Are you a self-professed “control freak”?
Is needing to do everything yourself getting in the way of manifesting your goals, especially in your business?
Perhaps you recognize the problem and have tried to fix it but keep falling back into your old ways.
I can relate. For a long time I was a master of “Nobody can do it as well as I can” in my business. I’m great at a lot of things; in the language of The Big Leap, my Zone of Excellence is HUGE.
Even when I hired people to help me, I sabotaged them in hidden ways that I didn’t recognize until years later.
And of course, because I wasn’t letting my team do the jobs I hired them for, these were terrible experiences and wastes of money, further justifying the story that I’m better off doing it all myself.
Sound familiar?
In a lot of cases, money may look like the reason you’re not delegating, whether it’s lack of money or not wanting to waste it. But the truth is, delegating effectively is always a wise and profitable investment, so this is a false reason. What’s the real reason?
If we wanted to boil down the whole delegating/outsourcing experience into one word – one emotional experience – it would be Trust.
Trust is a key ingredient in the recipe for successful delegation – and most humans don’t have it because of their Core Wound.
You got your Core Wound in the womb. It was the first chakra block / limiting belief / negative emotional pattern that you experienced, and one of the things it did was cut you off from God.
…Well, not really. No one is cut off from God. But we (mis)perceive that we are separated from God because of our Core Wound.
Because of this misperception, the hidden story playing in our minds is, “God left me and never came back.” No matter how committed you are to your spiritual life, some part of you remembers the innate feeling of being connection to God which you felt before your Core Wound and recognizes that the feeling hasn’t returned.
And if God can’t be trusted to have your back, then who else can be trusted? That’s the tape about Trust playing in most people’s head by default, unless and until they do the work to change it.
Meanwhile, there’s another issue with Trust: being able to trust yourself.
Our self-trust gets eroded during childhood. Imagine a very young child who just learned how to walk. They’re toddling around their environment, exploring everything as their instincts tell them to do: with all five of their senses. They put items in their mouths, try to touch hot stoves, etc. When a well-meaning parent intervenes to keep the child safe – and rightfully so – the unconscious message the child receives is “Don’t trust your own instincts.”
The effect as a toddler may be relatively mild, but if this experience repeats throughout childhood, with the child / teen often hearing “No” in response to their ideas and desires, then the message “Your instincts and desires are not to be trusted” becomes ingrained.
Eventually they become adults who project that story onto everyone else. That’s what projection is: the unconscious human inclination to assume that everyone else thinks and feels the same way they do. So if you’ve been conditioned not to trust yourself, then it’s natural (but not necessarily accurate) for you to assume that others don’t trust themselves.
And if any untrustworthy person is going to mess up your plans, it might as well be you. Or so the unconscious story goes.
How to rebuild trust
When I work with my clients on Trust issues, the first thing I do is heal their Core Wound, as well as working directly with limiting beliefs related to Trust. We can directly clear patterns like, “I am not safe if I trust myself/God/mother/father/others” – and it’s quite effective.
But that’s not the whole solution, because it’s not enough to release the old patterns. We still need to instill new patterns in their place.
The other part of the solution – one that you can apply even without the aforementioned healing – is to start building habits that instill trust in yourself, because how much you trust others is directly proportionate to how much you trust yourself.
Start with something small and doable. I often suggest the habit of making your bed consistently every morning. For people who have gotten down to zero trust in themselves, it’s pretty common that they’re not even doing a simple thing like that on a consistent basis.
Whatever you choose, make it something that you can’t fail at doing consistently as long as you keep making the choice to do it. Something that requires no skill and very little time. Something that produces a visible or tangible result, as making your bed does, is even better.
Focus on building just one habit, no matter how many weeks or months it takes. Until that habit has been instilled, require nothing else new of yourself. Once the habit becomes automatic, then you can add a second one. Make sure the second one you pick is just as easy.
The objective is to set yourself up for success. Trying to be an overachiever will backfire here. Eventually you can pick slightly bigger habits, but only when the thought of doing so feels like a no-brainer.
This process may sound slow and tedious, but I promise you the effects will happen faster than you think. While you are consciously focused on building this one small habit, you will unconsciously start to exhibit more trust in yourself and others in countless ways.
Over time of doing this, you will develop a new mindset of trusting others. The shift can happen faster (without as many stops and starts) if you heal the underlying patterns – but even on your own, the mindset shift will eventually happen.
Trust me, it works.