Welcome To Trust Yourself Thursday

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Sweet spotters, welcome, welcome home. You're back home here at the sweet spot. We love seeing you walk through the door every Thursday morning, every Thursday afternoon, and every Thursday evening. We are delighted that you're joining us. It's Trust Yourself Thursday here in the Sweet Spot. I'm Dr. Derek Sweet. I'm your teammate. Yes, I'm a board certified psychiatrist. Yes, I work in sports and high performance, but more than that, I'm your teammate. I'm your teammate in the game of life. And sweet spotters, have we not been having an awesome week just unpacking phrases? These wonderful phrases that we just happened to run into, and we unpack them together and we get such insights. I don't know about you, but I'm really enjoying unpacking these wonderful, insightful phrases. Yeah, it's Trust Yourself Thursday, and today I want to give you something to hold on to. Especially if you're in a season where the ground doesn't feel solid beneath you. Because some of you are standing at the edge right now, even as I speak to you. Maybe you're an athlete staring down an injury that has you questioning everything you thought you knew about yourself. Maybe you're in the middle of a really big competition and you're not doing as well as you would like. Who knows? Maybe you're someone who just walked away from a career, or a career just walked away from you, and the identity you wore for decades no longer fits the way it used to. So maybe you're building something, a business, a vision, a life, and there's a gap, a gap between where you are and where you're trying to go. And it feels wider today than it did yesterday. Some of us are grieving. We're grieving a person, a relationship, maybe it's a version of yourself that no longer exists, something that we lost. And the weight of that loss is making it hard to imagine who you're supposed to be on the other side of it. Who do we become now? So wherever you're standing right now, sweet dreamer, wherever you are, this trust yourself Thursday is for us. This is for us. This is for you and me. What is the phrase we're gonna look to today? Well, it's an interesting one. I came across this one on the internet, I'll admit, and there's this cool dude, he said this, he said this, and this is the phrase that stuck with me. Let me fall if I must fall. The person I'm becoming will catch me. Wow. Let me fall if I must fall. The person I'm becoming will catch me. Sweet spotters, we've got to unpack this one today, right? Oh my goodness, I I I can't wait. Like, where is this taking us? Let's sit with that for a second. Let me fall if I must fall. The person I'm becoming will catch me. Have you ever fallen only to realize that you've caught yourself in a better place as a result? Let me fall if I must fall. The person I'm becoming will catch me. At first, it sounds like surrender. But stick with me, sweet spotter, because this is actually one of the most sophisticated acts of self-trust a human being can perform. I guarantee you. Let's start with the fall because we have to go there first. The fall looks different for every person listening to me right now. Every one of us has fallen in our own way, and it's different for each of us. For the athlete, for an athlete, it can be the moment the body says stop. When the mind is screaming, go. Have you been there? It's the surgery, the bench, the season that was lost, the question mark hanging over everything you have worked for. The fall isn't always physical. Sometimes it's the identity beneath the performance. Who am I if I'm not playing? Who am I if I'm not in the game? Who am I if they're not using me? Who am I if I'm not getting phone calls, return texts? Who am I if I have to be alone? Who am I, right? Yeah, for somebody in transition, or the executive who stepped down, the retiree who suddenly has more time than purpose, who's the professional who is pivoted and now is trying to figure out what's going on, what am I gonna do next? Have you ever been there? The fall is the silence where the title and the function used to be. The business card that no longer exists, the calendar that is empty now. Yeah. Suddenly uncomfortably empty. For the builder, the entrepreneur, the dreamer, the person betting on themselves, the fall is usually something like uncertainty. You know, sometimes you have an investment that you've been putting a lot into and it just hasn't paid off yet. Have you ever had that experience of like pouring yourself into something? And it's just not returning it, you know. That's a good one to think about and trust yourself Thursday. Yeah. Sometimes you have a vision for yourself that only you can see, and it's kind of lonely because you're going and you're going and you're rowing and you're rowing your boat, and boy, it feels like such a long journey. The loneliness of being further along in your mind than your results are showing. You know you got this, you know you can do this, but the results just haven't caught up to it yet. And it feels like you're falling, maybe even falling apart. And sometimes you're carrying grief, you're carrying sadness. I know when I lost my dad, that's how I felt, I still feel it. Whether it's a loss of a person, it could be uh a relationship, it could be a season of life, it could be a version of yourself, it could be several things that you loss isn't always a person, it could be loss of a role, a function, a responsibility, something that you used to do, that you were the best at, and somehow you fell out of it. Somehow we fall out of it. We've all been there. Where the fall is about waking up and having to remember all over again that you fell, right? The fall is like the restructuring of an entire world around an absence. We've all had different falls, but they seem to all have the same edge. So this saying on Trust Yourself Thursday that I came across that I wanted to share