of take it as a given. The only time I believe that we really think about it, is if someone asks us if we trust ourselves, and when we doubt that we trust ourselves. Not necessarily as a response to them asking, but just in general, like if we think that we doubt it. So for example, like for me, I don't trust myself to eat a jalapeno and cheese bagel that's sitting in front of me, like, I love them, they're so good. I wouldn't trust myself to not eat it. 

 

So when I doubt myself, that's when it kind of comes up. Like when I think about that, I'd be like, "oh okay, well, I don't know if I trust myself in that." But other than that, I think it's really when somebody asks us that we truly kind of think about it. And someone asks us, if I trust myself, or when I hear other people asking someone if they trust themselves, I think there's always been kind of like a scoff, or like a small laugh and an answer, like kind of like, "duh I trust myself!" Even if the person that was asking was being completely serious. So I think we kind of take it just as Yeah, doesn't everybody trust themselves? And we kind of respond to that way too. So as everyone knows, by now, I like questions. So when I ask someone if they trust themselves, and most of the time they say yes, then my next question is always, how do you know? And I love knowing why people believe they trust themselves. A lot of the times the answer that I get is, they've never given themselves a reason not to trust themselves. So this makes me even more curious, as you could imagine, because most of us don't trust someone that we just meet. But if we go off of the logic that we go off of, like, if we say like, "Well, I haven't given myself a reason not to trust myself." But at the same time, we don't trust people that we just met, you would think that that would be the same. So most of us right now, when I say that, like, if we're telling ourselves that like, "Well, I haven't given myself a reason not to trust myself." But yet, when you just meet somebody, you don't automatically just trust them. Most of us are probably like, at the thought of that are really resistant. Like the thought of even trusting somebody as soon as we meet them, we're resistant to that thought. So what is it about us, that makes us trusting ourselves different than us trusting others? I think one of the major differences is that we believe that unlike others, we have the ability to control ourselves. And we are able to control what we do and how we show up in the world. When talking about ourselves, I think intellectually, we know that to some extent, we're the ones that have control over what we do. And what we're going to do is we're going to talk in other episodes that are coming up, we'll talk about how, at times, we forget that we don't have control over others, and how others show up. But for today, I really want to stick to the trust. So I think a lot of it is like like I said intellectually, to some extent, I think we know that we can't control others, but we do believe that we can control what we do how we show up in the world. So why do we trust ourselves?

 

And although this response may come to mind, when you can't really pinpoint why exactly trust yourself, but you believe you do. Or at least you believe you should. I don't think it's because we haven't given ourselves a reason not to trust ourselves. Because I don't know about you, but I can think of a whole lot of reasons in my lifetime, that I've given myself not to trust me. And so I think that's something that does come up, like I said, when we believe that we should trust ourselves or when we do believe that we trust ourselves, but we can't really pinpoint it. And so for me, I'm like, Well, I don't know if that's the truth because like I said, in my lifetime, I've given myself a whole lot of reasons not to trust myself, but yet. Overall, I do trust myself, and honestly, I trust myself much more than I trust most others especially when it comes to my well being or someone I love's well being. So for this I really wanted to turn to like the definition of trust. The definition of trust says, "a firm belief in the reliability, truth, ability, or strength in someone or something." So a firm belief in the reliability, truth, ability, or strength of someone or something, that's the definition of trust, like from the dictionary. And I want you to remember that like belief, I don't know if I've mentioned this before, I believe I have. But beliefs are thoughts that we think over and over. So a lot of times our beliefs are things that we feel are very true to us. They're still thoughts, but they seem like they're facts. Because we believe we know our own personal reliability, our truth, our ability, and our strength - this is where most of us believe that we trust ourselves. So it fits, it's fitting. We believe that we know those things like we can go within ourselves and we can kind of check that and see like, how do we feel about that.  When it comes other people, we only have the ability to kind of make a determination off their actions and their words. So what they do and what they say, and then from there, we attempt to determine their intentions. And many times it's really a guess, like we try to make a guess, and that's what we determine whether we trust them or not. For all of these things for like their reliability, their truth, like the ability, their strength overall. So for ourselves, were able to look within and determine firsthand our intentions, and for others, it's our personal interpretation of what they do or don't do. And this is why it's easier for us to believe that we trust ourselves and sometimes a little bit harder for us to figure out if we trust others. Since many of us think we trust ourselves, but don't really know why, how can we actually like develop that self trust? How do we make that stronger? How do we get more self trust? First, I want us to think like, let's think of someone that we trust, that is outside of ourselves. And then let's think of like, why we trust them. 

