How to Build Radical Self-Trust and Overcome Self-Doubt

Trusting yourself can be one of the hardest things to do, especially when the world keeps telling you otherwise. But the journey to radical self-trust is the key to true freedom.

This show is for women who’ve been labeled, misdiagnosed, or misunderstood. Whether you have a diagnosis or just know deep down that you experience life differently, this is your space to stop fixing yourself and start trusting who you already are. My name is Amanda Hess. Let’s go.

Hey, hey, my friend. Today we’re going to talk about the importance of self-trust when it comes to healing and growth. And I have really found in my coaching career that one of the hardest things women need to learn is how to trust themselves.

It is such an essential skill, and it is one that we don’t even necessarily look at as a skill. What I will tell you is that a lot of the times, the women that I am working with are not even aware that self-trust isn’t there. And then when they do become aware, they become very judgmental of themselves because they feel like it is somehow a defect that they don’t trust themselves.

And I just want to abolish that right away. Because for anybody listening to this podcast, the truth is, the reason why you don’t trust yourself is because of years of conditioning. You have been conditioned not to trust yourself.

And if you think about it from the standpoint of if you had been one of those children that was taken away from your family as a young child, and then you were raised in some other family to have these wild beliefs, right? We’ve all heard those stories of children that have been removed from the home or women that have been kidnapped and then they have been abused and conditioned by their captor, that those things happen in the world.

And I don’t say that to freak you out. You don’t have to search that up. But we all know about it. And I especially see this in women who have been in an abusive relationship, right?

When women are in an abusive relationship, or people, I could say, what happens is we do become conditioned to survive in that environment. And that’s how I really look at it. You know, when people say, why doesn’t she just leave? Well, because she’s been conditioned to survive in that environment. Her body and her nervous system has been trained to react in a certain way to try and create safety inside of an environment where there is no safety.

And so when you look at yourself, whether or not you come from an abused situation or not, the reality is that you have been conditioned. And when we have been conditioned, there are beliefs that are kind of hard-baked into us. And then we find ourselves in that situation of, how do I unbake it, right? How do I create different thoughts and different beliefs?

And the first thing I find to be the most useful to look at is just to understand that the reason why you don’t trust yourself isn’t your fault. It’s just not your fault. You didn’t create it. You don’t lack motivation, you don’t lack confidence. You don’t lack. There’s nothing going wrong with you.

And this is completely a solvable problem. This is 100% figureoutable. This is something that we can start to build and create, but not if we try to shame ourselves. Not if we say, “I shouldn’t be like this.” Not if we decide that we should have been stronger or better, or that there’s something deficient in us because we’re whatever age we are and we’re in whatever stage of our life we’re in, and therefore, we should know better or should have known better or shouldn’t be reacting in this way.

It’s just natural to react in the way that you’ve been conditioned to react. And so when we look at changing behavior, when we look at changing our experience of ourselves, when we look at things like, hey, I want to stop people-pleasing. I want to set boundaries. I want to be able to advocate for what I want. I want to be able to go and do hard and scary things and not completely shut down or freak out. I want to be able to keep moving forward and not find myself in bed in a shame spiral.

When we find ourselves in that situation, it can be easy to judge ourselves and say, “Oh, well, clearly there’s something wrong with me and there’s something lacking in me.” Whereas I look at it and go, there’s just a very key missing piece here where you don’t trust yourself. And it’s hard to trust yourself when you’re always beating yourself up, when you are perpetually judging yourself, when you are going in at yourself, when you are cutting yourself down. And we do it, and it is automatic. So then what is the solution? How do we fix it?

I always like to start at the feelings level. I believe that this is a feelings problem. And what I mean is that when we experience an emotion that feels too much, too scary, too hard, the first thing we’re going to do is look outwards. Who has the solution? Who has the answer? What if I’m wrong? What if it’s my fault? That’s how we’re going to be.

So I like to be able to first of all, let’s just look at what are the emotions that you normally experience on a day-to-day basis? Is it doubt? Is it fear? Is it frustration? Is it overwhelm? What is the emotion that you’re experiencing? And the most common ones that I see are doubt, fear, overwhelm, and frustration. I would say they’re by far the most common. And so when we experience those emotions, we want to look at what do you do next? What do you do next when those emotions come up for you?

And what I will tell you is you first of all need to acknowledge the emotion, have an understanding of it. You need to know it’s there. So if there’s a lack of awareness of what emotions you’re feeling, we’ve got to start developing an awareness for our emotional experience. We need to start knowing what we’re feeling.

