“At first, it may feel like difficult circumstances are breaking you down or pulling you away from what’s meant for you. In reality, they are pushing you to grow into the version that can actually hold what’s coming.”

This is the daily motivational message that landed in my inbox at just the right time, yet again. It says that you have to trust that some things need time to become what they’re meant to be. This kind of trust is what the late co-founder of Apple, Steve Jobs, spoke about in the commencement speech he delivered at Stanford University in 2005.

He didn’t talk about productivity plans, product launches or profits. No, he spoke about trusting that life will make sense in hindsight. “You can’t connect the dots looking forward,” Steve said. “You can only connect them looking backward. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something – your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever.”

In her book, ‘Steering by starlight’, Martha Beck gives readers an exercise where you basically have to reverse the story-telling order of your life, so that the mental momentum runs from future to past.

Try following your chain of life events backward until you can think of one piece of “bad luck” that helped wonderful things to come into your life. What is the best thing in your life today? Say it is hosting your own radio show. How is it that you ended up on radio?

You were born with dyslexia and couldn’t keep up at school. So, you compensated by constant disruptive behaviour, which was the ideal breeding ground for thinking on your feet and developing a wicked sense of humour. These proved to be just the right characteristics for hosting your own radio show, which is the favourite thing in your life today.

Now tell this story of your favourite thing from a backwards perspective. Instead of saying, “I was born with dyslexia, so I flunked out of school and went into radio,” you can say: “Because I was destined to be in radio, I was born with dyslexia and hated school.”

As Eagles guitarist, Joe Walsh, said: “As you live your life, it appears to be anarchy and chaos, and random events smashing into each other and causing this situation or that situation, and it’s overwhelming, and it just looks like, ‘What in the world is going on?’ And later, when you look back at it, it looks like a finely crafted novel.

That’s why it’s so important to trust that things happen for you, not to you. So, don’t get paralyzed trying to predict every outcome, Marcel Schwantes says. Instead, believe that what you’re doing today – however messy or uncertain – is shaping who you’ll become and what you’ll build. You still have to make the call, send the e-mail, start the thing – trusting that it’s adding up to something meaningful, even if it doesn’t look like it yet.

Marcel writes that when Steve Jobs said, “You can’t connect the dots looking forward,” he wasn’t saying “be reckless”. What he was really saying is that you’re not going to have all the answers up front. You won’t always see the full plan or know where every decision is leading.

You have to keep taking baby steps, even though the path is not linear. Raynor Winn says that we’re caught in an endless cycle of ‘what if’, where all we can do is take the next step and see where that leads.

Trusting the process means that you’re not desperately trying to control the outcome. It means that no matter what life throws at you, you’ll trust that you’ll grow through even the most painful circumstances.

Maybe it’s only once you’ve grown through the lessons you’ve learned, that you’ll be ready to fulfil your purpose. Maybe it’s all a matter of timing. Maybe what once felt overwhelming will return to you when you’re ready to receive it as a gift that suits the person you’ve become.

“Everything happens for a reason, whether it’s something you’re excited about or not,” Brittany Burguner writes. “It’s all for a purpose in the big picture. Knowing this, relax . . . Sometimes certain events are necessary for a grander opportunity to arise.”
Just trust the process, girlfriend. – Angie Kleijn