How long should you keep doing something that isn’t showing results?
That’s the real question underneath this phrase, and everything depends on it. Because trust the process is either the wisest thing anybody can say to you, or a way of stopping you from asking a perfectly reasonable question — and the same four words do both jobs equally well.
Start with the word process, because it’s more concrete than we treat it. It’s from the Latin procedere — to go forward. A process is, by definition, a going-forward. Motion toward.
So trust the process means, at root: trust that this is going somewhere.
And the reason anybody ever needs to say it is one thing only. Lag.
Every worthwhile process on earth has a gap between input and visible output. You train for six weeks and see nothing in the mirror. You write for four months and it’s still bad. You’ve been in therapy since March and you’re still the same person having the same argument. You planted something and the ground is still just ground.
That gap is unavoidable. It isn’t a sign of failure; it’s a property of how real change works — biologically, creatively, structurally. Results arrive late, and often all at once, long after the work that produced them.
And trust is precisely what you use to cover the interval. That’s its whole job. Trust is what lets you keep making deposits into an account whose balance you can’t currently see.
So the phrase is pointing at something completely real. Almost everyone who fails at something worthwhile fails inside the lag. Not because they were incapable — because they were doing the right things during the invisible stretch and concluded, reasonably, that nothing was happening.
That’s the honest case for the phrase, and it’s strong.
Now the other half.
The same four words are perfect cover for a process that doesn’t work.
Because notice what trust the process does to a question. Someone says: I’ve been doing this a year and I’m not sure it’s working. And the reply trust the process doesn’t answer that. It reclassifies it. It converts a legitimate inquiry into evidence of insufficient faith — and now the person isn’t just failing to progress, they’re failing to believe properly.
That’s an extremely effective silencing move, and it gets used constantly. By organizations that want your patience. By people selling programs. By anyone who benefits from your continued participation and would rather not be examined.
So we need a test. And I think there’s a good one, in three parts.
First: is there actually a process?
A process is a specified sequence with a mechanism. It has steps, and there’s a reason those steps produce that outcome. If nobody can articulate the mechanism — if the answer to why does this work is essentially it just does — then what you’re being asked to trust isn’t a process. It’s an authority.
And those are different things. Trusting a process is confidence in a causal chain. Trusting an authority is deference to a person. This phrase is often used to convert the second into the first.
Second: can you examine it?
A real process survives inspection. You can ask what the steps are, why they’re in that order, what it should produce and roughly when. Anyone running a genuine process finds those questions normal, because they’ve asked them too.
If asking is treated as betrayal — if the questions themselves are the problem — that’s your answer. Nothing legitimate requires you to stop looking at it.
And third, the practically useful one: what are the leading indicators?
This is the part I’d most want you to take away, because it dissolves most of the difficulty.
The reason people give up during the lag is that they’re watching outcomes, and outcomes are the last thing to arrive. But every real process has intermediate signs — things that move well before the result does.
You can’t see the muscle yet, but the weight on the bar is going up. The novel is still bad, but you’re now bad in more interesting ways than you were in March, and you’re finishing things you’d previously have abandoned. Nothing has changed in the relationship, but the argument that used to run for three days now runs for an afternoon.
Those are leading indicators, and they’re how you tell a process from a holding pattern.
So the question to put to anything you’re waiting on is not am I there yet. It’s: what should be moving by now, before the result appears? And if something should be moving, and it’s been long enough, and nothing is — then saying so isn’t a failure of trust. It’s a correct reading of the instruments.
And here’s what I find most freeing about that. It means trust doesn’t have to be blind. The phrase implies a binary — either you have faith or you don’t — but that’s a false choice. Real trust is held with evidence. It’s what you extend to a process whose leading indicators are moving even though its results haven’t landed.
That isn’t faith. That’s navigation.
And I’d add one more thing, gently. Sometimes the process is perfectly fine and you need something it was never designed to give — encouragement, company, some sign that anyone has noticed. The lag is much harder alone. A great deal of what gets called losing faith in the process is really just somebody having been in the invisible stretch for a very long time with no one to tell about it.
So here’s what I’ll leave you with tonight.
Think of something you’re in the middle of, where the results haven’t come.
And ask the only question that actually helps: what’s the leading indicator? What should be moving by now, before the outcome shows up?
Because if you can name it, and it’s moving, you can stop asking whether to keep going, and get some sleep.
And if you can’t name one at all — then the real question was never whether you trust the process. It’s whether anyone has ever told you what the process is.
0 Comments