3 signs that you might struggle with self-trust (and what to do about it)
You make thousands of decisions every day. What to wear, who to spend time with, what jobs to apply for, how much to share on a first date and so on and so forth.
Every decision changes the course of what our life looks like, in big or small ways. So it’s no wonder that the weight of these decisions can feel heavy.
It’s not that you’re incapable of making decisions. I see in my clients and my community regularly how impressively they’ve built lives for themselves. You made the decisions necessary to succeed in school, get the job, make friends and find your way in the world.
But I also often hear from my community that the decision-making, especially on more personal topics like dating and relationships, can feel extra difficult. Perhaps it’s the lack of a clear rubric that we’re used to with things like school and work or perhaps it’s our awareness of the impact that something like choosing a life partner will have on our life.
Regardless, if you have noticed that you struggle to make decisions on your own, you often doubt or second guess your decisions after you’ve made them and you’re not sure your assessment of situations is always accurate, it may be a sign that you struggle with self-trust.
And I want to talk about it!
How to trust yourself more
3 most common signs that you struggle with self-trust
1. Polling your friends
What do I respond to this text message? What should I wear to this event? What does it mean that he hasn’t made another plan?
If you find yourself turning to friends, family or coworkers to discuss every situation in your life, it might be a sign that you’re not comfortable coming to your own conclusions, which is a symptom of low self-trust. It’s like you have an idea of what you think but until somebody else says it to you or agrees with you, you can’t really double down on it.
The problem with this is that your view of the world then becomes a true average of the people you spend time with. If they have scarcity mentality in regards to money, it will seep into your life too. If they harbor fears about finding their person, they’re going to infuse it into their opinion in your dating life.
It’s especially dangerous if your dream for yourself is a little out of the norm. That could be having a different relationship with work than your friends, wanting to pursue a creative passion or having a different ideal dynamic with your long term partner. In order to create this life for yourself, you will absolutely have to make decisions that are not the norm or that you’re unlikely to get a consensus on. You have to be brave enough to do it yourself.
2. You always want to collect more facts.
Let’s get something right out of the way here: there are very few objective facts. This can be really difficult for the logical, practical part of our minds but we have to remember that even concrete things like the price of something are filtered through the lens of what we value or what we believe it will deliver. The “facts” of whether or not he is putting in effort is determined by our standards for enough or not enough effort.
When we are looking for the “facts,” we are looking for an objective truth that we can land on, so we don’t have to stand on our own assessment.
When we can point to this just being “right” or “true,” then it’s not a matter of our judgement or our perception of the situation.
If you find yourself…
Fixated on why he ghosted because it feels like if you understand the reason you can let it go
Always clicking on the articles like “Sophia Richie said this is the thing that led to her meeting her husband” (hoping that there’s some trick or rule that you really need to unlock the outcomes you want)
In decision paralysis on things like your next apartment or a new job because there’s an argument for either and feeling like you need to have one more conversation because maybe that will tip you one way or the other
Daydreaming about that big dream (starting the business, taking the trip, telling that person how you feel) but never acting on it because you’re not sure it’ll work and you’re not sure you could handle it if it doesn’t
Then this might apply to you.
At the end of the day, there’s no such thing as objectively “right,” just right for you.
3. You don’t like feeling out of control.
Control is a funny thing. Because, in the words of the great Glennon Doyle, in her book Untamed, “We only control what we don’t trust.” If you feel the need to control something, to micromanage or always monitor (hello to all my anxiously attached ladies who are constantly seeking reassurance that everything is okay in their relationships so they can feel okay), it’s an indicator that you don’t trust in this scenario.
In order to trust yourself in a scenario, you don’t need to believe that it will work out, just that you can handle the situation whether or not it does.
Often the need for control, deep down, is based on a whole bunch of limiting beliefs. If deep down, you’re not sure that the type of guy you’d want to date would actually like you, then it makes sense why you feel like you need to control every logistic of the dating situation. Deep down, you don’t trust that he will stay so you try to control things so that you can manage your own fears.
