If you’ve missed part 1 on perfectionism and part 2 on procrastination, feel free to head back to the previous two blog posts to read those.

But for now let’s talk about paralysis. Because it has a bit of a different edge to procrastination and perfectionism.

Paralysis may be showing up in your life as real avoidance of decision making and action. It may be showing up in your life as feeling overwhelmed and it may show up in your life by allowing other people to make decisions for you and give you direction.

This form of hiding is super hard because when we are paralysed, we don’t make decisions well and so often it’s a very early hurdle that comes before the faffing and fear of procrastination and the hard work of perfection. Either we run from decision-making altogether, or we have too many options and let people decide for us.

Maybe we feel scared to commit to decisions because we know there are so many unknown factors ahead of our decisions or actions and we really want to know how things are going to work out.

Paralysis in our work or life is often about needing to know the right step and if we don’t we go into freeze mode, bypassing our autonomy and usually letting things fall where they fall.

Of course, with indecision and fear and overwhelming options and opinions from others and society’s expectations, we become anxious. We’re afraid to do something wrong and what that might mean for us.

Paralysis isn’t just freezing though – it manifests into other states - feeling lost, confused, dizzy, tired, frustrated, angry, jealous, disappointed, dissatisfied, sad, lonely, or afraid of the future.

When we are in paralysis we sit back and let things happen, or we refuse to take action out of fear. We often blame other things to rationalise our paralysis.

I believe the underbelly of paralysis and indeed the antecdote to it is actually building healthy self-trust.

If paralysis is about fear of doing the wrong thing or being overwhelmed, it seems like we might need to look at what level of trust we really have in our own capacity to make choices, to try, to experiment and have our own backs. Sometimes paralysis can have us falsely believing that our inaction, our shinking and hiding is us keeping control. And paralysis only offers a false sense of control, because we only try to control what we don’t trust.

Glennon Doyle talks a lot about this in her book Untamed. She says: “We weren’t born distrusting and fearing ourselves. That was part of our taming. We were taught to believe that who we are in our natural state is bad and dangerous. They convinced us to be afraid of ourselves. So we do not honor our own bodies, curiosity, hunger, judgment, experience, or ambition. Instead, we lock away our true selves. Women who are best at this disappearing act earn the highest praise: She is so selfless. Can you imagine? The epitome of womanhood is to lose one’s self completely. That is the end goal of every patriarchal culture. Because a very effective way to control women is to convince women to control themselves.”

So if the cure for paralysis is self-trust, how do we do that, how do we cultivate that in a healthy and meaningful way so it’s not just another one of those words that we’re supposed to know what to do with but is actually a bit ambiguous in tangibility?

I feel like the core of self-trust is not actually about trusting yourself to know all the answers, or believing that you will always do the right things. That’s simply not possible or fair for us to expect of ourselves. That layers on all kinds of other stuff that can lead to shame.

The core of self trust for me is about having the conviction or focus that you will be kind and respectful to yourself regardless of the outcome of your efforts.

Self-trust is about believing in the integrity of yourself. When we look at examples of people who are self-trusting, we find that they are curious learners, willing to build their understanding of self and of opinions and experiences through action and seeing what works and what doesn’t for them. They have healthy interdependent relationships, not hyper in their dependency of others and their feedback. They speak with authority that comes from a deep place within but is not arrogant or dismissive.

Self-trust is about taking the posture of having your own back, being compassionate and not being self-punitive when you make mistakes. Because of course if we punish ourselves for making mistakes, our brains start to wire up to tell us we can’t be trusted.

It seems to me that self-trust starts to erode more quickly as we move into adult life – but it’s been chipped away at long before that. We spend most of our childhood and adolescence learning about ourselves through the lens of other peoples praise or criticism, through school and academics and extra curriculars – creating a dependency on that feedback to help us move forward. You’re good at this, keep going. Youre not good, try harder or stop. So when we reach adulthood, no wonder we begin to freeze up when those built in places of feedback are removed and we have to take action on our own. We haven’t been taught to trust our OWN instincts, our OWN desires our OWN roadmap – it’s all been dependent on other people, hinged on their perceptions of us. So we meander or wander and often end up desperately fixated on approval or some semblance of validation from others in order to take action for ourselves.

We can move away from our people pleasing and paralysis by rebuilding our self-trust and deciding to at the very least to commit to being on our own side. Not to win, not to succeed, not to guarantee results with ourselves, but to have our own backs. To be loyal to our desires and dreams.

Often paralysis stems from being on the arguing side of our needs and desires, trying to convince ourselves that we can’t or don’t deserve them. Self trust requires us to be on our own side, rallying for ourselves like we would a really solid, trusting friend.

We won’t do it perfectly, this self-trust thing. We won’t ever not let ourselves down and shrink and play small, forgetting about ourselves; but we can keep making that commitment to be on our own side.

I hope, if you are stuck in paralysis right now, that you feel some comfort from this, knowing that you can walk yourself back to trust, to being on your own side, even when it’s hard.