It's Trust Yourself Thursday. How are you doing? I'm Dr. Derek Sweet, you're listening to The Sweet Spot, and you have found yourself back here with me in Trust Yourself Thursday. Let's take a deep breath before we start, shall we? Just let it out. Sometimes it's just good to ground ourselves before we just jump right into the message. So I'm Dr. Derek Sweet, I'm a board-certified psychiatrist. I work with high performance, as you know. More than that, I'm your fellow partner. I've been walking with you on the journey. This mysterious journey we call life. And on this journey for the past couple of weeks, we've been spending time together unlocking gratitude. Just exploring gratitude. And it's been quite fulfilling. I've really enjoyed your feedback. Today on Trust Yourself Thursday, we're spending some time looking at trust. As Emmons discussed it in his book, gratitude builds trust because it builds resilience by changing how we interpret our challenges. Yeah, gratitude builds resilience by changing how we interpret our obstacles, our challenges, the things that we face. Nobody tells us that we could use gratitude to build our inner strength, our bounce back, our resilience. It's never taught. You kind of just have to know this. But this book that we've been looking at all week, called Thanks, by Robert, Dr. Robert Emmons, the world's foremost scientist on gratitude, has been helping us understand how gratitude is so powerful. So when we say gratitude builds resilience by changing how we interpret our challenges, that's self-trust. That's not hype. That's not the fake it till you make it version of gratitude. Um, self-trust is the quiet belief that your own experience, your judgment, and your wisdom are trustworthy, even when you're under pressure, even when there's a lot of stress around you, even when things feel like they may not work out, even if things aren't working out. Self-trust is that quiet belief that your own experience, your judgment, your wisdom, your faith can be trusted even when everything is allowed, when everything feels pressurized. And you know how you build more of that self-trust? Gratitude. Absolutely. Self-trust doesn't come from ego, doesn't matter how many push-ups you can do, doesn't matter how much money you got in the bank, I don't care how fly your clothes are, whatever, self-trust does not come from ego. You know what it comes from? Interpretation. Gratitude doesn't rewire your history, it rewrites the meaning of your history. So instead of saying I messed up, oh I'll never get this right, gratitude helps you see that you learned something from the error. You learned something from the failure. Instead of I'm not good enough, gratitude reminds you I've survived tougher than this, I've been through harder situations than this, I've been through things like this before, and I've made it, I've survived, I've come out of it. Instead of I can't handle this, gratitude brings forward this kind of thinking. I've handled things just as hard before. I'm reminded of an old gospel song. I don't know the name of it. It says something like this: I've had heartaches like this before. I've had disappointments by the score. But something, something, something, it did not last. This too shall pass. Oh, that's the name of the song, This Too Shall Pass. That's gratitude reframing your experience as evidence, not ammunition against yourself. When we're left to our own thinking, when we're just interpreting things just from what we see, we can fall into the trap of just being worried, anxious, disappointed, and upset. The minute we introduce gratitude and find something that can steady us that we can be thankful for, you build trust. You build a trust that's real, grounded, and earned. Let's say you're a soccer player. I'm gonna give you an example, right? Let's say you're a soccer player, a midfielder, and you make a really bad mistake. You misplace a pass that leads to a very dangerous counterattack on the field. And guess what? You know the feeling. The stadium noise gets louder, the mistake hits you in your chest, and suddenly you're inside of your own head replaying that mistake over and over again. If you don't know anything about the power of gratitude, you are doomed to have a really rough time. Without gratitude, the spiral will kick in, and whatever mistake you've made, whatever error, whatever mess up, oh my goodness, you keep getting the same message. You messed up, don't trust your touch, don't take risks, and it affects how you play, it affects how you make your next move. It's very, very dangerous. But guess what? Gratitude shifts the inner narrative when you can when you know it. You know, if that same player figures out how to use gratitude, he will reconnect with the truth of his game. He can say something like, I've made thousands of clean passes. I know that happened, but my vision is solid. I I saw the right idea, I recovered from