Ep 104: Hoping and Trusting: Why is it so scary?

This week I talk about the idea of having hope that things will get better. Hope can be a scary thing for a variety of reasons, and in this episode you'll learn:

• why hope can be scary
• 3 reasons why it might not be as scary as you think
• What hope, trust and belief are REALLY about.

This episode is only about 20 minutes - a great quick shot of inspiration to take with you into your day!


=== resources ===

* Create a Life You Love - Free e-book *
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* FREE Strategy Session *
Hoping, Trusting, and Believing that something is going to go your way is putting your eggs into a basket that you can't control. You need to trust and believe in YOURSELF that you've got your own back if things DON'T go your way.

Trusting and believing in yourself is something new to many of us though. I help people with this every day. Want to know how I can help YOU?

Schedule a free Strategy Session HERE!

Transcript

0:51

Hello. Hello. Hello and welcome back to Real, Brave and Unstoppable. As I sit here, looking out my office window, the leaves are turning all kinds of pretty colors and I'm really enjoying fall. The weather here in Maryland has been really amazing. We've had some really. Uh, warm days. But really perfect. So I went out for a nice long hike yesterday and enjoyed one of my favorite views. It was great. I hadn't been hiking for quite a while. I tend to not hike as much in the summer because it gets so hot. And I tend to gravitate towards paddleboarding a little more than hiking. So it was nice to get back out on the trail and just kind of immerse myself in nature. I had a lot of, soul searching to do yesterday, so really enjoyed that. And I was really supposed to record this yesterday, but that didn't happen. So here I am today, and I really struggled with what to bring you all this week. I have a lot of ideas planned for the next few weeks, but, sometimes they don't resonate with me and I just can't get in the groove of, you know, planning it out cause it just doesn't feel true for me in the moment. So. This week, what I ended up settling on was, talking about hoping hope or trusting or believing in something. And the reason that I chose this topic was, It's something that I've been feeling a lot lately. You know, there are things that are kind of in process for me and, hoping certain things work out and, you know, in the past couple of years, certain things that I've wanted to work out, haven't worked out and it's been a little frustrating. And recently I had an interaction or a conversation with someone about hope. And this individual was a little put off by the idea of hope. And that was really hard for me initially, because I feel like that's one of my gifts is to give people hope. I have a very expansive mindset when it comes to seeing possibility for other people. And myself to a degree too. It's a lot easier for me to see it in other people first, but I'm able to see possibilities for someone before they can see it for themselves. And this can sometimes be really challenging as a coach because I will be talking to someone and I'll immediately just have this vision pop into my head about oh, you could do this and you could do this, or you could, you could think this way, or you could think that way, or you could, you know what, it's just it's. It just comes to me and I see it. Cause I see, I always see the best in people. And it can be really challenging because all of this possibility and potential I hold for someone I have to hold it for a really long time. Since this kind of stuff rarely happens overnight. It's really hard to hold it without offering it. If that makes sense. And that's not my job. My job is not to tell someone, oh, you could do this, this, this, and this. You know, I can't just unload the whole vision that I see at one time it's way too overwhelming. And it might not even be what the client wants, you know? So I hold it, I hold it there until a client sees their own possibility. And sometimes like, if you can kind of picture, you know, chomping at the bit, like, it's like, oh, I want to see this. Oh, I want to say that. But no, no, no, no. You know, it's for coaches, we help people come to their own outcomes, we kind of guide them and encourage them. But, my point being, you know, that's one of my gifts is to really see, see an expansive vision for someone. And along with that comes encouraging them and sort of helping them find hope and, and belief in themselves. My tendency is really to inspire hope to all of my clients and everyone I cross paths with really, it's just really part of my mission and who I am. When I was going through my divorce, at one point I had no hope that things would ever be better. I, in in fact, like I had so little hope I was in such severe depression that I literally couldn't move. It was, it was really, really debilitating. I had no hope. And when I found some, I held onto that hope like it was gold. It was what got me through the darkest times. Just having a little hope that things would get better. And so I continue to pedal, my hope. Because it's just who I am and what I do. But this conversation, got me thinking. That hope can really be a scary thing. Right. So I get it. It can be scary, especially for people who have had the audacity to hope before and have been quote unquote burned, right? Buying into hope means that you're risking, that things don't work out. I mean, you're risking that anyway, but you're putting a lot more on the line, you know, it's like, we're afraid that if we hope and it doesn't work out, we're going to just feel worse. You know, it's easier to feel the flat line of emotions then, you know, go up and down. And the problem with that is that, you know, if you hope and if you hope and you do the things to get yourself to a better place, the joy or the happiness or whatever it is that comes with that is going to be so amazing. It's going to feel so