Trusting Myself vs Knowing my Limits

A few weeks back I did a post on learning to trust myself. In it, I shared how I can be brutally un-trusting of myself and that I need to keep this in mind when making decisions, so that I don’t end up playing small in life.

My natural inclination is to not trust myself which comes from years of not feeling good enough. I notice this pesky self-defeating voice telling me I can’t possibly take on a new challenge because I ‘won’t cope’ which is another mental loop I get myself into.

My approach, on a good day, is to take a mindful and self-compassionate approach - I’ll acknowledge the thought and challenge it by bringing to mind all the many occasions when I have in fact coped perfectly well with various things. I can then, in a sense, override the thought and take on the new, and often daunting, challenge.

But it doesn’t always happen this way and that’s often because there is another part to the ‘trusting myself’ equation - I also have to know my limits.

This feels confusing. Surely there is some kind of balance to be achieved between the two? I find myself constantly up against this very conundrum.

There are times when it’s blatantly obvious when my self-talk is not based in any kind of reality and that’s become fairly easy to override, as mentioned above, but what really trips me up is when I can’t for the life of me distinguish whether it would be helpful or detrimental to act upon the troublesome mental commentary that goes on in my mind.

Let me try to break this down with an example because I may not be making any sense here…

I had an invitation to some drinks a while back and genuinely wanted to go. It was with people I didn’t know that well but would like the chance to get to know better. Negative thoughts often accompany such activities - I think I have some deeply ingrained social anxiety, which I have learnt ways to manage, but it does often trip me up.

Because this wasn’t an ‘easy’ social gathering, in that I don’t know the people very well, it naturally sparks some of the unhelpful thoughts ‘what if they think I’m boring’, ‘what if I have nothing to say.’ I have enough experience behind me to know that I am usually absolutely fine and the thoughts are just that - thoughts - not reality.

However, on this particular occasion I was in my luteal phase (if you know, you know), it was a very busy week and probably the biggest factor being the drinks were starting at 8pm which for someone who is regularly woken by a toddler before 5am that’s basically bedtime for me.

This is confusing because it can be hard to know what is objectively a really valid reason to decline the invitation and what is ‘an excuse’ my brain is giving me in desperation to protect me from the grave danger of the wolves (or should I say, the very lovely people who I had the chance to go out with…)

On this occasion, the general exhaustion I was experiencing led me to decline the offer and I stayed home and was probably asleep by 9pm. I had a mild onslaught of thoughts such as…

• Has my anxiety stopped me from making new friends?

• Am I playing small once again because I don’t trust myself enough to go out and interact with other humans?

On the whole though, I could objectively see this was the right call and that, for me, is progress.

This goes back to my post from last week about Givers and Drains. Due to being an introvert (some of my friends would be surprised by this) I would have needed a decent amount of re-charge time after a social event with new people. That week in question I did not have the luxury of any opportunities to re-charge my batteries, in fact, I needed to be on form for other things and I know the night out would likely have derailed my week. It was 100% the right call.

But then this is just one decision out of hundreds of decisions I make every month and because I am so acutely aware of my tendency to hold myself back I have to go into detective mode to know when I’m doing this versus when I’m actually being compassionate towards myself and respecting my limits. It’s a fine line, hence the confusion.

This is once again reminding me how bloody genius the Givers and Drains list is - if you’ve not read that post, go back and have a look if you’re anything like me and need a bit of a framework in order to protect your time and energy and stop your anxious mind totally running the show.

Knowing, and crucially trusting, my limits has become yet another essential life skill. When we’re young I think we can handle a lot more - more late nights, more easy breezy decisions about spontaneous nights out, rather than a detailed thought process/self-therapy session concluding in a blog post all about it!! At least I can laugh at myself!

There is more at stake these days from pushing my limits and, more often than not, it’s just not worth it but I have to balance this with living life - giving myself opportunities to have fun, meet new people, grow as a person and push myself personally and professionally. This is a constant dance for me.

Having the awareness of all these thought processes is so important and I’m proud of myself for recognising how my brain tends to work when it comes to this stuff. I’m also glad I am able to (hopefully) articulate it and share it. It feels scary though - there is always that niggling feeling that all this overthinking is totally unrelatable. To some, it will be but I have to remind myself that even though I feel so different, there will be others who feel the exact same way. If that’s you, I get it. It’s exhausting isn’t it?

But by digging into this stuff it does offer some comfort and clarity and it’s worth trudging through the messy stuff to get here.