We are all works in progress and constantly evolving. As adults, this can be hard for us to see. But for the butterfly, the change is more obvious.
Butterflies are not born as baby butterflies. They hatch from their eggs as caterpillars. As larva, the caterpillar will consume plenty of leaves and grow to be quite large. One day, he stops consuming leaves and begins spinning his cocoon. This cocoon keeps his body safe as he undergoes major changes through metamorphosis. Then he emerges from his cocoon as a butterfly.
What is Trusting the Process?
As humans, it is hard for us to just “trust the process”. We are wired to want to see immediate results. But what trusting the process means is that despite setbacks and challenges, you remain committed to what you’re doing. When you don’t feel motivated enough, you keep going anyway. You remain disciplined and loyal to the path that is going to ultimately get you to where you want to be. Remember, it is the difficult roads that lead to beautiful destinations.
How Do I Trust the Process?
When you find yourself struggling with trusting the process, remember these three things:
1. Focus only on what you can control. There are very few things in life we have complete control over. Determine what you truly have control over and pour all your energy into it. In many cases, what you have control over may just be your attitude and response.
For example, you can follow your diet and work out plan to a T and still have a couple of weeks when the scale doesn’t budge. Don’t be discouraged! Focus on showing up and sticking to the plan. If you continue to not see the results you expect, troubleshoot what might be causing a lack of progress or reassess to see if your expectations are too high. Speaking from experience, sometimes you can do everything right and your body just takes a while to respond. By trusting the process and continuing when many would just give up, you will see the progress in weight loss. You just have to stick to it.
2. Know that failure is invaluable experience. For many of us, we want to avoid failing at all costs. But what we need to do is change how we look at failure. All failure is, is experience. By failing, we learned how something won’t work or new things we can try to try to make something work. This is good information to have. It’s more data than people who refuse to try or fail once and give up.
I have written extensively about people who have failed hundreds of times. Had they not pushed forward when faced with failure after failure, the world as we know it wouldn’t exist. You can check out my list of people who succeeded by failing here.
The truth is failure is an ally. It helps us learn from our mistakes and it propels us forward closer to our goals.
3. Enjoy the process. If you’re like me, when you set goals for yourself, you are focused on the final destination, not the journey. While it’s important to keep your eyes on the finish line, when you are overly focused on it, you miss out on all that you gain along your journey.
Real growth and personal development happens by going through all the obstacles along the way. It doesn’t magically happen once you reach your goal. So enjoy the process and your state of “becoming”.
It’s also important to point out that when we are overly focused attaining the goal itself, we can set ourselves up for an unhealthy mentality when it comes to thinking about our goals. We may begin to believe that we will only be happy once we reach the goal. Andrew Huberman talks about why doing the work is the reward we should be chasing. You can check him out here:
