Increase Your Happiness By Trusting Yourself
Stop Being a Know-It-All
Knowledge is great. It gives you the power to make decisions and even keeps you from making the wrong ones.
However, if you get to the point where you believe you know everything, that is going to hurt your ability to make those decisions. At that point, you will lose trust in your abilities.
You are one smart cookie. Perhaps you went to a great college which landed you a great job after graduation.
Once you start working, however, you get fixated that you know everything there is to know. That is when you are in danger of losing your edge. You will start to make bad decisions which could end up costing you a job or two.
It is important to trust yourself with the knowledge you have learned. However, times and technologies change, and you need to be ready for those changes.
Too many people get left behind by getting comfortable in their current positions.
Companies have been trying to help by offering training or tuition reimbursement.
While this is a step in the right direction, if companies or colleges are not offering the appropriate training, this becomes a waste of money.
Another danger with companies offering internal training is they blame employees when those employees don’t learn from the offerings.
Even if employees do learn, applying the knowledge may not increase the companies’ bottom lines. These companies don’t evaluate the effectiveness of their programs. Worse, they make broad claims that they are leading-edge companies because they offer training to employees.
There are some great training programs online from websites such as Udemy.com, SkillShare.com, and others.
However, anyone is permitted to submit training modules and makes selecting these modules hit or miss. There are good offerings with these programs. But, you must rely on feedback from others.
No matter where you find training, modules can be well-presented but may still contain out-of-date material.
People could give high ratings based on the fact that they are well-presented. That gives you a false sense of security that you are receiving proper training.
You must be quite selective when choosing training for the current work environment. Be overly critical, but don’t let it stop you from seeking training.
Good training exists. Ask people you know for suggestions.
You should always stay in learning mode, no matter where you went to school or how much knowledge you think you have.
In a constantly changing world, you’ll be way ahead of others, and it will give you the tools you need to trust your decisions.
Stop Relying Too Much on Others
If you have difficulty trusting yourself, the problem may be that you are too dependent on others.
When this happens, you tend to let the situation grow and become further dependent on more and more people. That presents a problem when called upon to handle situations on your own.
Have you ever let someone else take over a part of your job?
While you may feel a temporary relief when this happens, you could be setting yourself up for future failure. The reason why it happened is that you didn’t trust that you could do the job yourself.
The above scenario often happens when you are asked to do something outside of your comfort zone.
Perhaps, your boss wants to test how you will handle a situation that is new. He or she gives you an assignment knowing that you have never dealt with it before.
It’s natural to ask others for help when you find yourself in unfamiliar territory.
There is nothing wrong with doing this. However, if you simply let others solve the problems or handle the situations for you, you cannot grow from this.
You will never develop the trust in yourself to handle new situations. Your manager will see that you, in essence, passed the assignment onto someone else, whether directly or indirectly. Your manager will not look kindly on this development.
When presented with something that you haven’t experienced before, maintain a positive attitude.
Always be willing to try even if you make mistakes. The mistakes are the tools for you to learn. When you do make those mistakes, ask what you did wrong.
Over time, those mistakes will get less and less, and you will begin to trust that you can handle the situations.
A subtle consequence will result from trying something new.
You will prove that you can handle new tasks and develop new skills. That is enlightening and is a big factor in developing trust in yourself.
Every skill you are now good at and find easy you probably struggled with at the start.
If you keep this in mind, you will give yourself over to trusting that you can handle anything that comes your way. You won’t need to rely on others as much.
You still should ask questions when you are unsure about something. That is another part of how you learn. Some people may give you a hard time because it’s inconvenient. But, you will find most people want to help you succeed. It helps them when you get up to speed with new skills.
Learn How to Make Mistakes
A big reason why you don’t trust yourself is you are afraid to make mistakes.
It’s a common situation for many people. However, it could be holding you back in your success. When you learn how to make mistakes, you will be ready to start trusting yourself.
You may have heard people say that nobody is perfect.
You should make it a rule to live by because it’s a true statement. When you make mistakes, you learn from them.
That is what makes them so valuable. Of course, if you don’t learn from them, you will be doomed to making the same mistakes repeatedly. That’s why you have to do a post-mortem of your actions and evaluate where you made your mistakes.
If you try too hard to avoid mistakes, you end up making more of them. That is because no one is perfect. You simply cannot avoid mistakes and you shouldn’t.
Sometimes, the mistakes that you make will make people angry with you.
