Trusting Yourself. M. J. Ryan

day was nice. “Oh, yes,” she said, “I was worried all week that it would be raining.”

      Now I've spent a great deal of my life worrying and trying every technique known to humankind to stop. I used to say that if I could get paid even a dollar per worry, I'd be a millionaire. So when someone mentions being worried, my heart goes out to her or him. This time something else occurred as well. I thought, This person worried for days about something she could not control, which ended up just fine anyway. What a waste of time and energy!

      I've been there so many times myself. Hearing it from someone else made me realize that I had changed. I actually worry less than I used to—not never, but much less. And the reason is that I've learned to trust more and more in my capacity to handle whatever life throws at me. Rain on a picnic day? We'll postpone it or move it indoors. Will my boss like the proposal? I'll redo it if she doesn't.

      Worry is always about the future, even if it's the next minute. And what we are really worried about is our capacity to deal with that future: our child's disappointment, the test results, our work performance. We're anticipating that we won't be able to cope. So we worry—as if that will help create a good outcome (which of course it almost never does). Mostly it just frazzles our nerves and wears us down.

      In The Positive Power of Negative Thinking, Julie Norem points out that there are actually two types of worries: those you can do something about and those you can't. If you are worried, for instance, about freezing up during a speech, you can practice more or use notes. When you use the worries that can be dealt with to plan ahead, you actually meet with greater success.

      The more we come to deeply know our thinking talents and trust in our capacity to cope, the less time we have to spend in worry. We take action on those worries that we can and know that we'll somehow figure out how to cope with the ones we can't or get appropriate help if they come to pass.

      For those of us not born with self-assurance, this doesn't happen through simplistic affirmations (“I will stride confidently through life and think only good thoughts”). For most of us, trusting ourselves comes through experience—having the opportunity to prove to ourselves we can handle a particular situation. And it comes through reflecting afterward on that experience and using it as a resource when a potential worry arises. It also comes from being flexible—understanding that there are a variety of possible responses to any given situation and relying on our capacity to find an appropriate response.

      I had occasion to recall this recently. My editor, agent, and I were struggling with a subtitle for this book. I could have worried. Titles are so important, what if we can't come up with the right one? I could have stayed up nights racking my brains and pulling my hair out. Instead I thought, Well, we're not there yet, but I have done this many times before. Plus there are many possible answers. I trust in our ability to come up with something that will work. And so I got to enjoy those weeks before we settled on something much more than I would have if I'd worried.

      This relief from worry is profound. We don't have to expend all that emotional energy anymore. We don't have to live in fear of the future. We're free to be in the present moment, that elusive destination of spiritual pundits of all stripes. When we trust ourselves, now is a place we can rest happily in.

      We Can Let Go of Shoulds, Musts, and Oughts

      “I must do this because they will be disappointed if I don't.” My friend and teacher Albert Ellis refers to this impulse as “musterbating.”

      —Wayne D. Dyer

      In her book Living Happily Ever After, Marsha Sinetar tells the story of two hermits who lived together for many years on a deserted island, praying. One day, along came a church official in a boat who proceeded to interrogate them as to how they prayed. “We just pray,” they responded. “No,” said the church father, “you must say the right prayer.” So he began to teach them his church's prayer. The hermits had a lot of trouble remembering it. Over and over they forgot. The church leader worked hard to teach them; finally, confident that they had it memorized, he jumped into his boat and took off. Miles away from the island, he heard his name being called. Looking out to sea, he saw the two hermits, walking toward him on the water. “Wait, wait!” they exclaimed. “What comes after ‘Give us this our daily bread’?”

      What a marvelous lesson about purity of heart and strength of faith being more important than all the shoulds in the world. From birth we are told by those around us what we ought to and must do. Your family, religion, school system, workplace, media—each and every structure in existence adds its ideas to the pot of dos and don'ts. By the time we are adults, these voices are not only outside us, but inside as well: I should go to the party; I ought to send a baby shower gift; I must work ten hours a day or else look like a slacker. These musts, oughts, and shoulds can be so strong that what we want in our heart of hearts can be completely hidden—even from ourselves.

      The word should comes from the Anglo-Saxon “sceolde,” and scolding is just the effect it has on us. Indeed, shoulds and musts set up civil wars inside our psyche. Psychologist Neil Fiore points out that as soon as we have “one voice say[ing], ‘I should,’ another says, ‘I don't want to.’” So we go back and forth between the two, feeling bad no matter what we end up doing.

      When we live from a list of shoulds, we end up in a tremendous amount of self-recrimination and regret. This is a great energy sap. Wayne D. Dyer puts it this way: “When we discuss what we should have done, or what we could have done, or what we would have done, we are not tuned in to our reality system. No one could have done anything differently than they did. Period.” Trust in ourselves gets us off this no-win roller coaster because it gives us the ability to do what we think is right and not look back.

      These days, I'm practicing letting go of shoulds, musts, and oughts. I say, Sorry, I'm too tired to come to the party, even if it's at the last minute. (Friends can attest to how often I've bailed on them.) I let my work speak for itself rather than worrying whether others will think me a slacker for taking time off. And when I do find myself stuck in a should, I seek a solution that I can do whole-heartedly—pick flowers from my garden for a friend rather than buy a gift, for instance, if that feels more authentic.

      What I've learned from outside the “should” pile is that life is so much simpler. How about you? Would you have more time, more mental energy, by not dwelling on the oughts in your life and acting more from the wants? You might even get to something on your list that you actually enjoy.

      Here's an added benefit: You let other people off the hook, too, because you're not as focused on what they “should” be doing either. Ah, freedom—it feels pretty darn good!

      Creativity and Success Flourish

      There are 152 distinctly different ways of holding a baby—and all are right.

      —Heywood Broun

      Dick Fosbury was a high jumper. But instead of facing the pole and jumping it feetfirst, he somehow got the idea to throw his body over headfirst, with his face looking at the sky. “I was told over and over again that I would never be successful . . . that the technique would never work,” he is quoted as saying in Attitude 101. In fact, he was so criticized that the position soon got a name—the Fosbury flop. But despite the ridicule, Fosbury trusted that he was onto something. He kept at it. Then, at the Olympics in Mexico in 1968, the laughter stopped as Fosbury not only won the gold medal with his flop, but set a new world record. Today, all high jumpers use his technique.

      I love this story because it is such a great example of how the new is born. Someone dares to do something different. If it succeeds, pretty soon everyone's doing it. But for the first person to stick his neck out, it's a very big deal. My friend Fuping tells me that there's a Chinese proverb that says, “The gun shoots the first bird.” No matter what culture you come from, going against the crowd can be challenging. That's where trusting yourself comes in.

      You get