by Oli Anderson, Transformational Coach for Realness
Trusting God / Life / Whatever is Always the Way Forward so Why Doesn’t it Work for Everybody?
There’s an idea you’ll hear all over the place once you start dipping your toes into some of the more ‘spiritual‘ realms of self-help and personal growth.
It usually goes along the lines of:
“Just trust God“.
Or:
“Throw it out to the Universe“.
Or:
“Let go and let life handle it“.
It sounds simple enough and maybe even pretty comforting – as though there’s some invisible safety net beneath you just waiting for you to relax enough to fall into it and have all your dreams come true.
Here’s the uncomfortable truth, though:
A lot of people try this and then…nothing happens – they end up being just as ‘stuck’ as they’ve always been.
They say the prayers, repeat the affirmations, write in the gratitude journal, and tell themselves they’re “letting go” but end up with the same old patterns, same old frustrations, and same sense that they’re missing something because life never quite ‘clicks’.
So what’s going on? Why does “trusting God” seem to transform some people’s lives… while leaving others exactly where they started?
This article will break it down for you – not from theory, but from experience.
Let’s dig a little deeper:
Why Trusting 'God' Doesn't Work for You: What We Cover in This Article
- Trusting God / Life / Whatever is Always the Way Forward so Why Doesn’t it Work for Everybody?
- I Tried to Control Everything…and Got Nowhere
- The Real Problem: Control Was a Symptom, Not the Cause
- The Turning Point: Learning to Do Nothing
- What Happens When You Stop Forcing Life
- So Why Doesn’t “Trusting God” Work for Some People?
- The “Cosmic Vending Machine” Illusion
- Why Trusting the Projection Never Works
- Real Trust Isn’t Conditional
- Projection vs Truth
- How to Shift Into Real Trust
- 1. Regulate: Slow Down Your System
- 2. Integrate: Deal With Your Emotional “Stuff”
- 3. Accelerate: Take Real Action (and Let Go of the Rest)
- The Final Word: Trusting God & Staying REAL
I Tried to Control Everything…and Got Nowhere
There was a time in my life where I was trying to control absolutely everything that I possible could – my future, my outcomes, how people perceived me, and even how I allowed myself to feel internally.
I thought that if I could just manage things well enough, I’d finally feel okay.
Spoiler: it didn’t work.
In fact, the harder I tried to control things, the worse everything seemed to get because I just ended up being constantly tense, constantly overthinking, and constantly trying to force life into a shape that felt ‘safe’ instead of REAL.
Perhaps the most insane part of living like this was that it I wasn’t even getting any results:
It was like banging my head against a brick wall – over and over again – thinking that this next attempt would somehow be the one that broke through.
It never did, though, and I always just ended up back at square one instead of where I wanted and needed to actually be.
The Real Problem: Control Was a Symptom, Not the Cause
Eventually, I had to get REAL with myself and to start embracing the truth:
The issue wasn’t that life was ‘against’ me, that I needed a better strategy, or even that I wasn’t trying hard enough (if anything, I was trying TOO hard and forcing life instead of flowing with it).
The issue was this:
I had unresolved shame and that shame was quietly running the show.
Everything I was doing – every attempt to control, ‘fix’, manage, optimise, or whatever else – was actually an attempt to avoid triggering that shame which meant that I wasn’t living, I was defending.
When you’re in this kind of a state, you don’t act from truth – you react from fear because you want to protect the ego which isn’t the truth about you – it’s just a reactive pattern built on top of unresolved emotional pain.
The Turning Point: Learning to Do Nothing
Eventually, I got tired of living like this – not just physically and mentally but existentially:
I was tired of forcing, tired of trying, and tired of getting nowhere, and so I did something pretty radical (for that version of ‘Me’, anyway):
I stopped and learned to DO NOTHING as much as I could.
Instead of being a human doing – constantly acting for the sake of acting and trying to outrun that shame – I trained myself to do nothing so I could being a human BEING again.
I’m not talking about laziness or resistance (I was still taking the real action that I new made sense because it came from my realness, not ego) – just stopping the compulsive need to interfere with everything.
That’s when things started to get interesting:
What Happens When You Stop Forcing Life
When I stopped trying to control everything, I started to notice things more clearly:
I became more grounded, more present, less reactive and – perhaps ironically – things actually started working out.
