How to Stop Letting Anxiety and Negative Thoughts Ruin Your Life Pt 9
This is the ninth in a series about how to stop letting anxiety and negative thoughts ruin your life.
If all the people who have betrayed you over and over are a source of your anxiety and negative thoughts, this video will show you how to reverse that trend and become what you want most in relationships.
If you’re interested in working with me in a consulting or coaching capacity, you can jump on my calendar at https://theharthabits.com/about.
00:00 Intro
00:34 How can trust or mistrust invoke anxiety and negative thoughts?
03:54 TL/DW: Here’s the solution
04:08 Choose Trust
05:55 Here’s How
06:07 1. Trust and Verify
11:42 2. Create Systems to Close the Loop
13:00 The System to Build Trust
16:07 Wrap up
How can trust or mistrust invoke anxiety and negative thoughts?
When I was early in the process of creating what “The Hart Habits” is, I was going through a real-life situation at the time, where a person from leadership in my life whom I trusted very much, was accused of cheating on his wife with a coworker. It was inside of a church setting.
If you’ve ever been in that kind of a setting, you know the gossip was flying and judgments were being made left and right.
Everybody had an opinion about what they had seen, what they thought, and whether this person was telling the truth or not.
At the time, I was going through a catharsis in my life and I was saying, “I don’t think I want this anymore.”
One of the principals of the initial text that I was working from at that time was, “Love Always Trusts”.
All right, I thought to myself, okay, love always trusts.
I had to think about the situation with that in my mind.
In that scenario, it meant that I chose to trust the individual I knew from leadership when he told me it was not true.
I decided that I was just going to believe that and move forward as if that was the case and behave in a way as if I 100% believed him, even though there was quite a bit of mounting evidence against him.
I made that decision and the consequence was that I was pushed out of the gossip circle, which was great because I didn’t want to be in the gossip circle anymore.
I thought to myself, “Okay, good, one excellent side effect of choosing to trust this individual.”
But then fast forward a few months later and the truth came out that the person did, in fact, cheat on his wife.
The whole thing was true.
It was a sordid affair and there were all the juicy details to go with it.
So, I had to face the truth of my decision.
I decided to trust that individual and believe their story and it turned out they lied to me.
At that time, it was just a big experiment for me, I wasn’t super invested in the outcome either way.
But I wrote down that I was going to make this choice, I was going to approach it from this way, and I was going to see what the end result could be.
And do you know what the end result was?
My peace of mind.
I had far more peace of mind throughout the entire six months of this little factoid, or that little detail, or this little piece of evidence, or that meeting those people had.
I wasn’t concerned with any of it.
I told people what I believed to be true, I left it there, and I walked away from the situation.
The beautiful thing was I didn’t have to walk away from the people in the situation.
I was able to stay connected to the individuals that were part of that without letting myself be involved and embroiled in the gossip and slander and extra stuff behind the scenes.
It’s a good thing too because, here we are 10, 15 years later and he’s still married to his wife.
So apparently, they worked it out.
TL/DW: Here’s the solution
So, the solution to the problem of having had so many people betray you in life, and how to reverse that, and stop letting anxiety and negative thoughts ruin your life is to choose trust as your default.
That sounds pretty scary, doesn’t it?
Don’t worry, I’ve got some tools to help you figure out how to choose trust as a default while still honoring yourself, honoring your boundaries, honoring the truth of the situation, and being able to move in a way that’s aligned with love.
Choose Trust
So, the principle is simple.
It’s the third of “The Hart Habits”.
The word is trust.
The mantra is “I choose to trust as a default because I listen to my inner voice and I know how to see and carry truth.”
So, if you’ve watched any of my videos, you’re probably starting to see things pulling around, pulling together and you might recognize that the two things that I mentioned in this mantra are: “Hart Habit #1” and “Hart Habit #2”, which are self and truth.
You might recall in “Stop Letting Anxiety and Negative Thoughts Ruin Your Life (Pt. 8)“ I talked about truth and how we can allow for everyone to have their own truth, even if it’s in conflict with our truth
We can still celebrate it and allow for it to be true for them.
Those principles are really key to what I’m gonna talk about today about defaulting to trust or choosing to trust as a default in your relationship.
Because, what I am not recommending is that you just run around blindly trusting everybody, throwing your life to the wind, and allow anybody to come in and take you with their desires, okay?
That is not what defaulting to trust looks like and that’s not what it means.
Here’s How
I’m going to give you a couple of really specific tools to help you on this quest to live a life aligned with love and to be able to trust while still honoring yourself and the truth.
1. Trust and Verify
The first is to trust and verify, okay?
I’m sure that you’ve heard this saying before, but trust and verify.
It’s okay to trust someone and default to trusting them, but if their actions or your trust in them or your belief in them is going to affect your life, you need to verify that what they’re saying is true and it’s okay to verify.
You can trust someone and still verify that what they say is true.
In business, we call these contracts, right?