Then once we know what we’re feeling, we need to learn how to process and allow that emotion. Now, a lot of times when I say that, what people think I mean is we need to get rid of the emotion. And that is not what I’m saying. It just is not what I’m saying at all. What I’m saying is we’ve got to notice it in our body and recognize that a bear is not chasing me. I am not in danger. I am safe. I am okay. This feeling can live in here and I can still keep moving. I can still keep going. We grow the capacity for the emotion.

We start with: what is the emotion? What does the emotion feel like in our body? And then we grow capacity through nervous system regulation. We grow capacity for the emotion because we want to be able to hold emotions like fear and doubt and frustration and overwhelm. We want to get better at feeling them. We don’t need to get rid of them.

And this is a key point, super, super important to understand. Every single one of the people that is listening to this podcast right now, every single one of you, absolutely has the ability to do this. You might not know how. You might not know exactly how to do it or how to do it effectively, but you absolutely can do it. You can drop into your body and allow an emotion. It takes seconds.

Once we’ve done that, then we look at what are the things that I’m thinking that are creating this for me. And what I think makes me different when it comes to my approach is I just don’t believe that we have to get rid of the negative thoughts. I just don’t believe we do. I don’t even think it’s worth looking at.

You can notice them and recognize that they are not very helpful. But a lot of the times that we are experiencing that, these are automatic thoughts that come from conditioning. So they come from our parents, they come from our teachers, they come from the patriarchy, they come from trauma, they come from pain. They were formed when we were younger, when our brain was growing at a really rapid rate. So those things that are in there, they’re strong. Really, really strong. And we don’t want to get in a fight with them.

What I have learned is that two things can be true at the same time, that we can hold two things as being the truth. And I love the idea of that radical acceptance of holding two things as being true. On one hand, we are experiencing these thoughts and they are creating a hell of a lot of negative emotion and they are a pattern. They’re familiar. They’ve been there for a while. So they are still very loud. And on the other hand, we can also believe that we can start building trust in ourselves, that I can build trust for myself without having to remove those thoughts.

You know, I think it was in the last episode where I shared the analogy of the garden, where our brain is a garden and we spend a lot of time weeding. But if we don’t plant any flowers, nothing beautiful is going to grow there. So when I’m talking about planting flowers, one of the flowers that we want to plant is self-trust.

I think a really important piece of this is understanding that the way that we do this is through specificity. This isn’t just, “Oh, I’ve now become the Amanda that always trusts herself.” That’s not real. Nobody does that. I promise, even if they say they do, they don’t. Can you become more practiced at it? Sure. Are you still going to have doubt? Yes.

I was listening to, well, I shouldn’t say I was listening to, I was watching this TikTok, and they were interviewing Tom Cruise. And I have, listen, I have watched Tom Cruise for a long time. I used to have his poster from like, I don’t know, Teeny Bop Magazine, who knows? I had his picture. I had Charlie Sheen as well. So funny, they look somewhat alike, actually. I taped them to my walls, much to my mom’s chagrin. I was obsessed with him. And it’s so interesting and fun for me as a 49-year-old woman to see him still just killing it as far as his movie career goes.

And I’ve read a lot about Tom Cruise and how dedicated he is and how he is just an adrenaline junkie and how he just is so intent on his craft and how he’s always been like that. But I was watching him interviewed on this TikTok channel, and for the life of me, I can’t think of what it’s called. So I’m going to have to just get it for you and I’ll put it in the show notes, and you can find it there because I always forget.

And what the interview does is he asks people that are making millions of dollars or more, what contributed to their success? And what their advice would be to someone when it comes to creating money and success. And so Tom Cruise was asked about this, and one of the things that he shared was that he does still experience fear. In fact, he experiences it all the time. He’s like, I haven’t gotten rid of the fear. It doesn’t bother me to feel afraid.

And I thought that that was like the perfect example of somebody that has learned how to process and allow emotion. That is the picture of it. I feel it, I’m just not afraid of it. I’m not afraid to feel fear. And this to me is the pinnacle of being the boss of your emotions. It’s not about controlling them. It’s about not letting them control you.

So we don’t want to do that with force. That’s not going to work. We can’t just push them away, because we know what happens when we push feelings down. They just pop up like little whack-a-moles, right? Constantly in weird, unexpected, not very useful places.