This wasn’t because I was doing more (to state the obvious seeing as my strategy was to DO NOTHING or as little as possible) but because I was finally doing what was actually mine to do instead of whatever my fear told me to do.
Life began to flow again – not perfectly or magically but in a way that felt REAL.
The end result of this is that all these years later, my life is pretty awesome – not because everything goes my way but because I’m no longer at war with reality.
So Why Doesn’t “Trusting God” Work for Some People?
So here’s the thing:
A lot of people say they “trust God” or “trust the Universe” or [“something similar”]… but nothing ever changes for them.
From what I’ve seen (and lived), there are two main reasons for this that I wanna share with you:
1. They Don’t Actually Take Action
Let’s start with the obvious one which is that some people tend to think that “trust” means:
- Sitting back
- Doing nothing
- Waiting for life to ‘fix’ everything for them
This is what I call spiritual bullshit because it’s just the ego in disguise – the illusion of total control and getting whatever we want whenever we want it without doing anything.
What’s really happening when we filter the idea of “trust” through the ego like this is that we’re attempting to avoid discomfort, risk, and actual growth.
To be clear, then, real trust doesn’t mean you never act:
It means you take the real action that’s yours to take and forget about doing anything else.
There’s a difference between:
- Forcing outcomes (ego)
- Avoiding action (also ego)
- Taking aligned action (truth)
Trust lives in that third space where you meet life on its own terms and work with it to grow through whatever comes your way.
2. They’re Not Trusting ‘God’ / Life / Whatever… They’re Trusting a Projection
This is the deeper and more important reason that can help you to improve your relationship with life in a meaningful way:
Most people who turn to “trust” do so because something in their life isn’t working.
For example:
They feel the Void.
They’re confused and lack direction.
They’re in pain.
They have unmet emotional and material needs.
Instead of resolving those things directly, they project them outward into an idea of what ‘God’ (or whatever) ‘should’ be to meet all these needs.
This causes them to trap themselves because:
They put their trust in the projection they created rather than in the truth itself.
The “Cosmic Vending Machine” Illusion
Normally, this projection ends up unfolding like this:
They create an idea of “God” or “the Universe” that functions like a kind of magical cosmic vending machine where if they press the right buttons (performative prayer, affirmation, gratitude etc.), look like they ‘trust’ with their external behaviour, follow the rules then – eventually – they might get what they want.
This might sound pretty harmless but here’s the problem:
The “God” they’re trusting isn’t real – it’s just a projection of their fragmented relationship with their unmet needs, emotional wounds, and unconscious expectations.
Why Trusting the Projection Never Works
At first, this projection can feel ‘good’ because it brings hope, creates optimism, and makes it feel like the universe is finally on your side.
Unfortunately, as time passes, reality kicks in (because what’s real is always real):
Perhaps something ‘bad’ happens, things don’t go as expected or longed for, and the great cosmic vending machine doesn’t deliver what you thought you’d get when you started pressing the buttons.
This just leads to frustration, disappointment, and even anger at ‘God’.
Here’s the truth, though:
You can’t be angry with reality itself (for example, you wouldn’t be angry at the sky for being blue) because reality just is what it is.
All you can get angry at is the projection because the projection can never meet your expectations for one very simple reason:
It can only give you what you already have.
If your inner world is built on unresolved shame, fear, and unmet needs, then that’s what gets reflected back – not because life is punishing you but because you’re not actually engaging with life:
You’re engaging with your own distortion of it whilst telling yourself that the distortion will free you (when it’s actually the only thing keeping you ‘trapped’).
Real Trust Isn’t Conditional
One of the biggest shifts I had to make that really helped me was this:
Trust doesn’t mean you only trust when things are going well.
That’s not trust – it’s preference because REAL (actual) trust means that:
- You trust when things feel ‘good’.
- You trust when things feel ‘bad’.
Because you understand that both are part of the same process of becoming more real, more whole, and more aligned with the TRUTH.
Projection vs Truth
Here are simple differences in how we show up when we’re either aligned with projection or truth:
Projection says:
- “Life should go this way”.
- “I need this [thing] to be okay”.
- “If this doesn’t happen in a certain way and by a certain time, then something’s wrong”.
- “This is what’s happening”.
