Stop Worrying – Choose Trust

Key Takeaways:

• Worry depletes energy: Both conscious and unconscious worry drain energy. Often, we carry around anxiety without realizing it, which can be exhausting until we identify and address the specific source of our worry.

• The opposite of worry is trust: To stop worrying, you must choose to trust. Trust eliminates the emotional space that worry occupies, helping to shift focus away from uncontrollable concerns.

• Ask what you’re not trusting: When you feel worry rising, ask yourself what you’re not trusting. Identifying the underlying source of worry allows you to redirect energy toward building trust in that area.

• Take action to build trust: If you’re worried about something you can’t control, take proactive steps to increase trust. For example, checking in with someone or reinforcing the importance of a task can alleviate anxiety and create a sense of trust in the process.

• Trust the Universe when you can’t control the outcome: After taking all reasonable actions, let go of worry and trust that the outcome, whatever it may be, will be handled. Embrace the uncertainty and trust that you’ll navigate whatever comes your way.

Who doesn’t worry? Anxiety and worry are a fact of life for most people. Certainly all my clients find that anxious worrying constantly drains their energy. Sometimes they carry around a general level of anxiety they’re not even aware of. This unconscious worry simply depletes them until they learn to stop and notice specifically what they’re worried about.

Worry—conscious and unconscious–used to drain my energy too, but less and less since I started using the InPower strategy of “Choosing Trust.” Now I almost never find myself exhausted from anxiety.

The opposite of worry is trust. To stop worrying, choose to trust.

Choosing Trust leverages the simple reality that where there is trust, there is no emotional energy left for worry (and visa versa). A lot of us spend energy thinking about things out of our control, which puts us at an immediate disadvantage because no amount of thinking about it will guarantee success.

So the solution is to ask yourself, “What am I not trusting that is making me worry?” and then find the thing you can trust to put your energy into.

For example, at 4pm when you haven’t gotten confirmation that your client received your proposal, due by 5pm, you may start to worry.

Ask yourself: What am I not trusting that would calm my worry? Perhaps you’re not trusting that the intern tasked with dropping off the packet knows the importance of doing so by COB. What can you choose to do that will help you trust her more? Pick up the phone and call her? Call her supervisor? Do it! Do whatever you can to put your energy into creating more trust.

Then what? If you can’t get her on the phone and end up leaving a message, how can you stop the remaining worry? This is where most of us get messed up. We do what we can and then we still worry. What’s the answer to this last bit of worry? Choose to trust the Universe.

Sure, sometimes the Universe doesn’t exactly follow orders, but you know there’s truth in old saws like “when one door closes another opens,” “every cloud has a silver lining” and “be careful what you wish for.” Some things that appear terrible on the surface turn out to be blessings in disguise.

Since you can’t control it anyway, choose to trust that you’ll deal with the outcome when the time comes, regardless of how things go.

Stop worrying. Choose to put your energy into trusting and let the worry go.