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6 Ways We Can Learn to Trust Again

July 16, 2018 by Dr. John Townsend Leave a Comment

We are born trusting. In the beginning, we put our trust in our parents and relatives to care for us, love us, and keep us alive. Yes, these are basic needs, but they are also important ones!

Unfortunately, over time, something happens.

We get let down. We get left out. We go through a break-up or betrayal. The hard truth is that a lot of things just happen in our lives that cause us to lose trust in others. Knowing this, is it even possible to learn to trust again?

Yes. You can trust again!

Defining Trust is a Must

How do we define trust?

Trust is allowing someone to know our vulnerabilities. It’s about revealing our soft spots, failures, pain, negatives, and weaknesses. When you allow someone to see the real you, it’s a way of saying, “I trust you with this information, and I believe that you’re not going to do something hurtful to me with it.”

In the Bible, one of the translations for the word “trust” in Hebrew is “to be careless.” This means that you have so much trust in someone that you’re just careless with them. You don’t worry about saying the right thing. There is no walking on eggshells. There is no fear. You are truly yourself when you show that vulnerability and trust.

This “carelessness” comes from knowing that, no matter what, you are safe with this person you trust. When someone violates that trust or exposes one of the “secret parts” of ourselves that we don’t share with everyone, it hurts. Sometimes deeply.

That betrayal is what I call a trust fracture. How do trust fractures happen? Unfortunately, trust can be broken in a number of ways, especially as we grow older.

Divorce, problems with an adult child, challenges at work, friendship drama, and disappointment are all common culprits of trust fractures. How we approach rebuilding trust after it fractures that makes all the difference.

The Two Big Don’ts in Trusting

Two different outcomes can happen when someone breaks our trust. Sadly, sometimes these trust fractures happen more than once and we experience a hurtful pattern from the same person. Small breaches in confidence add up! Once those breaches happen, it can be hard to trust anyone, whether they’re a longtime friend or someone new.

Big Don’t #1: We don’t trust anyone.

When we lose trust, we often default to not trusting ANYONE. That’s not good at all. You need safe people in your life and that means having trust in them. They’ll give you the right nutrients for a happier and more trusting life. (Information on how to identify the safe people in your life is in my blog post here.)

Big Don’t #2: We trust everyone (but shouldn’t)

Or, conversely, we trust TOO quickly. When people let us down or are inconsistent, we can sometimes forgive and forget without sitting back and thinking, “Let me discern if you’re gonna really change your ways here.”

Then, the cycle repeats.

Trusting everyone or trusting no one at all is not a healthy way to work through losing trust. You end up in a passive permanent state where you wait for people to come to you. That won’t give you the nutrients you need at all.

6 Ways to Learn to Trust Again

The good news is that you can learn to trust again, no matter how deep the fracture, if both people agree to change (and actually do).

Repairing a trust fracture won’t happen overnight. It is going to be hard work, too. It takes time to rebuild trust or to initially put your trust in someone after a pattern of broken promises. But, if you follow these steps, you will be in a prime position to start trusting again.

Count The Cost. By not trusting anyone, consider these questions: What am I missing out on? Am I lonely? Am I lacking energy? Healthy boundaries are one thing. They help us with trusting people. But, when you put up too many boundaries to the point of isolation, you lose out on the potential for the nutrients needed for a happier life.
Don’t Be Afraid. A big step toward rebuilding trust or putting your trust in someone new is overcoming the fear-need complex. It’s something in our head that says, “I’m afraid of needing people so I won’t need them. But, then I feel like I really need them and I get afraid.” It’s a hard, back and forth internal struggle. Let the need overcome that fear.

Stick Your Toe in the Water. Take a small risk with someone NEW and see what happens. Allow someone to see a small mistake you made and be vulnerable. This is what happens right after you work through the fear I mentioned in #2.

Pick the Right People to Trust. Trusting someone is hard, so don’t make it harder than it has to be. Make sure people deserve your trust. You’ve got to make sure the people you’re surrounding yourself with are not going to intentionally betray your trust I always stress the need to identify safe people and trust is a big part of that concept.

Treat Others as You Want to Be Treated. Trust is truly a two-way street. The foundation of trust is built when you treat someone well, regardless of what they can or can’t do for us. Start to look out for them, start to put their needs in front of your own. It’s a lot easier to build trust with someone who shows consistent, good behavior toward us. It’s also a way to show the other person how they can build trust with you!

Balance Strength & Vulnerability. A strong person is one who can be vulnerable with others. Meaning, strength comes from being able to trust someone. For example, if you tell someone you want to trust that you’re feeling anxious about a situation at work and they give you warmth in response, that’s a show of strength. It is not weak to show vulnerability. Quite the opposite in fact. Keep in mind, this is not the kind of strength that dominates people or controls them, but the kind of strength that is balanced with being vulnerable.

It takes a lot of work to build trust, and even more, work to build it back up after a trust fracture. Trust is not something that should be given freely (meaning just to anyone). It should be earned.

4 Steps To Dealing With Failure In A Healthy Way

May 29, 2018 by Dr. John Townsend Leave a Comment

God designed you for many wonderful purposes! He made you so your self-image would be your friend and ally. A positive self-image will help you make great choices, find your passions, and succeed in all walks of life. It was also designed to help you fail well.

Let’s face it – failure is going to happen to you at some point in your life.

Read my recent blog on dealing with failure as a starting point.

Healthy self-image can help you learn to fail in redemptive ways.

People with a healthy and accurate self-image don’t have a big problem with failure. Why is that? It’s because they have harnessed the ability to fail well.

How Does a Healthy Self-Image Help Us Fail Well?

The idea of failing well might be a new concept to some of you. That’s okay.

