Love the Process
(Why trust isn't enough)
Last week at the gym, I heard my grad school clinical director.
Not her voice. But her words. Specifically, her favorite phrase:
Trust the process.
It’s not an easy job to corral a crowd of nervous psychologists-to-be. And our cohort was more nervous than most. Other students nicknamed us the “Anxious Sparkly Unicorns” because of how often we worried.1
When our unicorn brigade brought our concerns to Dr. Andrews,2 she would inevitably encourage us by saying, “Trust the process!” Generations of psychologists had developed a training program that worked. If we stuck with it, our rough clinical edges would be smoothed out. Our career paths would become clear. We just had to show up every day and let the process work.
You can trust the process with more than just grad school, of course. At the gym, I heard “Trust the process” from a video about the wrestler Zion Clark3.
Zion was born without legs, and became a champion wrestler and Guinness World Record holder. When interviewed about his success, he attributed it to trusting the process.
He showed up every day.
He put in the work in.
He believed that the same iron and sweat that transformed others would make him strong, too.
There’s great power in trusting the process. But trust is the easy part.
When you trust the process, you sacrifice for the process. The process of becoming a psychologist demands long hours studying and painful tuition payments. The process of becoming strong requires long hours in the gym and painful denial in the cookie aisle.
That’s why we rarely commit to the process, even when we trust it. The sacrifices stack up. The discomfort rises. And we’re faced with a choice.
Do we choose the promise of eventual transformation, or immediate relief?
Most of us choose the easy path most of the time. That makes sense (easy things are easy!) But sometimes, we choose the hard path.
Why? What unlocks the hard road of transformation? Is it based on:
How hard you try?
Your willpower?
How much you want the end result?
Or is the truth…none of the above?
Trying hard relies on willpower. Willpower is a finite resource, and even the strongest wills will be exhausted long before the transformation arrives.
And, let’s be honest. You’ll rarely want something in the far future more than you’ll want an immediate gratification.
Instead, the answer is love4.
Genuine transformation comes when we love the process.
I’d love to be a New York Times bestselling author.
But I don’t love that now, because it hasn’t happened. I can’t love that, in fact. It’s not real, and you can’t love a fantasy.
Getting a comment that my writing has helped someone, on the other hand?
That’s real, and I love that.
Feeling satisfied when a paragraph comes together?
That’s real, and I love that.
Smiling to myself when I put in a weird footnote?
That’s real, and I probably love that more than I should.5
I write because I learned to love the act of writing. I do trust that if I keep writing, it’ll pay off down the road. But it’s love, not trust, that actually gets me to sit down and confront the blank page.
So -
If your goal is to transform yourself, it’s not enough to find a trustworthy process. If you tried and failed at a long-term goal before, you probably trusted the process but you didn’t love the process.
But you’ll find something to love, if you keep searching. Look for something about the process that makes today’s sacrifice feel worth it - today.
That might not feel as noble. That might even require you to go about the process in a less efficient (but more enjoyable6) way.
That’s okay :)
Because when you love the process, you can commit to the process. And when love and commitment meet, magic happens.
The “Unicorns” were because we had a lot of married students in our cohort, which was rare (thus, unicorns.) And then we were sparkly because - well, why not?
She’s a subscriber - hi Glena!
It usually is