 

So for me, I would say my parents, I completely trust my parents and I always have, like growing up, I completely trusted my parents. Did I get frustrated? Did I get mad? Did I throw tantrums when I didn't get my way? Absolutely, like 100%. But I completely trusted them. I trusted that they would always make the right decisions for me and my well being never once never ever once did I ever doubt their intentions. That's because I completely 100% trusted them. I trusted that they would take care of me. If I were to ask them now, like did they always know that they were making the right decision. Like as many parents do, like, I'm sure at times they doubted themselves, or thought it would be easier to just give in to me, and like what I was begging for. But they saw the big picture, and they looked out for my future self, like always sticking to their decisions. And it's interesting, because this decisions is another topic that we'll discuss making decisions like in an upcoming episode, because I do know that so many of us do struggle when it comes to making decisions and struggle when it comes to being okay with our decisions once the decision has been made. And so as I've mentioned before, like during my one month, Check Your TEMP program, these are all concepts that we like dig way deeper into, for you individually when you do that program. So it turns out that like we can actually build our trust for ourselves, just like we often view our trust for others. And like going back to the definition, just as the definition like states, trust is the firm belief in the reliability, truth, ability or strength of someone or something. So for others, we normally do kind of mental checks on if we can trust them by our thoughts on if they're reliable, if they're truthful. We check their abilities and their strengths on a specific area, like in a specific topic, whatever it is that we may say, like do we trust them in this area? Like we do kind of a mental check on, "Well, I don't know, can they do this? Can they do that? Where are they at with this?" And that's how we kind of determine our trust for them. 

 

So when it comes to exercising, for example, like trusting ourselves when it comes to exercise, like we can develop self trust by planning our days, which we're going to exercise and decide exactly what we are going to do ahead of time. So we can easily just decide what days are we going to work? Like, what days are we going to exercise, and then we can plan exactly what we're going to do. And this will help to build that self trust when it comes to exercising, we can develop that self trust, when it comes to exercising by doing that by planning ahead. And for me, what that looks like is today, I trust that yesterday's version of myself took care of me. I trust that she planned exactly what it was that needed to be done, in order for me to complete the workout that needs to be completed today. So today, I trust my yesterday's version of myself, that she took care of me. I trust that she planned exactly what needed to be done and planned, in order for me to complete the workout that needs to be completed today. So my yesterday's version of myself, at that time, she was trusting my today's version of myself to trust that she took care of the plan. Yesterday, she was already trusting my today's version that she's going to know, that like my today's version was going to know that yesterday, she was taking care of me. She prepared and planned so that all of my today's version of myself would need to do is do my workout. So like she prepped that yesterday, yesterday, when I was there, I took care of my today's version of myself. I did all of the prep, I did all of the planning to make sure that today all I had to do was work out. Now, today, my version of myself today gets to appreciate yesterday's version of myself, because she took care of me, and now my today's version gets to take care of my tomorrow's version by not only planning and doing the work to prepare for tomorrow, but also I get to take care of my tomorrow's version of myself health wise, by following through with the workout that yesterday's version of myself planned for me today. Today's version of myself, my current version of myself gets to appreciate yesterday, and then I also get to take care of tomorrow, I get to do all the prep work for tomorrow, I got to make sure that everything is planned for tomorrow's version of myself so that all she has to do is complete the exercise. But then I also get to take care of tomorrow's health version of myself by doing my workout that was planned yesterday. I know that's a little bit confusing, I know that can easily get confusing. 