It’s a part of life. If this happens, you first have to determine if your mistakes truly affected those people. If it didn’t, they have no right to call you out on them.
If it turns out that your actions did affect them, do what you can to rectify the situation. A simple apology may be all that is needed.
Just as you would like others to forgive you when you make mistakes, be forgiving of others when they make mistakes, and it affects you.
It’s not fair to expect others to forgive you if you aren’t willing to do the same. It’s okay to get angry in certain situations. But, open your heart and let them make amends.
Once you give in to making mistakes, you will find it a freeing experience.
You will no longer need to put too much pressure on yourself to avoid them. Another factor to consider is that mistakes can lead to positive unintended circumstances.
Just look at sticky notes by 3M. The researchers at the company set out to create a strong adhesive that resulted in a weak one.
Someone at the company took the idea and used it to create the sticky notes product. There have been many instances of mistakes that lead to alternative solutions. These would not have happened if they were trying to avoid the mistakes.
Permit yourself to make mistakes which will help you to trust yourself.
Tips to Increase Trust in Yourself
You may have a difficult time trusting yourself. Don’t despair. You are not alone.
It is something that many people experience, and find difficult to overcome. When you lose trust in others, you start to lose trust in yourself.
To help you overcome this problem, you need to focus on key aspects of trust.
The first is to have faith in your accomplishments.
If you pass off your accomplishments as not being that important, when you need to rely on them, they won’t be there for you. That is sure to interrupt the process of trusting yourself.
You also need to trust your instincts.
You won’t always be right, but you will be more often than not. An instinct is something you feel strongly about and does not come only from experiences.
They come from something internal that no one can truly explain. It’s part of that inner voice that is telling you what to do. You need only listen. How many times have you said to yourself that you should have listened to your instincts?
You should rely on other people.
If you open yourself up to letting others into your life, you will find that you become more trusting of yourself. Whether you like it or not, you need other people.
You can’t know everything there is to know about every subject. Use the strengths of others to supplement what you know.
It will take the burden away from you to do everything. That will help open the possibilities to put trust in yourself.
Try to filter out negative information.
You get bombarded with this throughout your life. It occurs every day in the news, at work, and in many cases, your home.
The more you learn to focus on positivity in your life, the easier it will be to trust yourself. A good first step towards this goal is to avoid negative people. They work hard to try to bring you down.
Trusting yourself sometimes requires a leap of faith.
Take some chances. While you want to be smart regarding the risks of your choices, you don’t want to overanalyze every decision you make.
If you do, you will never make any decisions, and you will stagnate. It’s true that not everything will work out the way you plan. But, you will never know unless you try. The good news is when you are ready to try, many of your decisions will work for you.
Being a Perfectionist May Be a Sign of Not Trusting Yourself
Are you a perfectionist?
If so, your expectations may be set too high. It is an admirable trait to want everything to be perfect. The trouble is there is no time for it.
You will also find that most people aren’t perfectionists. You are certain to be disappointed in them.
You need to learn how to manage expectations. It is a delicate balance, and you have to know when you have done as much as you should. You can always do more, but you need to move on.
Another problem with perfectionism is you may miss opportunities.
Suppose you decide to hold off releasing a product because you want to put more features into it. You delay the release of the product by several months, only to find that your competitors are finished releasing their versions.
The product you would have released was better than your competitors. Customers would have likely bought your products over your competitors. Try explaining that one to management or shareholders!
Further, if you miss those opportunities to get your product released, you will miss building relationships with your customers.
Product releases have marketing activities associated with them, including sharing experiences on social media, etc.
When customers have good experiences with products, they share those experiences with friends and family. Often, this sharing occurs on social media channels, which in turn, can go viral. It’s more challenging to build up a product that is not yet released than it is to build up one that is.
There are cases where perfectionism is warranted.
Show business is one example. Medical techniques and technologies are another. In most other fields, perfectionism will hold you back. It’s not necessary, and it only leads to frustration and delays.
Of course, you should never release products that have a sloppy design or are dangerous to the consumer.
That is where this delicate balance comes into play.
The product needs to meet safety guidelines. Your reputation is at stake, and you don’t want customers bashing your product or your brand. In this case, it may be necessary to delay the release of products until they are safe, etc.
How does being a perfectionist a sign that you don’t trust yourself?
You think that nothing is ever good enough and that you have to keep striving to be better. When you trust yourself, you can reel expectations to manageable levels.