You could be working with a great friend and you might trust that they are going to honor their word about a business deal you’re doing together, but that doesn’t mean that you should forego a contract.
You should get it all in writing and verify your trust by making them sign and date it.
When I say trust and verify, that can mean a lot of different things to different people.
I think about the people I dated prior to meeting my husband.
At the early stages of our relationship, I had to be honest with my husband that 100% of the men I had dated up to that time had cheated on me.
100% of them had snuck around behind my back, lied to me about it, and spent their time, energy, et cetera with other women during the time when we were in a relationship.
To say that I was hurt and untrusting would be the understatement of the century.
When I tell you trust and verify, it reminds me when I used to check his phone to see if he was calling certain people, or if he was calling someone, or to find out what was going on behind the scenes.
I told him, “I’m going to choose to trust the things that you tell me.”
At the time, I didn’t even know about trust and verify or any of the other things I’m going to share with you today, but I knew I was gonna choose trust and I was gonna see where it took me.
I kept trying to choose trust, but there were times where I was not believing what he was telling me.
So, I decided to verify.
At the time, verify meant go look through his phone logs and see who he had been talking to and what had been going on.
But, as I did things like that, what I found was that I would find whatever I wanted to find.
If I was determined that he had been calling some female the night before about this, that, or the other, I would certainly find phone numbers that would lead me to believe that was true.
So, I chose trust, but then I verified that he wasn’t trustworthy, right?
The thing about choosing to trust is, you also have to know that you’re prepared to deal with the truth.
We talked last week about how truth plays into our anxiety and negative thinking, and how the key to that is to celebrate the truth.
So, I have this situation.
I’m dating a guy.
He’s, so far, been good to me, but my past and experience say that he will definitely cheat at some point.
I make the decision, “I’m gonna try and trust him, but I’m pretty sure he’s doing stuff behind the scenes.”
So, I had to start thinking about truth.
Because love celebrates truth.
What was the truth of the matter?
The truth in that situation was that he was showing me with his time, energy, and effort that he wanted to be in relationship with me.
He called me every day, asked me what I was doing, invited me to his house, expressed interest in what I was doing, et cetera.
That was the truth of the matter.
Another truth was that he told me he was interested in a relationship with me, but in the beginning he was also very honest with me, that he wasn’t ready to be in a monogamous relationship and that we should just be friends for a period of time.
Being his friend, I had a lot less say-so on what he did with his time, or how he spent it, or who he went out with.
So, the truth is that all I actually had to do was ask him if he was calling another woman, if he was going out with another woman, and he actually told me the truth every time.
I’m not suggesting that will always happen for you.
What I am suggesting is that when we take these pieces together, when we choose trust but we take truth, our own self, and valuing ourselves into the equation, then trusting people can’t hurt us.
It can only help us.
So, when I say trust and verify, it doesn’t necessarily mean dig in and trying to find ‘the truth” for yourself.
That’s not what it means.
It means to learn more, get more information, find out more about the role that your belief system plays into this situation.
Learn more about how you can create better boundaries in your life, how you can honor spirit, your shadow, and your strengths better for yourself.
Think about, how can you find truth for yourself.
What is true for you?
What could be true for other people?
And how can you celebrate those truths and highlight those truths?
If you’re dating someone and you’re not sure if they’re monogamous with you, then you need to have that conversation.
And if they’re not, then you don’t need to be either.
Is that good, bad, or otherwise?
I don’t know.
I don’t have the right answer for you.
That’s where diving into what your boundaries and what matters to you really becomes the conversation at hand.
But we can verify things, and we can make sure that we are taking all the possible steps to make sure that our trust is placed in places that are really worthy of that trust and then give it freely.
2. Create Systems to Close the Loop
So, the second big point about how to always trust, still protect yourself, honor yourself and your boundaries is to trust then create systems that will close the loop.
I’ve already said trust and verify, right?
But if you create systems that close the loop, the verification happens as a natural by-product of the system that you set up.
Let me give you an example of this.
In business, we call this the checks and balances of making sure that all your systems are high-quality.
In the group home business I ran, part of our quality assurance process was a form that was completed and checked each shift so that we knew when things needed to be done, that they were done completely, and that we had independent verification it had been completed.
Other systems we used were time-sheets, clear policy and procedures, structure for corrective actions, duty checklists, and performance evaluations.
In our personal life, these can be things like an accountability buddy or a prenuptial agreement in a marriage.
But it also can show itself in strong personal boundaries.
The System to Build Trust
There’s a nice little system I like to use and that you can use as well.
We call this the triangle of trust or how to build trust.
It came from Frances Frei in her Ted Talk on building trust and there’s a link below.
The three corners of the triangle of building trust are: Empathetic, Logical, Authenticity.
Empathy is about really hearing what people are saying, putting yourself in their shoes, looking at the situation from their perspective, and celebrating their truth.
“Logical” means you’ll apply objective truth to a scenario.
Ask yourself: What is the objective truth here?
