We can earn our own trust.
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Notes
We develop trust in people or organizations over time as they meet our expectations. (And when they don’t meet our expectations, how the people/organizations handle that can still build trust.)
Trust in ourselves and our practice are similar. We develop trust over time as we do the work, even if what we hope for doesn’t happen every time.
It’s a commitment and decision to the best option we have—not perfect, not guaranteed, but best.
Trust “earns you” (builds?) patience.
Thoughts
My sense is that he’s saying that trust in yourself and trust in a practice are intertwined, perhaps like a virtuous cycle. As we do the work, we come to trust in it. As we come to trust in the work, we learn to trust our commitment to it. We come to trust ourselves and whatever practice we’ve developed.
Something Seth said a couple chapters back— about how we should not plan, but just work and be—has been niggling at the back of my mind as I’ve continued working through his book. I am a planner, for sure, even though I know it’s not necessarily the best thing. I remember reading in, I think, Kelly McGonigal’s The Willpower Instinct that the brain responds to planning (or maybe it was making a commitment) the same way it responds to actual action toward a goal.
The idea, if I’m remembering correctly, is that we may feel urgency to make a change (e.g., to sleep more), and that urgency would of course be relieved by getting to bed earlier. But the brain feels similar relief when we simply make a plan or commitment to make the change—that is, the same neurotransmitters kick in and “fool” the brain out of that urgency.
Of course, planning or committing isn’t enough to deal with the actual problem. But this helps explain why my journal has pages and pages of wisdom (I’m not being sarcastic there—my ideas are often very good), yet I will find, months later, that I’m still dealing with the same issue. The urgency leaves and, if I’m not careful, I’ll end up not following through.
I think this type of thing is happening to me here. I have thought a lot about what I’ve been reading here. I’ve even started, as Seth notes is the crucial beginning. But I’m not following through. And, while I’d like to say, “Hey, let me stop reading and I’ll get to work,” there’s no guarantee that I’ll actually get to work without the insights that I’ve been getting from the book.
I need to figure out the solution to that brain quirk that McGonigal pointed too. I need the planning/commitment and the follow-through.
This series is meant to capture my thoughts as I work through Seth Godin’s The Practice. It’s a book with over 200 (very short) chapters, which I hope to work through and, I further hope, to implement over time.
If you’re interested in more of Godin’s ideas, or my thoughts about them, you can check out this collection of posts. Note that if you’re more interested in the former, you should probably get Godin’s book and read it yourself; my notes will be both incomplete and idiosyncratic, and my thoughts will relate to my own experience.
But if my thoughts resonate with you, or if you think I’m just silly, I welcome your comments.