It's because just because you're born to some people does not mean that you have to do exactly what they want or be this person that they think you should be, right. We all have different interests. We all have different strengths. We all have different passions. We have different things that light us up. And the only way to know what are the things that you wanna pursue is to listen to yourself.

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Hello, my friends. Welcome to another episode. I am so excited you are here. If you are new around these parts, I just wanted to let you know that every month I do a free coaching call, totally free, no fluff. You can get into whatever it is that you need coaching on and trust me, you all need coaching because you have a human mind, just like the rest of us and it needs managing. So if you wanna join, it's usually the last week of the month and you get the link, everything out the week before and the day of, and it changes times and days so that people from different time zones, different countries can all have a chance to join and you can come and just listen, which is what most people do, because you'll get just as much out of it than if you actually get coached. So if you are interested, go to quitterclub.com/coaching and sign up and come join us. Alright, let's jump into today's episode which is the ever important topic of self-trust. Okay. So today I wanna talk to you about this because I think it's one of the most important skills that we can cultivate. I think it's the basis, kind of the foundation of where your self-confidence comes from and I teach it in my program as like a triad… triad. How do you say that word? I don't know. Self-trust, self-compassion and self-acceptance is really the basis of self-confidence and how we come to learn to trust that own inner knowing. But I wanted to talk to you today about one part of that, which is self-trust. Like what it is, why we lack it, why so many of us lack it and why it's so important. So let's jump in. Okay. I think it's one of the biggest problems I see. Like it's the root, kind of the foundation of the most of our other problems. What I see with people who are always second guessing themselves, always ruminating over decisions, having a really hard time making decisions, always seeking everybody else's opinions on what they should and shouldn't do, thinking that other people know more what you should do with your life than you do, really sitting in that anxiety of uh making the wrong decision. All of that behavior that sounds like you comes from a lack of self-trust. Okay. And what I think that we get wrong, what I think that most people don't understand is that it's just a lie that you can't trust yourself. Okay? It's just a lie that you've chosen to believe, that you've been persuaded to believe whatever, that you don't know what's best for you or that you can't rely on your own intuition and your own decision making skills to make the best decisions for yourself. And so the, I guess the spoiler alert, I don't know the the reality of all this is like there's nothing that you need to do to build self-trust. You just have to stop believing that lie that you can't trust yourself. You have to stop engaging in this, I don't know, make believe that your brain likes to pretend that you somehow, unlike everybody else, doesn't know what the right thing to do is for you. Now, obviously when we're kids, we're still learning about the world, right? Our brain functions in a different way. And we rely on other people to teach us. So we rely on our parents, on our family, on maybe our church, our teachers to give us kind of the quote unquote right way to live like the right things to do. And for the most part, they try to steer us in what has been deemed acceptable by society and what's going to keep us safe and they, you know, teach us lots of valuable information that we need in order to live. But another message that we often get from our parents, our teachers, even though they're extremely well-meaning is that we don't know best for ourselves and other people do. Okay. And so even when we're like trying to make decisions and you know, oftentimes we have, like I said, it's not from like a bad place, I I'm sure I do it with my children where it's like you just jump in and do it for them. Or you jump in and you make the decision for them or you tell them how they should feel or how hungry they should be or whatever. It's like we we subtly get these messages over and over again. They're like we can't trust our own instincts. We can't trust to know when we're full, we have to finish our plate. We can't trust knowing like what the best decision is here, someone else will tell us what it is. And so we slowly start building this belief that we don't know how to make good decision for ourselves or we don't know what the right thing is in this situation. And part of that lie that we believe is based again on this ridiculous misconceived notion that we have that we somehow always have to make the right decision, the quote unquote right decision. And what I mean by right is the decision that's going to create the results that we're always happy with, right? Like a decision that's gonna get us to the next place where we always feel good about that choice. Obviously, that's impossible. Consciously, when