with you is waiting for us at the bottom of every fall. I'll repeat the saying Let me fall if I must fall. The person I'm becoming will catch me. Here's what the neuroscience of identity tells us about this very moment I'm talking about. Your brain and my brain, it's been beautifully designed and it's wildly protective. It doesn't distinguish well between physical danger and emotional danger. It doesn't distinguish between physical danger and emotional risk. The same threat detector system, our good friend, the amygdala. That threat detection system that kept your ancestors alive in the caves and in the forest, in the wilderness and in the wild, is the same system firing right now in your apartment, in your car, at work, when the ground beneath you has suddenly become uncertain. And you know, sometimes that's what we're dealing with on a day-to-day basis is the level of uncertainty. Your amygdala and mine reads unknown as unsafe. And so, what do we do when we feel unsafe? We grip on, we hold on tighter, we resist, we try to hold on to the old version of ourselves, to what we know works, what made sense, yeah. Because sometimes we it's better to be around what you know and what you don't know. That's where the brain works, yeah. But here's what the research shows. Your identity and my identity can only change if we take action. We cannot let fear paralyze us. We must act, and it's through the willingness to move through the fall rather than navigate around it or try to avoid it, that we will get to the other side. Every time you do something, sweet spotter, the old version of you wouldn't have done. Every time you show up in the uncertainty, instead of running from it, retreating from it, and hiding from it, every time you do that, every time you square your shoulders, you take a deep breath, and you you just look at it, you're laying down something called new neural architecture. They call it neuroplasticity. Your brain has the capacity to lay down new pathways for you. A new map begins to form about who you are. And you discover if you're an athlete that you're more than the sport you're playing. And if you're retired, you find that you've got a bigger playing field than you actually thought. And if you're a builder, you realize that the struggle is not a detour, not at all. It's a new vision taking shape. And if we are grieving, oh, we find that God's grace is sufficient. We slowly, painfully, and beautifully begin to find that our loved one or what we lost is still there, and that we're still capable of becoming, even in the aftermath of such a grave loss, right? You don't think your way into becoming, you move, sweet spotter. You've got to get up, you gotta take action, and you've got to move your way into becoming. I'll say it again. Let me fall if I must fall. Don't try to take away all my pain. Don't try to overcounsel me. Don't try to tell me it's all gonna be okay. Uh it let me fall if I must fall. The person I'm becoming will catch me. Now, this isn't blind faith. This is the most evidence-based thing I think you can do today. The person you're becoming is built in real time through every hard moment you move through, every time you get up, you make breakfast, you take a shower, you get out there, you roll your sleeves up, you take a deep breath. Yeah. Every old identity you release, every old version of yourself you're willing to let soften so that something else can take place, you're on the journey. And it's not a fantasy. You're under construction. We're under construction. Yeah. There's a line from a poet Rumi that I read, and I want to bring it in here because it speaks directly to this moment. Be melting snow. Wash yourself of yourself. I love it, right? Be melting snow. Just wash yourself of yourself. And what he is pointing to is this, sweet spotter. Sometimes becoming becoming requires releasing the old version, not abandoning it, not dismissing it, honoring it, and then letting it give way to what's emerging. Yeah. Absolutely. When you're an athlete, you can honor your competitor and you can discover the leader in you. You're retired, you can honor the career and discover your wisdom. You're a builder, you can honor the struggle and discover the resilience that was always there in you. Oh yeah, you're grieving, the grieving soul honors the love. And slowly on their own timeline, on our own timeline, discover that that love did not leave, it changed form. So the fall and to fall isn't failure. The fall is the melting. And what comes after the melting is not loss. No. What comes after the melting, sweet spotter, is a truer shape. Yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely. Let me fall if I must fall. I trust me. I trust God. The person I'm becoming will catch me. Yeah, it's trust yourself Thursday. We got a little heavy. But I love it. Sometimes we have to do this work. We have to do this work, and we have to trust it. If we're in a free fall right now, we're not gonna hit the ground. There's another saying, I don't want to get into too many sayings because we have a good one today. But look, a bird on a branch doesn't trust the branch. You know what it trusts? It's wings. Absolutely. Because the branch can break, but we can still fly. It's trust yourself Thursday here on the sweet spot, and we're going in. Let us fall if we gotta fall, because the person we're becoming will catch us. The fall is not the end of the story, it's the middle. And the person who catches you, the one being built right now through every brave and uncertain and grief-soaked and hope-filled step you're taking, sweet father. That person has been waiting for you to trust them. Future you is thankful for your courage, your faith, and your ability not to give up and you're not being afraid of the fall. This is the sweet spot. For science, for soul, for success. I'll see you tomorrow. You know what tomorrow is sweet spotter. Oh yeah. It's finished strong Friday. I'll meet you there.