Building Self-Trust is the Foundation (LESSON 29)
“Trust is the glue of life. It’s the most essential ingredient in effective communication. It’s the foundational principle that holds all relationships.” – Stephen Covey.
“There’s no denying the centrality of trust in everything we do — from leadership, personal relationships, building businesses, or just collaborating on a project — trust will either bind people together or the lack of it will blow everything apart. Fortunately, there’s a model to help you understand and improve trust and trustworthiness:
The Trust Equation states that Trustworthiness is equal to the sum of Credibility, Reliability and Intimacy divided by a person’s Self-Orientation.” ~ Trusted Advisor
I frequently reference the Trust Equation in my “day job” as a Team Building Workshop Facilitator (see the recent Blog post where I wrote about this on my website). Today’s lesson is the application of the Trust Equation to our relationship with alcohol, and a little about my personal story.
In the context of our relationship with alcohol, the most important take-away is about starting by building Self-Trust. If you’re approaching the home stretch of this Alcohol-Free Challenge, you’ve met your commitment to yourself everyday, and you’re close to achieving the goal you set at the beginning of the Challenge, you are building (or perhaps re-building) the trust and confidence in yourself. Congratulations — this is a huge accomplishment!
Many times, we can get stuck in the ‘drinking cycle,’ waking up in the morning promising yourself you won’t drink that day, and by the time 5PM rolls around, you break the promise and open a bottle of wine. Or you promise yourself you’ll only have two glasses, and you end up nearly finishing the bottle. This cycle kept me stuck for a LONG time in my own quest to “moderate” my drinking.
Once I took alcohol off the table and gave sobriety a try, it honestly became so much easier! There were no decisions to make (goodbye, decision fatigue!), no inner dialogue, no counting drinks, no more planning which days to have a drink, and no more making (and breaking) rules. I had to work on the cognitive dissonance about wanting a drink / not wanting a drink, but that also went away with the “thought work” I explained in a previous lesson. As a quick aside, cognitive dissonance can be explained as:
“An uncomfortable state of mind when someone has contradictory values, attitudes, or perspectives about the same thing. The degree of discomfort varies with the subject matter, as well as with how well the person copes with self-contradiction,” according to psychiatrist Grant H. Brenner, MD, FAPA.
Within a few short months of making the decision to go alcohol-free, all of that mental space that had been taken up by obsessing over drinking or not drinking, magically opened up! It was like a huge weight was lifted and my mind was lighter, freer. It was the difference from being fixated vs. liberated (and you can feel that way too!). I was free to think about the things in my life that really mattered. My self confidence came back as I re-built the trust in myself. Of course there were other things to work on, but building back the trust and confidence in myself provided the foundation on which all of the next things were built.
You see, each time you make a promise to yourself and keep it, a glimmer of self-trust comes back.
Today’s video is a short message about how this works, from Stephen M. R. Covey, New York Times and Wall Street Journal best-selling author of The Speed of Trust: The One Thing that Changes Everything.
COMMENT BELOW! What resonated with you in this video?
