Love and blessings, beautiful souls. Good morning. Good morning. How are you doing? This is the sweet spot, and we're happy you're here. Good afternoon, by the way. If you're listening in the afternoon, and if it's evening, you know what I'm gonna tell you. Good evening or good night. Whatever it is, it's all good. We're gonna make it good. We're in the sweet spot. When we get into the sweet spot, we start being positive, we start thinking positively, and we start exuding a good vibe so that we can benefit from it and ride it all the way through. This week we've been doing a series called The Sealing You Don't See. Talking about beliefs. This episode is entitled You Trust Yourself until the outcome isn't familiar. And then what? I'm Dr. Derek Sweet. As you know, I'm a board-certified psychiatrist, a performance psychiatrist who works with athletes, executives, first responders, and people who make decisions when the ground isn't steady beneath them. And as always, I'm your fellow traveler as well. Sitting with you at the coffee table of life, naming what actually shows up when certainty disappears. Life is full of tricks, isn't it? It's full of surprises, it's full of twists and turns. Sometimes these twists and turns are super positive, and they're the most amazing, beautiful moments you could ever want. And then, out of nowhere, life can deal us a blow. It can hit us with something that we just did not expect. And you know what happens in those moments? The ceiling you don't see. The very title of this series. The beliefs you hold. That's when they get exposed. So my whole talk this week is about nurturing the right beliefs, making sure you examine your beliefs because that's what's going to be guiding you, girding you up, and helping you grind if you have to through some of the challenges that life always puts in front of us. Let's place today in the arc of the week, shall we? On Monday, we said you don't see the ceiling until pressure reveals it. That's true. A lot of times when life is comfortable, we feel no ceiling. On Tuesday, we learned that effort doesn't break ceilings. You can try all you want. If you have the wrong belief or a limiting belief, it's just going to be exhausting. You're just going to keep trying and trying. And that hidden, invisible ceiling that you're not seeing because you've never looked at the beliefs that you're holding, or that the other person is holding for that matter. And you keep trying harder and you're not getting anywhere, you're just exhausted because effort alone doesn't break the ceilings. Beliefs do. So yesterday we clarified that confidence comes and goes. We said that. But belief is what decides how far you perform when the moment is stressing you or stretching you. It's about the beliefs. Today on Trust Yourself Thursday, we connect the dots because trust and belief are not the same thing, but they are inseparable. And here's the quiet truth: you don't stop trusting yourself. You trust, your trust narrows to what your beliefs allow you to see and believe. So you don't stop trusting yourself. Your trust just narrows to what you believe. What you believe. Most people say I trust myself, and they do, as long as the outcome is familiar, as long as the outcome is predictable, as long as the outcome doesn't threaten their identity, their status, or their safety. But let me tell you, when the outcome becomes unfamiliar, a new role, a harder level, an unpredictable happening, a bigger responsibility, a risk with no guarantees, believe me, that trust doesn't disappear. It just sort of contracts and shrinks. And that contraction isn't always fear, it's just belief setting its boundary. Let me make that more concrete. Someone might trust themselves to succeed, right? But not to fail and recover. Let me say that again. You might trust yourself to succeed, but you don't know anything about trusting yourself to fail and recover because you don't have a belief like that. But you have to start believing that you can fail and recover too, because life is gonna offer you failures. Sometimes an athlete or performer can trust themselves to perform, but not to adapt when the plan breaks, when things don't go their way. They trust themselves when the feedback is positive, but not when they're misunderstood or they're exposed or things aren't gonna work out the way they planned. And that's really not a lack of self-trust on their part. It's just the belief ceiling around what they believe they can handle and not handle. Lots of times we've never thought of believing in ourselves as resilient. You see, we believe ourselves to be strong, but we don't believe ourselves to be able to fall down seven and get up eight times. We don't believe in ourselves as being able to take a hit and survive that and let it go. And that's a kind of a belief pattern we want to develop. Artists have named this long before psychology did. Yeah. The writer Anais Nin put it this way: we don't see things as they are, we see them as we are. And that applies directly to trust. You don't trust according to reality, you trust according to belief. Oh, absolutely you do. We all do. And the ancient wisdom is very clear on this connection. In the message Bible, it says in Proverbs, trust God from the bottom of your heart. Don't try to figure everything on your own. Listen for God's voice in everything you do, everywhere you go. And the KJV grounds this. Trust in the Lord with all thine heart, and lean not onto thine own understanding. Notice what the ancient wisdom is trying to communicate to us here. Not effort, not confidence. What you lean on when your outcomes are unclear, when it's uncertain, when you're not sure, is that your trust follows your belief. Because, see, if your belief says I can't survive uncertainty, then trust is going to collapse. If your belief says I can't recover from mistakes, well, then trust is going to shrink and contract. If belief says, well, you know what, I need to I need control in order to be safe, trust becomes conditional. And that's an issue. You see how trust and belief are connected? And the science helps us understand it even better. Cognitive and social psychology. We know that trust is the context-dependent scenario. The brain always asks one core question when it faces uncertainty. Your brain and my brain, it'll do the same thing. Can I survive this? That's the question it's asking. Is this survivable? Our brains are designed to help us survive. Half the issues we're facing in life with other people is because they're trying to survive and we're trying to survive, and we're just all doing it the best way we know how. If belief says yes, you can survive, the nervous system stays calm, it stays regulated. And your decisions become flexible, you're you begin to be more balanced. But if the belief inside of you says no, trust gives way to control, avoidance, or overthinking. One of those three. You'll either try to control it, avoid it, or you'll overthink it. And boy, this happens in the performance world on stage. It can happen on the field, on the ice, on it can happen anywhere. So you want to ask yourself honestly, where do I say I trust myself? But only if the outcome is to what I want, only if the outcome stays familiar. Where does my trust end when uncertainty begins? Because that's not really trust. And it's not a flaw, it's just information. That's just your ceiling. Remember, what's the title of this whole series? This is the series of the ceiling that you just don't see. And your trust is tied into whatever you believe. Yeah. Trust doesn't fail first, belief fails, and then trust kind of follows. So today, don't force trust, don't talk yourself into being brave. Just notice what outcome your trust is depending on. Reflect on it. And I want you to just appreciate with me the connection between what you say you trust and what you believe. This whole week is about the power of belief. We just change it into the ceiling that you cannot see. Because belief is not only what you kind of hope for and wish for and what you think and you hope is true, belief is also what's going to limit you if you don't have the right ones. You've been listening to the sweet spot here. It is Trust Yourself Thursday. Tomorrow is Finish Strong Friday. And we're going to talk about how fatigue exposes belief even more clearly. And why you'll see why ceilings show up late, not early. They never show up early, they always show up after the pressure rises. So if today helped you, my friend, if it helped you to see yourself clearly instead of judging yourself, please subscribe. It's absolutely free to subscribe to the sweet spot. And if you know someone facing an unfamiliar decision right now or in dealing with some trust issue, share this with them. If you know somebody who needs to trust the process more, trust themselves more, believe more. Now you know something, sweet spotter. You're a sweet spotter right now, okay? You can spot belief in action underneath somebody's language, underneath their behaviors. What do they believe? All right now, trust is not about certainty, it's about what you believe, what you believe you can handle when certainty disappears. All right now. This is Dr. Derek Sweet. You've been listening to the sweet spot, beautiful souls. I'll see you tomorrow. And we rock and roll.