we think about it, we realize that there's no way that every decision you make is gonna be the absolute, knock it outta the park, you're always gonna feel great. It was, you know, you knew exactly the best thing to do. And it turned out exactly the way you wanted. I mean, that's just not how life works and that's not how you would learn. You wouldn't grow if that happened. Right. And that doesn't happen for anyone. So even the people you're following, whether it's your parents or your teachers or whatnot, it's not as though they're knocking it out of the park every time. Right. They're also just trying to kind of make do with what they've been told is the right way to do things. And they're passing that on. And so what happens is we think we should get it right all the time. And even though we make millions of decisions, we have a negativity bias. So when things don't turn out the way we want it, when a decision doesn't pan out the way we thought it would, we focus on that. We collect that as evidence of like see, can't trust myself. I don’t know what I'm doing. I'm not good at this. Right. We look at everything that went wrong or we did wrong. And part of that even, even the wrong or the failure, again, is just a made up thought of the way things should be. So what I mean by that is society has told us, our culture has told us like you pick one partner and you get married and you live with that partner for the rest of your life. Right? And a lot of us have just like adopted that belief that that's the right way to do it. So then when you get to a place where you wanna break up with someone, let's say you're break up with a boyfriend or girlfriend, you call off an engagement, you get divorced. Well then we think we did it wrong because when it is stacked up against this made up rule that you have to be with someone for the rest of your life.
Well, you didn't meet that measurement. It's the same thing with your career, right? We were just told like hey, you pick something at 18 and go and study it and then do that for the rest of your life. And that's what you're just supposed to do. That's how our society works, that's the way everyone should be when we do that. And then we realize, oh, I don't like this thing. Then we think like oh, see, I don't know how to pick stuff. It's clearly me. I can't trust myself to choose the next thing because I chose this thing. And it wasn't the thing. And I think in the first place we have to question is like is there a thing? Why does there have to be one thing, right. When we create made up rules and then we hold ourselves to that standard, well yeah, oftentimes we might not hit it. We might not meet that standard but I would start questioning the standard first. Like is this something I want to keep believing? Is there truth to this? Most of the stuff that we have is completely man-made. Right? It's made up, it's very different than it was 50 years ago or a hundred years ago. And it's all been made up. And so it just requires like instead of going to first like I don't know how or I'm not good at this, maybe just looking at that standard that you're measuring yourself with. But let's say like looking at that standard while we start looking at this stuff and let's say you even wanna choose to keep certain standards. It's totally fine if you want to. But we start thinking like okay, I didn't choose that one right. Like like I don't even know how would you know, with a career for instance, how would you know if you are gonna like it until you do it? Like is there a way to ever know that? I don't think so. But let's say you even adopt that belief that like you need to know what your career's gonna be. Okay fine. And let's say the first time it doesn't work out well. The thing is, is your brain is just gonna focus on that, right? It's not gonna look at everything else that you've done right, it's gonna look at oh, I made this one decision that didn't work out. And so I'm gonna prove to myself that I don't know how to trust myself. I clearly don't make good decisions. So I want you to know like what self-trust is, right. If we back it up and we think about what does it mean to trust ourselves? And I think the definition of self-trust is knowing that you can always rely on yourself to deal with whatever happens. You can rely on yourself to figure it out. That doesn't mean that you're gonna make the best decision all the time. That doesn't mean that you will know the best way to react and you will always act that way. That doesn't mean that you will show up as a perfect human who always says and does the perfect thing in every situation. That's not the standard. Like you don't have to do that in order to be able to trust yourself because if it was then none of us would ever be able to trust ourselves, right? There's nobody in history, in our lives, anybody that's doing things perfectly, that's showing up their highest self, that's always reacting the best way they possibly can. And what's funny is that we don't require that to trust other people. It's not like we require other people to be perfect for us to trust what they say, but for ourselves, if I have any hiccup in the way that I act, if I show up in a way that I don't want to, if I make a decision that I don't want to, then I'm gonna use that as the barometer of like whether I can trust myself or not.

