Developing Self Trust: Clean Up Your Relationship with Yourself

You know that little voice in your head?

It’s been called your critic, your narrator, you conscience.

It’s that voice that both tells you that you’re too fat and need to diet, but also when you start to diet, it says, “Hey now, wait a minute, let’s not get too hasty here, too rigid with our life.” It is constantly chirping away telling you what you can do, can’t do, what you should do, why you’re wrong. It’s relentless.

The Little Voice in Your Head

There are many ideas out there of how to deal with this little voice, and I’m going to add one to the mix.

If you look at the nature of the relationship to this voice, it comes down to one thing: It wants what it wants, it wants to be taken care of, and it doesn’t trust you to take care of it.

Despite the fact that it has been the source of most of the undermining of your intentions in life, it doesn’t recognize that. It thinks you’re to blame. It thinks you should have known better than to listen to it, and the fact that you didn’t know better, only shows it how much you’re not to be trusted.

How Do You Get Out of This Vicious Cycle?

The answer: Simple, you need to clean up your relationship with yourself.

You need to begin to consider that you have broken so many promises to yourself of what you wanted out of life, that like anyone who you’ve broken promises to, it – that little voice – doesn’t trust you anymore.

We’ve come to accept the fact that the voice will always be there; that this critic is just part of what it means to be human; yet there are times when it isn’t there. There are times when it’s quiet and life is wonderfully easy.

There are times when it lets you live your life. And so, it is possible that the internal critic is not a permanent condition of being human; it’s just a relationship that needs to be nurtured and tended to like any other relationship in life.

Becoming Friends to Make Amends

So how do you clean up your relationship with yourself? Make amends? Well, how do you make establish trust in any relationship in life?

You live up to your promises. You begin to intentionally live the life that you want, and I mean really, really want. Over time, what you want may change, but you can’t fool it today.

Choose an area or two of your life, create an intention, make a plan and start to live up to your promises. And when that’s done, and the voice starts chirping in your head criticizing, worrying that the plan might not be the right plan, just understand it’s just a reflection of the current state of your relationship, i.e. it doesn’t trust you.

It’s acting in accordance with how you’ve treated it over the years. Your job is to build trust with it and so your ultimate task is to discover the answer to one very simple question, “What’s the life I need to live to build trust with my little voice?”

And this doesn’t mean you have to be super-human, that you can never fail to fulfill a promise or accomplish a goal, but when you do, clean it up. Acknowledge to the critic quite consciously that you failed to keep your promise, and let it know you’ll take care of it. All that little voice in your head wants is clarity and to know that someone will take care of it. Yes, it needs compassion from you, but it also needs to know that you have the helm, or it will take it from you.

Creating Authentic Freedom

Why is it this way?

Perhaps it’s just that each of us has to earn our freedom. In the free world especially, we were born into a context of freedom. We just were free.

We talk about how others fought and died for our freedom. They earned freedom for us. Perhaps this is just life’s way of ensuring that we appreciate what it takes to be free.

Until you live a great life – whatever that means for you – it will never stop. Until you earn freedom; until you clean up your relationship with yourself and start to live up to the promise of who you are, you will never be free to live your life.

Don’t fret though. There’s no burden here. It’s what you wanted anyway.

Author, William Giruzzi, is a personal life coach who enjoys working with individuals who show a strong commitment and desire to transform their lives. Be sure and check out his website, and recently published book. A Life Worth Living is available as a download or print book.

To learn more, click  > A Life Worth Living