So, we process and allow. We start recognizing the emotions we feel in our body. We understand that emotions are 50/50. We feel negative emotion 50% of the time, no matter what we do. So if that’s the case, then imagine what it would be like to trust yourself to experience those emotions.

When I think about self-trust, what it boils down to is no matter what happens, I know I can handle what’s coming next. To me, that is self-trust. I think that sometimes we misinterpret self-trust as meaning I need to make sure that I never make a mistake. I have to be able to trust that I won’t screw up. And to me, that isn’t trust. That’s perfectionism dressed up like trust. And we don’t want to do that, because that will keep us trapped and that will keep us stuck and that will keep us in a scenario where we don’t get to thrive.

So one of the things that I see coming up for my clients all the time is having thoughts about other people, having thoughts about experiences. I see it just relationally, I think is where I see it the most where there is a lack of trust. And I think this makes sense for neurodivergent women, for sensitive women, for traumatized women. I think this makes a lot of sense because we have learned to be hyper-vigilant of how other people see us to create safety. So we go back to that conditioning. We have been conditioned to be afraid not only of how we feel, but of how other people feel.

So how do we create trust when that is the conditioning? What do we need to hold in the other hand to balance this out? The first thing that we want to hold is that everybody is responsible for their own feelings. Okay? Everyone is responsible for their own feelings, everyone. I promise. I’m responsible for mine, and you’re responsible for yours.

And the reason why this is important as it relates to self-trust is that we no longer are trying to create a result in something that we don’t have control over. It gives us the opportunity to focus inwards instead of focusing outwards. If I can trust that you have the capability to handle what goes on for you and that if you don’t, it is your responsibility to figure that out, then I get to just decide to think the same thing about myself, that I have the capability to handle what comes up here. I know what to do when it comes to me experiencing me.

And I like to point to the fact that you are still here. Okay? You still exist, you’re still alive. And so that means that so far, you’ve survived everything that’s happened to you. You’ve survived. And now you’re looking and you want to thrive. And if you want to thrive, we have to start building that self-trust.

So when you think about planting that thought garden, this planting this trust flower, right? In order to plant it, we give everybody back what’s theirs. And then we take radical responsibility for what’s ours. What that does not look like is beating the shit out of yourself. What that does not look like is deciding there’s something wrong with you. What that does not look like is deciding that somehow you’re hyper responsible for everybody else. What it looks like is acceptance, radical acceptance of self.

In order to trust yourself, you have to accept yourself. You can’t have one without the other. So radical acceptance of you looks like understanding that you are not a perfect person. And that song always plays in my mind the minute I say it. *I’m not a perfect person.* I don’t even know what the song’s called right now, but it always comes up when I think it. Just got a musical soundtrack in my brain. I don’t know. Am I alone? Let me know. Message me on TikTok or Instagram and tell me if this comes up for you too. Songs just appear.

But I’m not a perfect person. You’re not a perfect person. We are not expecting ourselves to be perfect, and we are not expecting anybody around us to be perfect. That is not required. That is a thought I offer to you as one that you might want to take upon yourself and plant it in your thought garden. I don’t expect myself to be perfect and I don’t expect other people to be perfect. That is not required. All right?

Number two, we want to look at our ability and our capacity to hold emotion. Now, are we always growing it? Yes, of course. That’s how we create a life we really love because we get to have really full color, incredible experiences if we do that. However, if you fall off and you end up checking right out and zoning out on Netflix and being in your bed, okay. That’s human. If you blow up and go scorched earth on your family or a friend or your partner, okay, that’s human too.

Do you want to know how I know that’s human? Because I’ve seen it happen everywhere, all the time. Other people just having this happen in their lives, coaching people, hearing their stories. It’s so human. Can we accept that we’re human and that we don’t always react perfectly and that that is not required? That is not required, my friend, for you to have a great life. I promise.

It’s one of those things where we hold two things true. It is perfectly acceptable for me to sometimes act in a way that is a little or a lot unhinged, and also, I’m working on being better. I’m working on changing that. I’m working on creating a new dynamic, but I accept the fact that I am perfectly imperfectly human, and there’s many inputs that we can’t control in our life.

So I’m going to let myself experience this however I need to experience it, and every day is a new day and I just have empathy and compassion for myself and I reset and I start again.

This is a process. So what I will say is building self-trust is planting that thought garden, right? Planting the thoughts that allow you to trust yourself. So when you think about your past, this is a good opportunity for you to really decide what is the narrative going to be when it comes to your past.