I want you to know that your brain will find evidence of whatever you tell it is true. The eyes find what the mind looks for. Okay? If you tell yourself that let's give an example, like let's say discipline, cause I hear this one a lot where people will tell me I'm just not disciplined. I just don't have a lot of discipline to do whatever it is, work out, do the things I wanna do. And what they're doing is that they're showing their brain evidence of every time they're not disciplined. Right? Every time they hit that snooze button on their alarm, every time they come home from work and they were swore they were gonna work out and they don't work out and they sit on the couch, right? Every time they don't do the things that they said that they wanted to do, their brain's gonna highlight that. It's gonna show them like see, you're not disciplined. Look, here's more evidence. Here's more evidence. I'm gonna keep bringing you more evidence. And we're gonna prove this thought true. I'm gonna show you all of the evidence of why what you're thinking is right. Right? We like to be right. We like to confirm what we think. And I always tell people that tell me this: humans are the most disciplined animals. One of our features of human beings is that we can delay gratification and we do it all day long, right? So you get up and you brush your teeth every single day. Nobody has to tell you. It's amazing, right? You don't have to beat yourself up every day. You don't have to have like somebody standing over you. When you're driving you don't all of a sudden like swerve out of every lane. You drive in the lane that you're supposed to be. You stop at the traffic lights. It's amazing how disciplined you are. When you go to the grocery store or the Starbucks, you stand in line and you wait your turn, you don't run up like a crazy person and demand to be taken care of. You go to work every day for the love of God. I love the people that tell me they're not disciplined. It's like every day you're doing things you don't wanna do because that is the thing that you've decided to do. You stick to it. Right? And it's amazing to see there's mounds of evidence to prove that you're disciplined. And so, yes, maybe your discipline meter runs low by the end of the day. And you just don't feel like doing one more thing that you don't want to do that you've been doing all day. And so you don't work out but what's amazing is that you just discount or overlook completely everything else to fit the narrative that you have that you're not disciplined. And it doesn't serve you to think that. That's the thing, right? It's a lie. And it's to your detriment because the thing is, they've done countless studies to prove that shame is a terrible motivator. It's a terrible way to get people to do anything. Right. And yet, we just think if I constantly beat myself up, if I constantly shame myself, maybe I'll ship up and get the things I wanna get done. I'm here to tell you it won't happen that way because shame feels terrible. None of us wanna feel it. And so when we're feeling shame, what do we do? We wanna get rid of that feeling. And so we want like dopamine, we want something that's gonna make us feel good. So we procrastinate. We overeat, we overdrink, we uh watch more Netflix, we scroll Instagram, we do the same thing. The exact thing we don't wanna keep doing. We just keep perpetuating the cycle because we keep telling ourselves a lie. Like that's it. And it's so amazing. Cuz if you just adopted the actual truth that like I am such a disciplined person, I'm choosing not to work out right now. I'm choosing today to give myself a break. The next day or the day after that or whenever it is that you actually want to start working out, it's so much easier for you to get up the motivation to do it because there isn't this huge, heavy story on you about how terrible of a person you are cuz you're not disciplined. Your whole like self-worth isn't riding on the fact of whether you work out or not. You can view yourself correctly in the positive light and then decide every day like do I wanna work out or not? If I don't, what's my reason? Do I like it? Do I not? You can give yourself a frickin break if nothing else. And it's amazing to see when you can do this from a place of like self-love and really like accepting how amazing you are. It's incredible how much motivation we start finding to do the things that we wanted to do. And so bringing this all back to self-trust, like that was an example with discipline, but it's the same exact thing with self-trust. It's just a lie that you can't trust yourself. Right? We make millions of decisions. Every single day, all we're doing is making decisions and you've done millions of things. You've made millions of decisions that worked out beautifully, the way you wanted them to. Right? If you just go through your day, think about all of the decisions you make like to not press snooze, to brush your teeth, to pick out your clothes, to feed yourself, to go to work, to handle the millions of decisions you get at work. Like do you go to that meeting or not? Do you do whatever it is, right? Looking at all of the things that you can just trust yourself to get through your day and take care of yourself, right? You're not like just blowing off work to sit at home and eat ice cream and watch Netflix every single day. It's amazing how much you can trust yourself. Pay your bills, take care of your children, to cloth and feed yourself, to have a roof over your head, whatever the things are, you do it all. And then look back at your life and just look at everything you've managed to accomplish up until now. You can make a list of it. Go back from the beginning, like I've graduated fifth grade, it’s amazing. All of the things that you have managed to do in creating your life. You learned how to ride a bike. You, you know, whatever, you went to college, you got your first job, got that internship, whatever the things are. You've done a million things, right? And then look back and look back at everything you've gone through and endured and made it out the other side. Look at all the breakups and the deaths and the tragedies and the friendships ending and the rejection and the sadness.