 

So, I want to share with you guys an exercise that I do, and it's something that's written down because like I said, I know that example could easily get confusing. But I want to share with you like a written exercise that I like to do when I'm unsure of myself, or I want to get some direction on how I can develop more self trust. And what I like to do this is the exercise that really develops self trust, by first thinking of myself in three different stages, and I kind of hinted at them in that example. But my three separate stages are my present self, my past self, and my future self. And to determine my trust for myself, I look first to my past self, to see how they took care of me in my present self. So that was kind of what I was explaining in the example of how I personally look for myself trust and see and know that myself trust is all there. Like I trust my past version of myself to take care of my present version of myself, and my future version of myself, trusts my present version of myself to take care of her. So I like to write this down. And on a piece of paper, like if you're looking at a piece of paper, I like to make three columns. And one is going to be past and one is going to be present and one is going to be future. And this is all from my present space. And what I like to do is I like to start on the left hand column, which is past, and I like to list in my past column, all of the things that I did, to take care of my present self. So list in the past column on the left hand side list all of the things that your past self did to take care of your present self. Then after you've done that, after you've made that list of all the things that you did to take care of your present self, then I want you to jump to your future self. So the right hand column that says future in it. And under that column, I want you to almost imagine yourself and kind of embody your future self. Jump into the future as if you were there, and you're in the future on the right hand column, and from there, I want you to list everything that you would like your present self, which is right now truly right now to do to take care of you. So while you're in your future self list, everything that you'd like your present self to do for your future self, this could be like everything that you need to get towards your goal, your big goal. Whatever it is that you want to do. So this can be a ton of stuff, you may write so much stuff, they're like you'd like your don't limit yourself, you don't have to limit yourself in that column. So list everything that you would like your present self, which is right now which when you get to your future self truly, like tomorrow or beyond, it would be your past self. But in your future self, when you're just kind of envisioning yourself being there, it is your present self that you're talking about. So everything that you would like them, your present self, to do. Then I want you to now look at it and you have your past list and you have your future list. On the left hand side, your past on the right hand side, your future, and your middle, your present is blank in the moment. But now what you can do is you can appreciate your left side, you can appreciate all the things that your past self did, and you can see that all the stuff that your future self would like for your present self to do. But you can look at this with a big picture view. So like how I mentioned, like I trusted my parents, they had a big picture view, they were looking at my future self, they were looking at the whole picture, they were looking at the entire thing. So now with this exercise, you can look at the entire thing, you can look at your past and see the things and appreciate the things that were done, and you can look at your future and see the things that need to be done, and that your future self would like for you to do. And then you get to make a decision from your present self on the things that you are going to do to take care of your future self. And you're going to list all of that on the present, you can go back to your future, you can look at your future, you can look at your past and you get to decide in the present moment, what it is that is going to be done that you can do to take care of yourself for the future. And again, you get to do that with a big picture view and list that under present.

 

So now you have your past your present and your future all done. Understand that your present list may be very similar to your future list. But it also may be slightly different, it may be a lot different. Because your present self is the one that's in charge. And it's looking big picture, like I said, and it's looking big picture for the future, and it trusts that whatever you decide in the present moment, your future self can trust that to that you are taking care of your future self. You're trusting that your future self is going to trust you to take care of yourself, and your future self is depending on you. But at the same time like when I was a kid, and I wanted all this other stuff. It's not that I didn't trust my parents. I wanted my way right. So your future self may have listed a ton of stuff and wanted their way. But you can look at your goal and say no, this is how we're going to take care, we are going to take care of ourselves, but this is what I can do to take care of you you're going to take into consideration sleep, you're going to take into consideration all of that your present self gets to do all of that and make those decisions. Your future self is like give me everything, give me everything, give me everything, and your present self is like this is what we're going to do, and still take care of ourselves. 

 

So, as you continue to build trust, as you continue to build that self trust, you will notice that you're able to increasingly trust and appreciate all that your past self is done, and you will know exactly what your future self needs from you so that all versions of yourself are working together towards the same goal. So for the next week, I invite you to try to increase yourself trust and increase this and do this exercise but I invite you to increase yourself trust. Until next time.

 

If you guys love this podcast, you will love my Check Your TEMP program. It is a personalized program that we dig deep into everything we discuss on this podcast. Work with me for one month and never stop exercising again. Head over to CoachKendra.com/WorkWithMe to set up a FREE Mini session.

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