Trust
The Word That Rose Above Everything
After a year of deeply listening to people, one word rises above all.
Trust.
Trust in myself. Trust my intuition. Trust in going out on my own.
Trust that time with my aging parents and family was exactly where I needed to be.
Trust my brother would one day come back. Trust letting go when my heart doesn’t want to.
Trust the questions. Trust the quest.
Trust that if I build it, they will come.
Trust that my best role is to be a mirror — so we can see clearly.
Trust that I can hold space at the bottom of the ocean for people, without trying to fix it.
Trust there’s not enough LinkedIn success in the world to mend a broken spirit.
Trust that sadness, defeat, and despair are teachers — and you can find your way out of the dark woods.
Trust that if it was a bad year, it will change. And if it was a good one, it too will change.
Trust in impermanence.
Trust that everything is far more connected than we think.
Trust that a few good people can change the world — and always have.
Trust that I see it, and I know it’s happening.
It’s awake and alive.
I’m awake and alive.
Are you?
Trust you can be.
Trust isn’t a vibe. It’s a practice.
Trust isn’t a vibe. It’s a practice.
Trust is the basis of every relationship—and every business outcome.
And it isn’t something you either “have” or “don’t.” Trust is built—slowly, honestly, and through repetition. It’s what you return to when the noise gets louder than your knowing.
This year, the noise got loud. There were moments when it would have been easier to reach outward for certainty—more opinions, more validation, more proof. But life rarely gives proof on schedule. It gives a choice:
Outsource your knowing…
Or come home to yourself.
Trust The Questions
Trust the questions. Trust the quest.
The leaders I trust most aren’t the ones with the tightest certainty. They’re the ones with the courage to ask better questions—because questions keep us awake. And questions are often the first honest sign of growth: the realization that the old answers don’t fit the new chapter.
Curiosity engages us. The right questions don’t just inform us—they move us.
They keep us following the white rabbit into the hole and through doorways we haven’t seen before.
Not because we’re lost—because we’re alive.
Trust The Discomfort
I have learned a great deal about sitting in discomfort. The urge is to reach for something outside us to ease it—to fix it, explain it, override it, numb it.
But discomfort is the crucible—the in-between state where metal is forged.
It’s in staying with it that we expand our capacity to hold it.
And it’s the same with risk.
The more you take, the more capacity you have to take it.
Not because you become reckless—because you become trustworthy to yourself.
Trust The Build
Trust that if I build it, they will come.
There’s a particular vulnerability in building without guaranteed demand—creating before you’re validated, continuing when the metrics are quiet.
There’s a particular vulnerability in building in public with eyes on you.
Because you already know the truth: not everyone is for you—and you’re not for everybody.
And still, you build.
You build with your name on it.
You build without consensus.
You build while people project, applaud, critique, misunderstand.
That’s the price of authenticity.
And it’s also the path to the right people finding you.
Trust what can’t be measured
Trust there’s not enough LinkedIn success in the world to mend a broken spirit.
No amount of external validation repairs an internal fracture. Success can be real… and still not be medicine. Because what heals isn’t proof.
It’s reconnection.
To self. To values. To what’s actually true.
Trust The Teachers You Didn’t Want
Trust that sadness, defeat, and despair are teachers — and you can find your way out of the dark woods.
There are emotions we treat like liabilities. But some emotions are messages.
Sadness can be love with no container to hold it.
Defeat can be the end of an illusion.
Despair can be the moment the old identity stops working.
Dark woods are real. But you don’t exit the woods by sprinting.
You exit by taking the next honest step.
And then another.
Trust that you can.
It’s awake and alive
It’s awake and alive.
I’m awake and alive.
Are you?
If you want a small practice to carry into the new year:
Before you open your inbox tomorrow, ask yourself:
What do I know to be true that I haven’t been trusting?
Write it down.
Don’t analyze it.
Don’t justify it.
Just observe it.
Trust begins there: with acknowledging what’s already true.
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