eight. I couldn't help noticing she was wearing a very provocative string bikini. When she went off to the pool, the wife asked her husband, “What do you think about that bathing suit?” He mumbled something. Silence for a few minutes. Then she asked again, explaining that her daughter had picked it out herself. Again he said something noncommittal. Five minutes later, she returned to it again: “But as a father, how do you feel about your daughter wearing that suit? I mean, this is the time we need to set standards.”
I left at that point, afraid if I didn't, I would blurt out something it was not my place to say. Talk about not trusting yourself! The woman obviously knew in her heart of hearts that the bathing suit was inappropriate but had given in to her daughter. Now she was practically begging her husband to veto her choice. It was clear that if he didn't put his foot down, she would continue to ignore her own sense of what was right.
Life is crammed full of choices. Indeed, one could say that our lives are comprised of the choices we make on a daily basis. And we must make them in the midst of all kinds of pressures—pressures from kids who want certain things, money pressures, time pressures. Then there's the pressure to sort through all the data to make the right choice among all the options out there.
A recent study revealed that twenty thousand new products are released every year and that having too many choices is making us unhappy. As author Robert Kanigel puts it, “While choices multiply, we stay pretty much the same. Our bodies and minds remain the bottleneck through which choice must pass. We still have the brains our forebears did, still only twenty-four hours a day to use them. We still need time and energy to listen, look, absorb, distinguish, and decide. . . . Each choice saps energy, takes time, makes a big deal out of what isn't.”
I was struck by the reality of this conundrum the other day. I just happened to notice the covers of two magazines: Bride and Modern Bride. Bride was trumpeting 704 pages of wedding dresses; Modern Bride, 512. If you bought both, you could look at 1,216 pages of dresses. Just thinking about that nauseates me.
When we trust ourselves, we don't need to look at 1,216 pages of dresses, unless, as with my friend Chloe, it gives us pleasure to do so. We don't need to agonize over decisions or second-guess ourselves endlessly or look to others, like the mom in the pool, for validation or limit setting. We know that we can live through the consequences of our choices without beating ourselves up because we believe, as psychologist John Enright says, that “you always chose right, given the resources you had.” Even if that mother had, in a moment of weakness, given in to her daughter, with self-trust she could decide to reverse her decision once she realized she had made a mistake.
Choice is about the capacity to make our wishes known, to ourselves or others, act on that knowledge, and then deal with the consequences and revise if necessary. Trusting ourselves allows us to do that more swiftly, comfortably, and with less regret. Given the number of choices we must make in a day, that's no small gift!
We Don't Have to Worry So Much
How much pain have cost us the evils which have never happened.
—Thomas Jefferson
The mother of one of Ana's classmates organized an “end of the school year” party at a park. The weather had been atrocious all month, but that Saturday it was warm and sunny, just the kind of weather for being outside. I commented to the organizer how fortunate we were that the day was nice. “Oh, yes,” she said, “I was worried all week that it would be raining.”
Now I've spent a great deal of my life worrying and trying every technique known to humankind to stop. I used to say that if I could get paid even a dollar per worry, I'd be a millionaire. So when someone mentions being worried, my heart goes out to her or him. This time something else occurred as well. I thought, This person worried for days about something she could not control, which ended up just fine anyway. What a waste of time and energy!
I've been there so many times myself. Hearing it from someone else made me realize that I had changed. I actually worry less than I used to—not never, but much less. And the reason is that I've learned to trust more and more in my capacity to handle whatever life throws at me. Rain on a picnic day? We'll postpone it or move it indoors. Will my boss like the proposal? I'll redo it if she doesn't.
Worry is always about the future, even if it's the next minute. And what we are really worried about is our capacity to deal with that future: our child's disappointment, the test results, our work performance. We're anticipating that we won't be able to cope. So we worry—as if that will help create a good outcome (which of course it almost never does). Mostly it just frazzles our nerves and wears us down.
In The Positive Power of Negative Thinking, Julie Norem points out that there are actually two types of worries: those you can do something about and those you can't. If you are worried, for instance, about freezing up during a speech, you can practice more or use notes. When you use the worries that can be dealt with to plan ahead, you actually meet with greater success.
The more we come to deeply know our thinking talents and trust in our capacity to cope, the less time we have to spend in worry. We take action on those worries that we can and know that we'll somehow figure out how to cope with the ones we can't or get appropriate help if they come to pass.
For those of us not born with self-assurance, this doesn't happen through simplistic affirmations (“I will stride confidently through life and think only good thoughts”). For most of us, trusting ourselves comes through experience—having the opportunity to prove to ourselves we can handle a particular situation. And it comes through reflecting afterward on that experience and using it as a resource when a potential worry arises. It also comes from being flexible—understanding that there are a variety of possible responses to any given situation and relying on our capacity to find an appropriate response.
I had occasion to recall this recently. My editor, agent, and I were struggling with a subtitle for this book. I could have worried. Titles are so important, what if we can't come up with the right one? I could have stayed up nights racking my brains and pulling my hair out. Instead I thought, Well, we're not there yet, but I have done this many times before. Plus there are many possible answers. I trust in our ability to come up with something that will work. And so I got to enjoy those weeks before we settled on something much more than I would have if I'd worried.
This relief from worry is profound. We don't have to expend all that emotional energy anymore. We don't have to live in fear of the future. We're free to be in the present moment, that elusive destination of spiritual pundits of all stripes. When we trust ourselves, now is a place we can rest happily in.
We Can Let Go of Shoulds, Musts, and Oughts
“I must do this because they will be disappointed if I don't.” My friend and teacher Albert Ellis refers to this impulse as “musterbating.”
—Wayne D. Dyer
In her book Living Happily Ever After, Marsha Sinetar tells the story of two hermits who lived together for many years on a deserted island, praying. One day, along came a church official in a boat who proceeded to interrogate them as to how they prayed. “We just pray,” they responded. “No,” said the church father, “you must say the right prayer.” So he began to teach them his church's prayer. The hermits had a lot of trouble remembering it. Over and over they forgot. The church leader worked hard to teach them; finally, confident that they had it memorized, he jumped into his boat and took off. Miles away from the island, he heard his name being called. Looking out to sea, he saw the two hermits,