Every one of us, right. We've endured a lot. And you were able to handle it. You were able to figure it out. You were able to get yourself through it. Now maybe you didn't do it in the way that you wanted. Right? I think we have this like thing is like if I don't handle it in the most beautiful, perfect, serene, highest self way, then I don't know what I'm doing. And that's bullsh*t cuz none of us handle things like that. And you were doing the best that you can with what you knew at the time but you still took care of yourself, right? You still made it. You still got through those worst days. And I just want you to see that as much as you tell yourself that you can't trust yourself, you can find 10 times the amount of evidence that you can. That you've been able to figure out anything that happens in your life.

Cause the truth is that only you can know what's right for you. How can anybody else know what's right for your life? People can give you their opinions and their opinions are based on their own biases and their own experiences and what they believe is right and what they believe is safe and their own fears. But we've all seen this like even the most well-meaning, let's say your parents, this happens all the time and this is why it causes so much friction oftentimes in families is because just because you're born to some people does not mean that you have to do exactly what they want or be this person that they think you should be, right. We all have different interests. We all have different strengths. We all have different passions. We have different things that light us up. And the only way to know what are the things that you wanna pursue is to listen to yourself.

Cause nobody else can tell you. They can tell you what might be the safest route. They can tell you what might get you the best paycheck or they can tell you, you know, what they've seen other people do, but they can’t ever tell you what's right for you. And part of the reason I think we wanna give up our power is because we don't have to take the blame if it doesn't go the way we want. I think so many of us have a hard time with decision making because we've had decisions that didn't turn out the way we wanted and we know what our brain's gonna do to us. We know how much self-loathing we're gonna go through. We know how all of the stories of see, you can't be trusted. Right? All of the self-blame, all of the agony and suffering we're gonna put ourselves through and it feels terrible. So we're like I don't want that. I want someone else to make this decision so I don't have to feel that pressure. I just wonder like what if there's nobody to blame? What if that's just life? You fail and you learn and then you make more decisions. You try something and you're like oh, that didn't go out the way I wanted. Alright, let's try something else. The blaming and the shaming is optional.

You don't have to do that. We've just been trained to. We've trained our brain because we've wanted to protect ourselves. We wanted to protect our ego. So we feel like I beat myself up, then I'll beat other people to that punch. But if you can start seeing like I don't need to engage in any of that. Of course, I'm gonna make decisions that don't turn out the way I want. Of course, I'm gonna try things and then realize I don't like them. Of course, I'm gonna like take a stab at something and then fail miserably and then try again. Like if you can look at it that way, then you can start seeing that decisions aren't actually that hard to make. They don't carry as much weight. They don't have to be all or nothing. They don't have to be the best decision we ever make. It's just a decision. And then we'll make the next one. And then the next one and then the million after that. And when you know that you can always have your own back, that you don't have to blame and shame yourself and that you know that you'll always figure it out, that's when you start realizing that you can always trust yourself. You always could have trusted yourself. That's it. You have that now. You don't need to do anything else. You don't need to prove anything else. You don't need to accomplish anything else in order to get that. We don't need to get to a certain place where we can then decide like now is the time that I can start to trust myself. You get to start today. Right now. With exactly where you're at, exactly what you're doing, with the very next decision you make.

You can start asking like why do I feel the urge to get everybody else's opinion? What do I want to do here? And you can know that no matter what happens, you will always figure it out. So my friends, I want you to take some time to really think about the fact of how you have abandoned yourself a bit, have you've abdicated that trust in yourself and you've given it to other people. And I want you to start recreating that story. I want you to look for the evidence of all the times that you did and could trust yourself. I want you to see how incredible you are and how many things you've been able to figure out. And I want you to slowly start listening to that voice and making the decisions for yourself and being okay with what happens and knowing that you'll figure it out. And that becomes the foundation of doing anything else, of ever going for that bigger, badder, best life is knowing that you can trust yourself the entire way there. Alright, my friends, I hope this was helpful. If it was and you want to keep doing this work, you're gonna wanna get on the wait list for the six month program, Pave Your Path. This is where we take these concepts and we put 'em to work and you get the coaching and the guidance and the help that you need to start putting it all together. The process to start figuring out how you create the life that you want. And we're on a wait list right now. We're gonna open it up actually fairly soon. So make sure you go to lessonsfromaquitter.com/paveyourpath and get on that wait list so you can get notified. Alright, my friends, I will see you next week with another episode.

Thank you so much for listening. If you liked this episode, share it with someone else. I promise you know somebody who also hates their job and wants to quit, so why not share the love? And if you want to come follow along for more, come join me on Instagram at LessonsFromAQuitter and make sure you say hi. I'll see you next week for another episode.