What are the things that are data-based or evidence-based, not subjective truth?
For example, just because I had been cheated on 100% of the time before did not objectively mean that my husband was going to cheat on me.
Subjectively, it might have felt that way, but objectively, that was not true.
So, when we talk about logic, it is based on objective information, data, and truths.
Finally, we talk about Authenticity, at the very top.
The most important part of this triangle of trust building is that you are being trustworthy and authentic yourself.
So, the habit is to choose trust as a default for other people, but the way that we do it is to be trustworthy ourselves in a logical, empathetic way.
What does that look like?
Again, it looks like contracts in business and accountability partners.
It looks like prenuptial agreements.
It looks like assessing a situation from an objective point of view that embraces the fact that there can be objective and subjective truths that might conflict sometimes, and that’s okay.
Let’s embrace them all.
Wrap Up
The way to get people to stop betraying you, is to choose to trust them and to set up systems to be able to verify that trust is well-placed; to know yourself-that you have good boundaries and you’re honoring your strengths, your shadow, and the spirit; being able to accept, acknowledge, and allow for different truths that sometimes might conflict; finding ways to celebrate those truths even though they conflict; and what you have is a perfect recipe to be able to choose trust.
And as you choose to trust other people and you give that to them, they begin to give that back to you.
This really could be the most pivotal piece of “The Hart Habits” for changing our lives, because we are not taught to trust in this society.
We’re taught to be cautious, critical, and to be looking for how someone is trying to cheat us or take from us.
In a capitalist society, that’s a well-founded fear because that’s how it was designed, okay?
And that’s the truth of the matter.
It was designed that way.
How can we celebrate that?
By admitting, okay, it was designed that way, now, how do I go about living my truth, honoring myself and my boundaries in a society that is that way?
And the way to do that is by doing disruptive things like choosing trust as your default.
That’s how you do it and as you choose trust as your default, while still verifying and closing the loop with systems, the more other people believe they can trust you, they begin to trust you, and the loop grows, and grows, and grows, we begin to strengthen each other better, and we become stronger together.
“Synergy” Look up this word.
That’s what happens when we begin trusting one another more deeply even though we know we’re all effed up humans.
We all do messed-up stuff sometimes.
We do, That’s the truth.
But when we choose to trust each other anyways (with verification and systems in place!), we begin to change things real significantly really quickly.
Choose trust, trust and verify, close the loop with systems, but choose trust.
It’s gonna help you.
It will help you stop letting anxiety and negative thoughts ruin your life.
You will go from feeling very guarded and like you’re being victimized to feeling very trustworthy and trusted by other people.
And it’s funny that you would be trusted because you’ve chosen to trust other people, but that’s how it actually works in our society and in our brains.
So… yay for brain science!
I love you.
Leave me a comment.
What are your thoughts?
Disclaimer -
This video is NOT sponsored. As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases. Your clicks help support the channel and allow me to continue to make videos like this one. But don’t worry, It does not affect the price you pay. 😉 Thank you for your support.
📕 Recommended Resources:
⚡The Thin Book of Trust by Charles Feltman: https://amzn.to/30PUKsi
⚡How to Build (and rebuild) Trust by Frances Frei: https://bit.ly/3kXWdUi
⚡Braving the Wilderness (The Anatomy of Trust: BRAVING) by Brené Brown: https://amzn.to/3kWVTFs
⚡Mastering the Skill of Trust by Angus Reid: https://bit.ly/3oM11ND
📱 Prefer Kindle? https://amzn.to/3vUhem6
🔊 Prefer Audio? Audible Plus free trial – https://amzn.to/3uRkbmf
📺 Recommended Playlist:
How to Stop Letting Anxiety and Negative Thoughts Ruin Your Life – https://bit.ly/3cnDNru
QUESTION(s) OF THE DAY — How have you learned to trust others?
👉👉 Used to make this video
🌟Camtasia: https://techsmith.z6rjha.net/JrJPO2
🌟Tubebuddy: https://www.tubebuddy.com/BridgettHart
🌟Canva: https://www.canva.com/join/mzn-ggl-phh
🌟Yeti Blue microphone: https://amzn.to/3kE8YE5
🌟iPhone XR: https://amzn.to/3eBm54X
👀 Seen in this Video:
💍 Wedding ring by Schwarz Jewelry out of Maui, HI: https://www.cmschwarz.com/en
💎 Earrings by Tawapa: https://www.tawapa.com/AUBSCM113/temple-of-light
💇🏻♀️ Purple Hair by https://www.instagram.com/smashthehair_stylist and Viral Shampoo https://amzn.to/3GpIhLT
To support our growth & development:
For fun 🤷🏻♀️my Amazon Wishlist: https://bit.ly/BHartslist
*Video produced and distributed by Hart Connections, LLC for Bridgett Hart*
Interested in working with Bridgett? https://sleek.bio/bridgettrhart
Patreon at: https://www.patreon.com/BridgettHart