I give the example, I’ve been giving this this week in my coaching sessions, where my dad came to visit me, which was great, and they have a motor home and this motor home has these slides that go in and out. It’s massive, it’s beautiful.

But the slides break, the motors break. They’ve been experiencing this since they bought it. They did this cross-Canada tour and one of them broke in like, I don’t know, Halifax. And so my dad comes out. He had bought a motor to replace the one that hadn’t broke yet, but then realized it was the wrong motor and hadn’t switched it out, hadn’t taken it back and gotten a different motor.

So they drove out, they parked their motor home, they put the slide out, they heard a really loud clunk, and my dad and his wife both kind of knew, like, that was probably the motor, and we don’t have the right one.

So my dad waited to put the slide back in because he didn’t want it to like go halfway in and then not go and then they couldn’t even sleep in there. So he left it until like the day before they left and then lo and behold, the motor was completely toast.

And I was listening to my dad talk about how, you know, he should have known better. He’s mad at himself because he didn’t order the motor, that this all could have been averted and just really beating himself up about the fact that they had to hire somebody to come out and install a motor and get the motor to them, etc., etc.

The interesting thing about it is, first of all, my dad’s retired and so is his wife. And they could stay as long as they needed. There was nobody waiting for the campsite. So they had nothing but time. The second part of this is that they were able to get the motor delivered to them within a day. And then the next day they had somebody that could install it, and it really wasn’t a problem. It was completely figureoutable. It was a minor inconvenience.

And I look at that experience and I think, you know, imagine if my dad just was able to not stress out about it, could enjoy those two days that he spent with us and just have a great time and not beat himself up and be like, oh, it’s just not a big deal. We’ll figure this out.

And this is what we do. We beat ourselves up and tell stories about ourselves that are not true. Oh, I’m a procrastinator. I’ve heard that so many times. You’re not a procrastinator. You’re a person who procrastinates, and that is a different thing. You don’t need to own the personality of procrastination. You don’t have to own that personality.

You don’t make that true about you. And you know why? Because that erodes your self-trust. So if you think about planting your garden and planting that trust, what’s going to erode it? Telling yourself that you’re stupid, that you’re a procrastinator, that you always do this, that you should have known better, that you’re mad at yourself.

All that is is just sabotage. Now, do we have to go in and weed out all those thoughts? No. Instead, we think about the ones we’re going to think on purpose. So what I want you to know is we notice those negative thoughts. We notice them coming up. They’re the weeds. But we plant, it’s okay. You know what? I have time. This is figureoutable. I choose to forgive myself. I choose to not make this a big deal. This is actually okay. And then we breathe. And then we just keep moving with our day.

Building self-trust is that simple. Building self-trust is simply a decision that you make every day. You can just decide, if I wanted to trust myself today, what is one thing that I would think that I’m not thinking right now? When you’re confronted with a situation that either happened before or that is upcoming, you can ask yourself, what do I need to think about this to be able to trust myself?

When you do that, you start building that trust. You’re planting seeds in that garden, and then we water them and we nurture them and we grow them. And when we notice the weeds, we pull them when we can, but it’s not the focus. The focus is on building the trust because when you trust yourself, you are able to make bolder decisions. You are able to experience more fear. You are able to experience more doubt. You’re able to experience all of these negative emotions that are coming.

And once you know that you can handle fear, then you get to trust yourself. Once you know that you can handle doubt, then you get to trust yourself. It all starts cycling in the right direction. We just shift into a new trajectory that creates a totally different result.

So if you’re a person that is looking to trust yourself more, know this. Your brain is going to tell you that you can’t and that you shouldn’t, and it’s going to have a lot of evidence for how that’s true. But the way that we build it is by being intentional, situation by situation by situation.

So if that is something that speaks to you and that is something that you would like some help with, as always, I want to invite you to book a discovery call with me, and I can really walk you through what this would look like for your specific situation. All you have to do is go to amandahess.ca/bookacall and we can talk about it.

Summer is the perfect time to do this. You want to start now, because if you think about what you want your September to look like, what you want your December to look like, it gets built now.

All right, my friends, that’s what I’ve got for you. I hope you have the most incredible week and I will see you here next time. Bye for now.

Thanks so much for listening today. If this podcast is helping you, please follow wherever you listen and consider leaving a review. It truly helps this community grow and allows me to support more women like you. I’m excited to see you back here next week with a brand new episode. Until then, take care, friend.