Let me explain how it should work when we fail. You should experience five stages:

Disappointment: That was a bummer; I’m sad about this.
Leaning on God: I need his help and wisdom in this.
Support: I think I need to call my friend Pat about this and get some face time.
Learning: What was my contribution to this problem? What do I need to change?
Adaptation: It’s time to swing the bat again and try things a different way.

Training our brains to learn lessons and grow from failure is the key to failing in a healthy way. Following the five steps outlined above will help you to learn as time goes on.

Entitlement Can Hurt Failing Well

Entitlement cripples your ability to fail well and hampers your capacity to learn and grow from failure. Research has shown that entitlement creates a paradox of self-images within us, one external and the other internal. This means the two self-images we have are in conflict.

The person with entitlement looks confident about themselves on the outside, to the point of arrogance or cockiness. They don’t need to prepare a talk, practice a golf swing, or take a course on building a resume. The external self-image says, “I am above all that because I am special.”

Given what we’ve seen and experienced personally with entitled people, we might expect this. What we might not expect is the existence of a different self-image deeper within the entitled person–one that is insecure and afraid, and above all, risk-averse.

The entitled person is deathly afraid of taking a risk and failing.

An Example of a Double Self-Image

I have a friend whose parents encouraged him to pursue what he was gifted at (and could do easily) but avoided pushing him in areas he would have to work hard in to be successful. He was a talented musician but didn’t like math. So they let him slide in math and kept him focused on music.

The result? As an adult, he loves his music, but has great difficulty in his financial life and has been in serious trouble with his money.

Because of his double self-image, he doesn’t try to face his financial challenges. Instead, he freezes up and avoids his money issues because he is overwhelmed when dealing with matters that are hard for him. Unfortunately, dealing with difficult matters is a skill his parents never forced him to learn while young. You don’t want your child, spouse, or employee to have this experience!

The Simple Solution

How can you begin to fail well? Start by helping people to feel competent because they are competent (not to just make them feel good about themselves). The young baseball player doesn’t need groundless praise; he needs parents and coaches who will support his attempts to develop a better swing with hundreds of pitched balls until he starts connecting. The young grad student needs a job where she is around people as intelligent as she is, who challenge her and who help her wrestle with difficult matters.

People don’t first feel competent and then become competent. It’s the other way around. They become competent and then they feel competent. It is the history, the experience, the at-bats, that create a sense of “I can do this.” And before we reach that point, all we have is, “I have people who love and support me while I am not-yet-competent.” And that is enough.

How to Learn from Failure (in a Healthy Way)

I’m going to give you a few steps to take as you grow after a failure. These are internal steps you can take at your own pace.

The sequence, then, is this:

Positive self-talk. Before you achieve competence, you are loved, you are okay, you are supported by God and others. It is grace, the essence of love that is not performance-based: “Though I am not competent at this, I am loved” is the positive self-image at this stage.
Step out of your comfort zone. You try new things, and while no one does them well at first, the “loved” self-image carries the day.
Try, try again. You practice, learn, get advice, fail, and adapt.
It gets better. Gradually, you begin doing things better. Now the self-image says, “I am loved, and I am competent.”

This is what works. Love precedes confidence, but confidence can’t exist outside of failure and adaptation. When your self-image aligns with what is real and true about you — in other words, how God sees and experiences you — it works for you and not against you. This is the foundation of how we learn and grow from failure.

Admittedly, everyone struggles with failure. That’s okay. It’s normal. If you are wanting to learn more about how to grow from a failure, become a TownsendNOW member. Our Certified Coaches can guide you through the challenges and get you on the path to growth.

This article was curated from “The Entitlement Cure” by Dr. John Townsend.

Are You Using Social Media in a Healthy Way?

May 14, 2018 by Dr. John Townsend Leave a Comment

I love using social media. It’s not going away, and I’m glad. Social media makes our lives better, but that also means that we must be able to use it wisely.

Before we get any further, let me just define the terms here.

Social media is any kind of a website or application that involves the delivery of content that leads to interaction with other people.

Benefits of Healthy Social Media Use

Social media can provide many benefits, including:

Stronger Relationships
More Success
Entertainment

Unfortunately, we tend to see people get stuck in addictive cycles on social media. This could mean they are constantly on their phone, which can also lead to physical problems like eye strain headaches. Or, they seek out people who may’ve been problematic in the past, which can lead to all kinds of emotional challenges. Social media is supposed to be primarily for entertainment. It simply cannot take over your life.

The main thing to consider when using social media is, “Is it helping me be a better person? Am I in charge of it or is it in charge of me?”

Watch Out For the Negatives of Social Media

Let me give you some of the negative ways people handle being constantly connected.

The first is access issues. You have your home life, work or school life, friends, church, etc. All too often, work or school can be accessed through text or email. You are technically available anytime. Do you respond or simply let it go for the time being?

Another thing is quality vs. quantity. When surfing social media make sure you’re not allowing stuff in that’s going to adversely impact your emotional or spiritual well-being. Then, there’s quantity. There’s so much research out there about how people are spending way too much time on Facebook, Twitter, etc., and it gets in the way of real life and real experiences.

Healthy Social Media Boundaries

Now, let me give you some healthy ways to deal with this:

Make sure you’re living a healthy life. You’re working out and dealing with people who are good for you and you’re doing something meaningful with your time. Nature abhors a vacuum. When we don’t have a healthy life and we’re lonely or isolated, we have a tendency to go into the digital world. This is the addictive process. Look, just like some people turn to drugs or alcohol, they can also go into the social media world because their real life’s not working. So, have the healthiest life possible.
Set realistic ground rules. To start, establish times when you cannot be accessed. Use this as a time where you can be disconnected and have real-world experiences, whether it a be a workout or going to church.