Trust the Process

Even When It Makes No Sense ...Yet

“Trust the process.”

It sounds wonderful, doesn’t it?

It belongs on a coffee mug. Or perhaps written in beautiful cursive over a picture of a mountain at sunrise.

It sounds slightly less inspiring when you are actually in the process.

When the plan isn’t working. When business is quiet. When an opportunity you were counting on disappears. When life takes an unexpected turn. Or when you’ve made a big decision and find yourself lying awake at 2am wondering whether it was, in fact, a spectacularly bad one.

Suddenly, “trust the process” feels a little less profound.

Because trusting the process is easy when you already know how the story ends.

It’s much harder when you’re standing somewhere in the middle.

The uncomfortable middle

Most of us like certainty.

We like knowing that if we do A, B and C, eventually D will happen.

Business plans are built around it. Budgets are built around it. Five-year plans are definitely built around it.

Life, unfortunately, appears not to have received the memo.

Dwight D. Eisenhower famously said:

“Plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.”

The older I get, the more sense that makes.

We need plans. We need goals. In business, we absolutely need budgets, strategies, systems and some idea of where we are trying to go.

But we also need to accept that somewhere between the beautifully organised spreadsheet and real life, things have a tendency to… improvise.

A client changes direction.

A project takes longer than expected.

A personal situation changes your priorities.

Something you were certain would work doesn’t.

Something you almost didn’t pursue turns into an opportunity.

And occasionally, the carefully considered Plan A lasts approximately three business days.

That doesn’t necessarily mean the plan was wrong.

It means new information arrived.

Trusting the process doesn’t mean doing nothing

This is where I think the phrase can become misleading.

Trusting the process is sometimes interpreted as sitting quietly, thinking positive thoughts and waiting for the universe to sort things out.

I’m not particularly good at that.

And I’m also not convinced that’s how it works.

Trusting the process doesn’t mean blindly believing everything will be fine. It doesn’t mean ignoring problems, staying in situations that aren’t working or continuing down a road simply because you once decided that was where you were going.

Sometimes trusting the process means having the courage to change the process.

There is an enormous difference between giving up because something is difficult and changing direction because you’ve learnt something new.

That applies to business, careers, relationships, parenting and probably most of the big things we navigate in life.

We make decisions based on what we know at the time.

Then we learn more.

And sometimes that new information changes the decision.

That isn’t failure.

That’s growth.

Business has a way of testing the theory

Business has a wonderful way of testing how much you genuinely believe all those inspirational quotes you’ve saved.

It’s very easy to talk about resilience when everything is going well.

Less so when invoices need paying.

When you’re waiting for someone to come back to you.

When you’ve invested time into something that hasn’t produced the result you expected.

When a project changes direction halfway through.

Or when you’ve taken a risk and there’s a slightly uncomfortable stretch between “I’ve made the decision” and “Oh good, it actually worked.”

That stretch can feel very long.

And because we live in a world where we mostly see other people’s finished results, it can also feel as though everyone else has somehow skipped it.

We see the successful business.

The promotion.

The new opportunity.

The finished project.

The beautiful home.

The big announcement.

What we don’t usually see are the months, sometimes years of uncertainty that came before it.

The plans that changed.

The ideas that went nowhere.

The conversations that didn’t lead to anything.

The mistakes.

The doubt.

What on earth are we doing? moments.

Those parts aren’t particularly Instagram-friendly.

But they are often where most of the growth happens.

Not every closed door is a sign

There’s another side to this that I think is important.

Sometimes something not working isn’t the universe redirecting you towards your destiny.

Sometimes it just didn’t work.

Sometimes you made the wrong call.

Sometimes the timing was terrible.

Sometimes someone else made a decision that had absolutely nothing to do with you.

And sometimes you simply got it wrong.

I actually find that strangely comforting.

Because trusting the process doesn’t require us to turn every disappointment into some profound life lesson.

We can acknowledge that something was disappointing, learn whatever there is to learn from it, and move on.

Not everything needs a silver lining.

Sometimes it just needs a next step.

We’re often too close to see the whole picture

One of the hardest things about life is that we tend to judge it while we’re still standing in the middle of it.

A difficult month becomes:

“Nothing is working.”

A slow period in business becomes:

“Maybe this was a mistake.”

One rejection becomes:

“I’m obviously heading in the wrong direction.”

One unexpected change can make us question ten decisions that came before it.

But zoom out six months, a year or five years, and the story can look completely different.

Something that felt like a setback may have forced you to change direction.

A quiet period may have given you the space to build something better.

A job that ended may have pushed you towards work you would never otherwise have considered.

A difficult experience may have taught you exactly what you don’t want, which, surprisingly, can be just as valuable as knowing what you do want.

Of course, we don’t know any of that while it’s happening.

That’s the annoying part.

Hindsight arrives with all the answers and none of the anxiety.

Very helpful.

Perhaps we’re trusting the wrong thing

Maybe trusting the process isn’t really about trusting that everything will work out.

Because sometimes it won’t.

At least, not in the way we imagined.

Maybe it’s about trusting ourselves within the process.

Trusting that we’ll recognise when something needs to change.

That we’ll ask better questions.

That we’ll learn.

That we’ll recover from the decisions that don’t work.

That we’ll take opportunities when they appear.

That we’ll know when to keep going and hopefully develop enough wisdom to know when it’s time to stop.

There’s a quiet confidence in that.

Not:

“Everything will work out exactly as I planned.”

But:

“Whatever happens, I’ll work out what to do next.”

I think that’s a much stronger kind of trust.

You don’t need to see the whole road

We don’t always need to know where something will lead before we begin.

We don’t need a guarantee that the business will succeed before starting it.

We don’t need to know exactly where our career will be in five years.

We don’t need every decision to form part of some perfectly coordinated master plan.

And we certainly don’t need to have our entire lives figured out before taking the next step.

Sometimes we just need enough information to make the best decision we can today.

Then take the next step.

Pay attention.

Adjust.

Take another.

There will probably be detours.

There will definitely be things we didn’t plan for.

And yes, there will occasionally be moments when the entire “process” appears to have gone completely off script.

But perhaps that’s the point.

Trusting the process isn’t believing that everything will work out exactly as we planned.

It’s trusting ourselves enough to know that when it doesn’t, we’ll find our next step.

You don’t need to see the whole road.

You just need enough of it to keep moving.

And maybe, for now, that’s enough.