With verse 6, the most beloved passage in Proverbs.
Quick answer
Put your full weight on the LORD, not on your own ability to figure life out. Trust here is not a feeling but a transfer of weight: what you lean on is what you are trusting.
Read the whole unit
The father's lecture on trusting the LORD is built with unusual symmetry: six pairs of verses, each an instruction followed by its outcome. Keep the teaching, and find long life (vv. 1–2). Bind mercy and truth to yourself, and find favor (vv. 3–4). Trust the LORD, and find straight paths (vv. 5–6). Fear the LORD instead of trusting yourself, and find health (vv. 7–8). Honor the LORD with your possessions, and find full barns (vv. 9–10). And then the pair nobody frames for the wall: do not despise the LORD's discipline, because it is the treatment sons receive from a Father who delights in them (vv. 11–12). That last pair is not an afterthought; it is the lecture's safety rail. Five pairs of blessing language could curdle into a formula, as if trust and generosity were coins for a vending machine. The sixth pair breaks the machine: the life of trust includes correction, and correction is not the system failing you. It is the Father loving you. The whole lecture describes how life tends to go inside a relationship with the LORD; it observes the grain of the world under God's active government. It does not sign contracts, and it never asks the reader to earn what the relationship already holds.
What this verse contributes
Verses 5–6 form the center pair of the lecture's six, and the center is where the weight sits. Leaning is what you do with a wall or a crutch: you commit your weight and find out what holds, and the father's claim is that your own understanding, real as it is, was never rated for that load. Trust in the LORD is not the abandonment of thinking; it is the relocation of dependence. The wise still plan, weigh, and decide, this very book insists on it, but as people whose security hangs somewhere sturdier than their own judgment.
Related: Proverbs 28:26 · Jeremiah 17:5–8
New King James Version®, Copyright © 1982, Thomas Nelson. All rights reserved. Full copyright information. Scripture provided by API.Bible.
Go Deeper
If this verse has been used to put weight on you that it was never carrying, ask about it directly.