I’ve never really liked the concept of “trusting the process.”
Because, if I’m honest with myself, I never wanted a process to begin with. I prefer my efforts to yield the intended outcome…every time and without delay.
But that’s not how it works, is it?
What actually happens is that you work hard → experience challenges or setbacks → keep trying → overcome more obstacles → and then, eventually the idea becomes what it wanted to become all along.
And it's not even the trust part of this concept that bothers me. It's the idea of trusting some ambiguous series of events that take place over some undetermined period of time. Why would I want to trust that??
I know I’m not the only person who feels this way. This tension — the uncertainty and waiting, the quiet loop of "is this working?" — is something I hear from almost every founder or creator in our community. People who’ve done the inner work, who know what they want, and who’ve taken brave, meaningful steps toward it. And still, there's that persistent hum of doubt that asks: Will this actually happen?
Fortunately for us all, I’ve had a perspective shift that’s helped me make peace with this concept, and I’d like to share it with you. It’s simple…
Don’t trust the process. Try trusting your vision instead.
What "Trust the Process" Has Come to Mean
Somewhere along the way, it seems like trusting the process became code for sit back, wait, and hope.
Hope that things will figure themselves out. Hope that if you just stay patient enough, the right door will open without you having to do much to find it. It's a passive posture dressed up in inspirational language — and for builders, leaders, and founders, that interpretation can actually stall you.
I've spent years studying what it actually looks like when people build bodies of work that light them up, and those who move through uncertainty with the most grace aren’t the ones who surrendered to the process. They're the ones who decided to trust their vision, well before the steps were clear.
That's a different thing entirely.
The Vision Will Come to Pass
When I was a professional dancer, I was in a constant rush to “make it” — whatever that means. "I was just so in a rush to get somewhere, but I don't know where," I shared during an episode of the Profits in Pajamas podcast. "My friends were booking jobs with major artists, and I'm like, okay, let me double down and go harder."
That mindset led to working overnight shifts, racing to auditions without rest, and pushing past every limit my body and spirit had. Until I burned out to the point that it took over a month just to feel like myself again.
What I didn’t understand then was that I wasn't really trusting a process. I was scrambling to control one, and those are fundamentally different things.
I’ve documented the paths of founders and creators over the past few years, and here's what I’ve learned since then: the vision always precedes the path. Always. The professionals I've profiled trusted that the vision they carried was real, even when no one else saw it yet or when the income wasn't there. And because they believed it was real, they kept building it faithfully (without scrambling).
And that gap between vision and reality is where most people either stay stuck or grow. The difference is what you choose to trust while you're in it. "No heart has ever suffered when it goes in search of its dreams, because every second of the search is a second's encounter with God and with eternity,” Paulo Coelho beautifully wrote in The Alchemist. The search itself is sacred, and the in-between isn't wasted time.
How to Trust Your Vision
Sure, choosing to trust that your vision will come to pass sounds easy enough, but how do you do that? Here's what it looks like in practice.
1. Slow down enough to hear yourself. The inner voice that knows exactly what you need to do next often comes as a whisper, but burnout, constant noise, and comparison culture drown it out. Create the conditions to actually hear it.
2. Stop collecting roadmaps, and start building your own. There's immense value in learning from others' experiences, but the goal isn't to copy someone else's path. It's to remix their wisdom into something that fits who you are. Your Personal Legend, as Coelho calls it, can only be found by going within.
3. Name the vision clearly, then let the steps arrive. The anxiety we feel in transition usually isn't about the destination. It's about not being able to see the whole staircase at once. But you don't need the whole staircase. You need to know where you're going, and then take the next visible step.
The Vision Is Already Real
Coelho writes that the universe conspires to make our dreams come true when we seek them fully. I've seen this play out in interview after interview, and even in my own life, too — professionals stayed committed to a vision that looked unreasonable from the outside, only to find, down the line, that they were exactly where they were always meant to be.
For me, in past seasons I wanted results and got a process instead, but today I'm choosing faith in the vision itself. Not blind faith, but the kind of faith that moves, builds, and keeps showing up to the work even when the map hasn't fully materialized.
Because the vision will absolutely come to pass when you trust yourself enough to keep becoming.
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