Building trust by doing what you planned

“How can I learn to trust myself?”

This is a question I hear from clients now and again – although more often the question is “How can I learn to trust my partner?” or “How can I get my partner to trust me?”

The answer to the first and last questions is the same – simply do what you said you were going to do.

Why self-trust comes first

I like to start with the first of these – trusting yourself.

The truth is you can’t expect others to trust you if you don’t trust yourself. Do you deliver on promises you make to yourself – such as taking exercise every day, eating healthily, getting enough sleep?

Doing what you said you’d do

When you make a plan such as going to the gym on Tuesdays and Thursdays or limiting yourself to just one takeaway a week, and then you stick to it, you give yourself a message – that you can be trusted to do what you said you would do.

Or perhaps the promise concerns something you tend to deny yourself such as spending an afternoon in an activity you enjoy, whether that be painting, reading or meeting a friend for coffee. Plan it into your week and then do it, and you’ll realise you can be trusted to take care of your need for fun as well as the more basic needs for food, sleep and exercise.

The link between self-trust and relationship trust

Once you have built up a pattern of doing what you promised yourself you would do – and perhaps saying 'No' to things that you know will not serve you – it becomes easier to make commitments to your partner.

This is just another example of putting your own oxygen mask on first. You’ve proven to yourself that you can be trusted and that makes it easier to show your partner that you can be trusted.

Colin’s story: Standing himself up

It may be that you’ve realised that you keep putting something off which is important to your partner. Colin (not his real name) kept putting off booking the flights for a holiday in New Zealand which he and his wife had been planning. She realised she simply didn’t trust him to do it on time and kept worrying about the escalating cost of the flights.

He realised this was a pattern – his procrastination on various things making it hard for his wife to trust him. When I asked him why he kept procrastinating about the flights, he said he kept forgetting to do it – there was never time.

So I suggested he block out some time in his calendar, instead of relying on his memory. The next day he sent a message – ‘I’ve booked the flights!’

The thing is that Colin’s wider problem was that he kept standing himself up. He had a repeating habit of not doing what he had promised himself. So the next question was what to do about that.

Replacing the school bell with self-leadership

We dug a bit into what lay behind this pattern of letting himself down and he guessed it was partly to do with spending 10 years in boarding school – where everything was done for him, and the things he had to do – like show up to lessons – were always signalled by the school bell.

There is no school bell any more, but Colin realised he doesn’t need one – he simply needs to remember why he wants to stop standing himself up. His Big Why is that he wants a life lived with love and integrity.

Four simple steps to build trust

So we tried a new approach:

1. Decide what you want to do

2. Put it in your calendar (with a notification if you need a reminder)

3. When the time comes, do the thing regardless of how you feel about doing it – in other words, show up for yourself

4. Notice how trustworthy you have become!

Be kind to yourself when you slip

If you don’t do the thing, be kind to yourself. This is about your relationship with yourself, so you want it to be kind and loving, not critical or judgemental. Besides you aren’t going to trust yourself if you level criticism at yourself whenever you don’t do what you planned.