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Learning to trust in yourself and your own inner guidance system…
Video transcript:
Hi everyone!
What I’d like to spend a few minutes today talking about is the importance of trusting yourself. I heard this question a while ago and I think it’s a really good question: If you could go back and tell your younger self something, what would you tell your younger self?
There are a couple of things I’d like to tell my younger self— one of them though would be to trust yourself.
You have a pretty good internal GPS system and that in the long-run, yeah you want to learn from others, but you also ultimately have to trust your inner guidance system.
And you have a good inner guidance system—and it really won’t lead you astray the way looking to external ‘experts’ might.
I have a couple of really embarrassing examples of this to share—in the name of full disclosure and confession, I am willing to share them with you.
Have you ever had that experience of having Goole Maps lead you astray? Right, that’s a great example. It’s like you’re trying to get to a destination—oh my gosh this happened to me one day trying to get to a yoga client.
I should have known. I was trying to get to a client I had never seen before and they live behind a gated community in a very exclusive area—I ended up on a dirt road out in nowhere because I trusted Google Maps, what Google Maps was telling me more than I trusted my internal wisdom.
There are so many examples of this, where I’ve trusted and bought into somebody else’s experience. Just because something works for somebody else, doesn’t mean it’s going to work for you. So you have to really trust in yourself.
Another great example of this in my own life is pedometers and Fitbits— they don’t work for me. I think they’re great if they work for you—I think they’re great if they can incent you to move.
But I know from my own experience, I had to throw away my pedometer (affiliate link) and I had to get rid of my Fitbit (affiliate link)—I’ll never own a Fitbit because my pedometer (affiliate link) hurt me.
I have a history of low back pain and sciatica and I’ve learned how to live with it through yoga and gentle walking. Suddenly, I got all enthused about a pedometer and the fact that the experts say you need to be moving 10,000 steps a day—I’d get to the end of the day and I’d only be at 8,000 steps and I would say I must get my steps in.
I live in a two-story house and I’d be up and down the stairs and all around—really vigorously working myself to get my steps in because that’s what the experts say this is what you must do. Within a week my back was screaming at me and I was in really severe pain.
That taught me that I really have to trust myself—I have to listen to myself, ahead of the experts.
And I really encourage you to do the same thing. Seek advice, listen to what people are saying, but also take it with a grain of salt and also trust what your body is telling you.
Your body does talk to you.
And I’ll be back to talk about that more in our next session.
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