good. But you can't feel that if you stay in the middle ground, The flat line, you know. With the high highs also come low lows. But if you don't risk the low, low having the low lows, you'll never have the high highs. And I would also offer that in doing the work to, you know, hope and move through something to get to the high highs. You're also doing the work to be able to handle the low lows better. But buying into hope can mean for some people, you know, I'm risking that what if things don't work out and then they'll never get better. And then I'll feel like I trusted and hope. And then I was betrayed and that feels worse to a lot of people. I also recently had a conversation about. Just said the word trust, but trusting and believing, which is similar to hope. I think. And it's hard to trust and believe in something once you've had something that you've trusted and believed in taken away from you. Like with my marriage, for example, it was really hard to trust men again. And it's still hard for me sometimes it's like a self protection thing. Like if I don't hope or if I don't trust and believe I'm protecting myself from that pain again. And that makes a lot of sense, right? We don't want to feel pain. So in our brains, we think that by not going there, we'll just avoid that. And I would offer that we're still feeling pain from staying in the same place. It's just that our brain doesn't see it that way because our brain always wants to look for the worst possible like scenario. We could go so deep on this topic. But we're just going to stay with a couple of things. Let's so let's unpack it a little bit. The first question I'm feeling called to ask about this is what if I hope or trust or believe and things don't work out? What's the very worst thing that will happen. I always like to ask that question. If you're a client of mine, I've probably asked you that question before. What's the worst thing that could happen. Well, the way I see it, the very worst thing If I decide that I'm going to hope that something gets better or something happens. If I'm going to hope the very worst thing that will happen because I hoped or trusted or believed is that it won't work out and I'll just be in the same place I was before I hoped trusted or believed. Which isn't really what I hoped for. But when you think about the facts, I'm really no worse off. Right. And you know, that you can handle, you are handling what you're in, you know, before you hoped trusted, believed. You've handled that. So, you know, you can handle that. So that's the worst thing that you're ever gonna have to do just by hoping, trusting or believing is to just stay where you're at. And the chances of you staying exactly where you're at by hoping, trusting and believing are really pretty small because by having that higher vibration and we'll talk about this a little more in a minute, but emotion, you're going to do things that bring you more out of where you're at. You're going to move forward by having that higher vibration emotion. And like I said, I'll talk about that a little more in a minute. But there are a few other things that come up for me about this. So the first thing is having hope means you're hopeful. Right. And being hopeful is just a feeling. Just like sadness or happiness or anger or frustration. And the thoughts that you think create the feelings you have. So what thoughts are you having to give you the hope? The hopefulness. Is it conceivable that you are capable of continuing to think the thoughts that would bring feelings that feel helpful and hopeful to you, whether or not something works out or not? Could you play a part in mitigating a situation not working out, even though you hoped it would, could you, could you really work on your mindset to be able to handle that better? You know, your thoughts, create your feelings, your feelings, drive your actions. So you put yourself your hope on the line. You put your trust in your belief on the line and it didn't work out for you. Is it conceivable that you have the capability inside of you to shift something. That helps Just kind of, you know, Regroup. Maybe you say, okay, well, this didn't work out for me in my timeline. I'm going to regroup. I'm going to reassess. What else can I do? It doesn't mean you're going to feel good, but that's okay. Feeling, feeling, quote unquote bad. It's part of life, right? It is part of life as much as we don't want it. It happens. So the next thing is that hopefulness or like optimism, is a fairly high vibration emotion. And our feelings drive our actions. So having a high vibe emotion like hopefulness or optimism will spur you to take actions that are different than having no hope. For example, hopelessness. So, I guess what I'm saying here is that if you really truly feel hopeful, even if you don't get the exact desired result, chances are, you will be better off than before you felt hopeful. If that makes sense. So if you sat around feeling hopeless, the chances of you taking like inspired action to create something better in your life, that's pretty small. If you're sitting around feeling hopeless and in despair. It's kind of like with me and when I was going through my divorce and I had so much depression and I felt hopeless, I felt completely hopeless. I couldn't get off the couch. That feeling caused the action of laying on the couch, the inaction of not getting up. The next thing that comes up for me is a lot of us live in a pretty black and white world. It's it's pretty normal to think that way, but there's a lot of gray area in this. Things happening for us as not an either or thing. We might desire something and not get it on the timeline that we want, but it's such a gray area. If we truly keep holding the vibration of hopefulness, for example. We're going to continue to create action that attracts more things that feel hopeful. If that makes sense. But we also have to be really careful here because time is something that we, as humans, have constructed