There are so many versions of this – people who create back up plans because they don’t think their business will work out, but by having the backup plan, pull their focus enough that it creates a self-fulfilling prophecy. Worrying that something is going to fall through at work, so controlling every step of the process, leading other teammembers to stop paying as much attention (“she’s got it!”) and leading to something falling through the cracks because you were the only one being invested.
Unless you want to live a life where you have to be 100% responsible, where if you don’t do it, it doesn’t get done, you will have to find a way to let go of control.
How to begin building self-trust
1.Look at all the things you’ve done right
I know you always want to improve and you always feel like there are ways you can be better. But that doesn’t mean that all the times you have done something well don’t count.
Our bodies are biologically wired to remember the negative at 5-10x the strength of the positive, but as a result we can be way too hard on ourselves based on a skewed perception.
So the first thing you can do is begin to balance the scales in recognizing and celebrating the ways you have shown up for yourself and the decisions you’ve made well.
Make a list of 10 times…
- You did what you said you were going to do
- You took a risk and it worked out
- You weren’t sure you could get through something and you did
If you feel like you mostly struggle to trust others, make a list of 10 times…
- Somebody pleasantly surprised you
- Somebody showed up or checked in without you having to ask
- Someone’s been there for you when stuff got hard
If these lists are hard to write, its 10x more important that you push through to write them (really pushing your brain to FIND examples of these types of things will prime it to be more open to spotting them in the future).
2. Address the root of the stories that make it hard to trust
When we have issues with trusting ourselves or others, there’s almost always a way deeper root. And until you get clear on what it is and where it came from, you’ll always be fighting an uphill battle to override the lack of trust.
Here’s an example…
You tend to follow up to make sure you get another plan on the calendar when you’re seeing somebody new that you like. When asked about it, you say “well, yeah, most guys don’t put in any effort.” It makes sense then, why you’d always jump into action to control the situation because you don’t trust that it will happen without you. But as a result, you tend to attract more guys who are comfortable with this dynamic, for whom it’s easier to not to have to plan, which only confirms the story that guys don’t put in effort. On the other hand, the guys who do want to put in effort, sense that for some reason you don’t let people make plans on their own timeline and rather than try to speak up about it in an early dating scenario, just move on, confirming your story again.
This pattern will likely continue until you look at why do you feel like most guys won’t put in effort. You can tell me it’s an objective truth, but if we were on a live session, I could easily rattle of 5-10 stories from my friends and family where guys put in quite significant effort. So it’s not a gender-wide principle, huh?
In this example, you might have learned this belief from observing the men in your family growing up who always left your mom to do the cooking and cleaning and leaving her stressed all the time as a result. It might have been a pattern with how your dad pursued your mom (or didn’t), which you heard told in many stories after and repeated in phrases like “if you want something done, you need to do it yourself.”
The way you perceive the world today is informed by these stories because confirmation bias is always paying more attention to the facts that support these existing beliefs. If you want to change how you experience the world, you have to change the belief.
3. Building up tolerance with small risks
You cannot build trust by waiting to know it will work out. Once you know it’ll work out, there’s no need for trust. So whether you are working to trust yourself and your decision making more, or give your friends and family more opportunities to step up and support you, or try to be more open to the men you are seeing without a deep sense of doubt, you can start building up your belief with little steps.
Here are some ideas:
- Make a point to share honestly when you’re struggling with a friend this week and watch to see whether they naturally step up to try to support you
- Rather than doing a deep scrolling and order comparison of places you can order from, look at the first page of options and pick what sounds best and place the order
- If you naturally are the type to send the follow up text but want to feel pursued in your relationship, one time soon just don’t
- That program or purchase you’ve been deliberating? Just do it.
What matters most is not that these decisions or moments work out for you – it’s likely that some of them won’t. But if you can support yourself even in the aftermath of a bad outcome, overtime, you’ll become less sensitive to the moments of risk because you know you’ll be okay either way.