worse than this. My coach still trusts me, my team still trusts me. And my team needs to be confident, not cautious. That's how gratitude turns experience into proof, not punishment. You messed up? Gratitude says, hey, this is proof, this is not your identity. The mistake is information, not identity. Say it with me. My mistakes are information, they're not my identity. And when that soccer player resets his breath, widens his awareness, and steps back into the play with self-trust instead of panic, oh, he's ready. And that's available to any one of us. You could be a parent or you could be a brother or a sister, and you don't know what you're doing, and you feel out of control. With gratitude, you will say something like this. I have gotten my family through every season with my love and my wisdom. My family and I, we have a bond, even though things aren't working right now, we can count on each other. And just remembering that removes all of the deep fear and negativity that nothing is going to work. Because once you get into the nothing is going to work, that's where you live, and that's very dangerous. So, gratitude helps us restore perspective, and perspective, when you get perspective, it restores self-trust. And that's what's happening under the hood in the brain. You know, we love science here on the sweet spot. This is science, soul, and success. You know, your mind has a loop in it, it's called rumination. The brain is always attempting to re to protect you by rebroadcasting the worst things in life. It's like a bad movie or the news that's only giving you bad news. The brain has a little section in it that does that. Actually, there are a few structures in the brain that uh work like that to keep you remembering what's wrong. But when you bring gratitude into the picture, when you focus on your strengths, the things that you've used in the past, the lessons you've learned, and look, you've been through many dangers, you've been through many scenarios, you've faced illness, you face financial troubles, you face relationship problems, you face doubt, you face pressure, and you've come through. When you tell your brain and you remember those stories, your brain actually updates your memory. And they call this reconsolidation in neuroscience. Every time you revisit a moment that's positive, like that, your brain rewrites how it's going to live inside of you. And here's the fun part the shift hits your brain's identity centers, your mid uh, your prefrontal cortex, your posterior cingular cortex, your hippocampus. Don't worry about the names. Um, you don't need to know about that. The medial prefrontal cortex, posterior cingular cortex, and hippocampus are your identity centers. What you need to worry about is that I got to practice some gratitude so my brain can take me down the right path. Just know that these are the regions that decide the story you tell yourself. The brain has regions in it that will write a story for you and you will run around telling yourself the story, so you better get in control of it and start being grateful for something so the brain doesn't take over. Okay, you are in charge of your brain, it's not in charge of you. And gratitude helps those regions rewrite the moment with truth instead of fear. That's how self-trust is rooted in your biology and not just bravado. So here's the line from Oprah today: be thankful for what you have, you'll end up having more. And more isn't stuff, it's perspective, it's composure, it's more confidence that you can count on. So before you make a decision today, before you take an action today, I want you to take a deep breath. Do it with me right now. And a slow exhale. Just make the exhale longer than the inhale. It's so good for your lungs. Your lungs are saying thank you right now. Your lungs are grateful right now. For some of us, this is the only deep breath we're gonna take today, alright? Before you make a decision today, my friend, or second guess one, or get into your loop or whatever whatever way you think. Pause and ask, what part of my story proves that I can handle this? What can I tell myself about a story in my past that proves I can handle whatever's in front of me right now? Let gratitude pull that evidence forward, then move from that place. Here's your affirmation. Today I trust myself because gratitude shows me the truth about who I am. Amen? Let's do that again. Today I trust myself because gratitude shows me the truth about who I am. Alright now, thank you so much for listening to Trust Yourself Thursday as we go on this journey on gratitude. Doesn't that sound like something you might want to know a little bit about? Don't you want better focus? I do. Alright, so I'll see you tomorrow. And stay amazing. Please share this if you found it helpful, if you know someone that could benefit from these messages. Love and blessings. I'll see you tomorrow for Finish Strong Friday. Let's go!