Truth ASKS:
- “What’s happening here?”
- “What is life teaching me here?”
- “What is being revealed here?”
- “What’s mine to do here?”
Projection resists reality by forcing itself upon it; truth works with it by learning from it moment-to moment.
The key is in understanding a simple truth about life:
You can only truly trust when your trust is placed in reality itself and not in your ideas of how reality ‘should’ be.
How to Shift Into Real Trust
So how do you actually make all of this practical so that you can shift into real trust and flow in life:
How do you stop projecting and start trusting in a way that actually works?
From my experience, it comes down to three things:
1. Regulate
2. Integrate
3. Accelerate
Let’s check each one out quickly:
1. Regulate: Slow Down Your System
If you’re constantly rushing, overthinking, and reacting then you’re not trusting – you’re surviving.
This means that your nervous system is in a state of urgency, trying to control outcomes to feel safe and so the first step is simple (but not easy):
Slow down.
- Breathe more deeply (especially through your nose).
- Spend time in stillness.
- Stop acting on every impulse and pause before you act.
When your system calms down, you stop trying to force life and so you can become patient which just means you can ride through uncertainty and work on life’s timeline – not your ego’s timeline.
2. Integrate: Deal With Your Emotional “Stuff”
If you have unresolved emotional wounds (especially shame), they will just end up distorting your perceptions, creating projections, and by extension driving your behaviour in an unreal way.
Instead of bypassing your emotions by putting your “trust” in your own projections, then, a more real approach is to finally FACE THEM:
- Feel what you’ve been avoiding.
- Question the beliefs you’ve inherited.
- Stop running from your own shadow self.
As you integrate these ‘parts’ of yourself then projection starts to dissolve and so reality becomes clearer (and you can put your trust in that instead).
If you want to go deeper into trusting yourself and life and finding realness then check out my book Trust: A Manual in Becoming the Void, Building Flow, and Finding Peace.
3. Accelerate: Take Real Action (and Let Go of the Rest)
Once you’re more regulated and integrated then you can finally act from truth instead of fear.
What this basically means is that you learn to:
Do your best and let go of the rest.
You can finally take the actions that are actually yours to take, stop trying to control outcomes you can’t control, and stay present in the process
This is where life starts to flow in the way it does in reality- not because you’ve “figured it all out” (that’s ego) but because you’ve stopped interfering with what’s already working.
The Final Word: Trusting God & Staying REAL
If “trusting God” (etc) hasn’t worked for you, it doesn’t mean trust itself is a flawed strategy – it means one of two things:
- You’re not taking real action.
- You’re trusting a projection, not reality.
The shift is simple in theory and it goes like this:
Stop trying to control everything, stop outsourcing your power to a projection, and start engaging with reality as it actually is.
In the end, the bottom line is that God, truth, reality – or whatever else you wanna call it – isn’t something you manipulate but something you align with.
This alignment doesn’t come from doing more – it comes from becoming more REAL.
If you take anything from this article, then let it be this:
Trust isn’t about getting what you want; it’s about becoming someone who can meet life fully whatever it brings.
That’s where the real results are and where the real freedom is and where life actually starts to ‘work’.
Stay real out there,
P.S. If you’re ready to start growing into your realness so you can build more flow in life then book a free coaching session with me and I’ll help you start taking real action.
Trust: A Manual for Becoming the Void, Building Flow, and Finding Peace is a book about learning to return to your realness by cultivating trust in yourself and trust in life.
It contains practical exercises and dedicated meditations (Transformational Bridges) to take you DEEP in knowing yourself and life.
This book will answer many of the questions you have growing REAL and flowing towards wholeness. It covers everything from shame to addiction to the unconscious mind and synchronicity (and way more).
Personal Revolutions: A Short Course in Realness is a book designed to help you look at your life from the inside-out so that you can stop holding yourself back and go get what you really want.
It contains 166 practical ‘Revolutions’ for awareness and over 8,000 Self-Guidance Questions for you to uncover new insight about yourself, the world, and reality that you can translate into action and start building your real life on the realest possible foundation.
Shadow Life is an exploration of the human shadow and the hidden side of our personalities. It looks at the masks we wear, where these masks come from, and how we can take them off.
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The Flow Builder Journal has everything you need to make the next 21-weeks of your life a turning point.
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