Theme One
Trust
Trust is the belief that we can handle whatever happens.
Not that things will go well. Not that we will never be hurt. Trust is quieter than that. It is the sense that whatever arrives, we have something to meet it with.
When that belief is strong, difficulty is a problem to work through. When it is thin, the same difficulty becomes a threat. Nothing about the situation changed. What changed is what we believe about our capacity to face it.
What Trust Beliefs Sound Like
Beliefs rarely announce themselves. They show up as the sentence running underneath the worry.
When trust is low
- ✗I will not cope with this
- ✗If it goes wrong I will fall apart
- ✗Everyone else knows how to do this
- ✗I had better not try
When trust is steady
- ✓This will be hard and I can do hard things
- ✓I have handled worse than this
- ✓If I do not know how, I can learn
- ✓I can ask for help and still be capable
Notice that the right column is not optimism. It is an honest assessment that happens to include our own capability.
Trust Is the Antidote to Fear
Each of the three themes answers a particular family of difficult emotion. Trust answers fear.
Fear is not one emotion. It arrives as worry, dread, nerves, panic, and the low hum of anxiety that has no obvious object. Underneath the variety sits one appraisal: something is coming, and I do not have what it takes.
Fear of Failing
I will not be able to pull this off.
Fear of the Unknown
I cannot prepare for what I cannot predict.
Fear of Not Being Enough
Whatever I bring will fall short.
Anxiety About Ahead
Something will go wrong and I will not manage.
This is why arguing with fear directly so rarely works. Telling ourselves the presentation will be fine does nothing, because the belief underneath was never about the presentation. Raise the belief about our own capacity and the fear loses its footing.
Fear shrinks as trust grows.
What Psychology Calls This
Trust in ourselves has a name in the research literature: self-efficacy.
The psychologist Albert Bandura introduced the term to describe our belief in our own capability to carry out what a situation requires. Not our actual skill, but our belief about it.
The two are related, and they are not the same, which is why capable people can be paralysed and why belief is worth working on directly.
The useful part of Bandura’s idea is where self-efficacy comes from. It is built mainly from our own history of doing things. Not from encouragement, not from being told we are capable, but from accumulated evidence that we have handled things before.
The evidence
A 2023 meta-analysis by Yeo and colleagues pooled results from nearly three hundred studies and found that higher self-efficacy was associated with lower levels of anxiety and depression in young people.
Trust is not a personality trait. It is a record, and records can be added to.
Building Trust
The work is collecting evidence we already have and refusing to discard it.
One
Count What You Have Already Done
Reflect on times you learned something and applied it, including the small ones. Each is proof, and proof is what the belief is made of.
Two
Trust the Learning, Not Just the Skill
We acquire new skills constantly, and we will keep doing so. Trusting our capacity to learn covers every situation we have not met yet.
Three
Trust Your Judgment About When
Knowing which skill a moment calls for is itself a skill. Confidence in that discernment is part of trusting ourselves.
Try this
One. Bring to mind the thing you are currently worried about handling.
Two. Now find three occasions in your life when you faced something comparable and got through it. They do not have to be triumphs. Getting through counts.
Three. For each one, name the specific thing you did. Not “it worked out,” but what you actually did to make it work out.
Trust and the Other Two
Trust rarely runs low on its own.
Fear about coping often sits alongside doubt about whether we matter, and alongside a fight with circumstances we cannot change. The three themes tend to move together, which is why it helps to know all three.
Changing any of them is the work of the 4-Steps™: noticing the belief, meeting it kindly, finding its root, and replacing it with something that fits the evidence better.