to make sense of things. If you study quantum physics at all. If you've read anything about it. Time out there in the quantum does not... that doesn't exist. It's not like it's not linear. Like it is here in our physical world. But we need our, you know, we need our sense of time, our definition, our construction of time in our world, just to function in the world that we live in. But, you know, time as we've constructed, it really has little meaning outside of our physical world. Our timeline is often very rigid. And the universes is not at all. So our judgment of whether something worked out for us or not is actually pretty black and white because a) we don't know that it's not still coming. You know, just not on our timeline. And that brings me to my next point is trusting, hoping, or believing in something is always what we think like we are owed or what we deserve. It's, you know, but it's not always what we're ready for. Or what God universe source. A friend of mine calls it Gus, has in store for us. It's not always what the universe has in store for us. And I feel like it's more helpful to trust hope and believe that if what I desire isn't for the good of all, then it isn't meant to happen for me. Maybe ever, but maybe just not now. And I can also trust hope and believe that something better is in store for me. And when you can finally let go of the past and open yourself to the possibility, something better will come along, but rest assured it will not happen on your timeline. So all of that, like I know it sounds pretty rosy, right? That's part of who I am is that's where my brain automatically goes, but it's taken me a long time to get to this point. It's taken me a lot of work I should say, to get to this point. It took me a while to figure out how to get to this point. And once you realize that you can get to the place where you can hope for something,, you can trust or believe, and it's not always going to work out the way that you wanted it to, but if you trust that your life will unfold, how it's supposed to. You're going to be good. You're going to, you're going to be fine. Right. It's it's we just get, we get attached. We get so attached to what we think we should have, or the way things should be. You know, and it just causes us pain and suffering. Now I want to be really clear though. There's like a fine line I always have to kind of, I have to kind of like clarify this is that, you know, if you are suffering from something like depression or trauma, or, you know, very debilitating anxiety, it's not as simple as just changing your thoughts, right? That's just, that's not how it is. That's, there's a lot of other things that go into that there's processing that, that pain, that trauma there's you know, just brain chemistry things. And so I just want to make sure that, you know, if you're listening and you have something like that, that makes it a little bit more difficult to, you know, track with what I'm saying. That's okay. And there's nothing wrong with you. So I just, I just want to make sure that I'm clear about that, that, you know, I do acknowledge, I've been there. It is very difficult to be in a place where you feel like nothing's ever getting better. But hang in there and don't be afraid to hope. Don't be afraid to hope. There's a quote that I've, We've all heard, but sometimes things fall apart so something better can come together. I love that. And it's really, it's a mindset, right? It's really a mindset in sometimes it's hard to get there, but you know, I've had it happen many times in my life where something didn't work out. It doesn't mean that later I'm glad it didn't work out, but it means that like I've been able to connect the dots and see maybe why it didn't work out. And oh, it would've been nice if it would've worked out, but here I am and I have something else that is equally as good. If not better. And there's another quote... ditch your timeline and let your life unfold, how it will. That's a really helpful skill to have is to be able to ditch your timeline and just sort of roll with it, stay in the now, in the moment. And it's kind of cliche. It's people talk about it all the time, but it's really true. If you can just always be willing to be with what is in the now, it's so much less overwhelming than if you try to, you know, look at the timeline you want and try to micromanage the unfolding of everything, because it just you'll be so unhappy because it doesn't work that way. And one more quote from Glennon Doyle that I shared last week. The truest most beautiful life, never promises to be an easy one. We have to let go of the lie that it's supposed to be. You know, what you want in life, I really believe it's possible in some way, it might not come in the form that you want it to or think it should come in. And what you want might take longer than you think. And, and getting it might be really hard. Really hard. But it's, it's okay to hope and it's okay to trust and believe that things are working for you. And, and you'll get there. Hope is sometimes what will get you through the day. You know, and if you trust your life to unfold, how it will, learn to sit with emotions that don't feel good, and always, always, always did tuned into your heart and the truth of who you are. Your life still won't be an easy piece of cake. No one's is, but it will be true and beautiful. And. You will feel alive. And that's what we're here for. Right. So. I hope that was helpful friends. I'm here to hope for you. I'm here to help you trust and believe, especially in yourself. I think that's the most important thing is, is can you come home to yourself? Can you trust and believe in yourself that you can create the life that you want? And the answer is yes. I believe in you, I believe. And I trust in you that you can, and you just need to find it for yourself. Not always easy, but look for it. I promise you it's worth it. All right. That's all I have for you today, friends and I will see you next week.