September 19, 2025 • 39 mins
We live in a world full of opinions, advice, and expectations - and somewhere in the noise, our own inner voice can get drowned out. Learning to trust yourself sounds simple, but in practice it’s a hard skills to build. Doubt, fear of mistakes, and the pressure to “get it right” often pull us away from what we already know deep down.
In this episode, we explore the psychology of self-trust: how it develops, why it falters, and what it really means to listen to yourself in a culture that constantly tells you to look outward for answers.
We’ll explore:
• Why self-trust is so crucial in this decade
• Self-trust as the antidote to anxiety
• How self-trust is shaped by early experiences and current circumstances
• Small ways to practice trusting yourself again
• Why trusting yourself is less about certainty and more about self-respect
If you’ve ever second-guessed yourself into exhaustion, or felt like your inner compass has gone quiet, this episode is for you.
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The Psychology of your 20s is not a substitute for professional mental health help. If you are struggling, distressed or require personalised advice, please reach out to your doctor or a licensed psychologist.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hello everybody, and welcome back to the Psychology of Your Twenties,
the podcast where we talk through some of the big
life changes and transitions of our twenties and what they
mean for our psychology.
Speaker 2 (00:23):
Hello everybody, Welcome back to the show. Welcome back to
the podcast. New listeners, old listeners. Wherever you are in
the world, it is so great to have you here
back for another episode as we of course break down
the psychology of our twenties. If you have been around
for a little while, you might remember that at the
(00:43):
start of each year, I kind of like to set
a theme for the next twelve months to come as
part of like our Welcome to the New Year like
podcast series that I do every new year. For twenty
twenty five, this year's intention it was the year for
trusting yourself, which to me, I think really meant like
(01:05):
letting yourself be a little bit afraid, trusting yourself in
situations you haven't been before, honoring your intuition, amongst many
other things. And today I wanted to kind of return
to that New year pledge and do like a check
in for like the final what is it like, final
third of the year. I'll be honest and I said
(01:27):
this in the initial episode. Trusting myself is something I've
always struggled with. I can think of so many moments
where I knew deep down what was the right decision
for me, but I still asked five other people what
they thought, or I still hesitated everything from when I
(01:47):
wanted to break up with my first boyfriend to literally
like the other week, I was at Ikia and I
was like trying to decide what lamp to buy. This
like opinion shopping that I often do, either leads me
to an outcome that I don't really want, not because
of the other people but because of me, or it
takes me so much longer to act on things that
were pretty emotionally in time sensitive, And later on I
(02:10):
look back and I think, why did I not just
listen to myself? Like in hindsight, it was so clear
what I wanted, it was so clear what I was
being called to do, and I just didn't have that
sense of trust that I actually was making the right
decision or that I could trust my intuition. Maybe you
have been here too, that kind of like the tug
(02:31):
of war between your own instincts and the pressure of
outside voices. It's definitely not easy, especially in your twenties,
when I feel like we'd all just love for someone
to give us the answer and to like kind of
play your life for you like a video game. But
what I've learned is that trusting yourself doesn't actually mean
you're always going to get it right, the same way
(02:52):
that if you put someone else in charge of your life,
they wouldn't always get it right either. It doesn't guarantee
an outcome. What it really does is just give a
sense of I trust myself, which means I'm going to
be fine anyways. And as I always say, the opposite
of anxiety isn't calm, it's actually trust. So building that
internal anchor and that internal system and process is like
(03:15):
one of the most crucial things that we can do
during this decade. So in today's episode, we're going to
dive into why self trust is honestly so hard, how
trust can be the antidote to a lot of innate
fears that this decade of life brings up for us,
and how we can kind of rebuild the connection with ou,
(03:36):
this inner voice that we all have, even if you
can't hear it very clearly right now, How can we
rebuild that relationship using some essential psychology tools. I really
hope that you guys enjoyed this episode, because if there's
one relationship that's going to carry you through life, it
is the one you have with yourself. And learning to
trust that person, the one who will make every decision
(03:58):
for you, be with you for every outcome, see you
through every setback, that is going to make you feel
a lot more capable. So, without further ado, let's get
into how we can fully trust ourselves. Trust is one
of those words where I think tend to place in
(04:19):
the hands of others a lot. You know, we talk
about whether we can like trust our friends, whether our
partners are trustworthy, whether like the people we've worked with
have like gained our confidence, whether we can like trust politicians.
Trust is like this leap of faith for another person,
where if you're wrong, you can obviously fall pretty far.
(04:41):
But the deeper, more unsettling question that's often left unasked
is do I trust myself? Not only do I trust
myself in my judgments of those people, but do I
actually believe that I can rely on my own judgment,
my own instincts, my own ability to handle whatever life
is going to bring me Or is it the case
(05:02):
that I kind of hide behind other people's opinions, hide
behind indecision, hide behind kind of doing nothing. For many
of us, especially in our twenties, you know, the answer
is we probably don't trust ourselves fully. I at least
I go back and forth, sometimes feeling like I'm so
in my element, I'm so prepared for whatever happens in life,
(05:25):
and other times like just really feeling like the wind
could blow me over. And that's not because we're weak
or incapable. It's because our twenties are like uniquely challenging
to this self trust. We've talked about this term before
emerging adulthood. This is a term that was coined by
the developmental psychologist defree n It, and he uses it
(05:48):
to describe how uniquely tumultuous this period of our lives
is and how we are kind of playing what he
calls a roleless role, often shifting by hour, by day,
by week between different perspectives and essentially different versions of
ourselves and trying to find the right ones or one
against like the backdrop of some pretty life defining choices,
(06:11):
meaning that you are sometimes going to make wrong choices.
According to the future version of you. Sometimes you're going
to make wrong choices that later on you might regret.
That doesn't mean you can't trust yourself. It means that
you made the best decision at the time with what
you knew now, and you made the best decision at
(06:33):
the time with the identity that you thought was most
true to yourself. But that doesn't always help. We don't
always have that perspective. We can actually be rather cruel
to our past selves and about the decisions that we're
currently making, and it means that we can feel kind
of alienated from our own selves, Like why did I
think that was a good idea? You know? Why did
I end up here? Why did I think that was
(06:55):
a good decision. That's like a classic thing in our twenties,
especially as we get into our later twenties, of like Wow,
why did I wear that? Why did I date that person?
Why did I say that thing? Why did I take
that job? Not remembering that you know at the time,
that's what felt like the right thing to do. It's
all part of it. There's also this undercurrent of fear
(07:16):
and kind of like what if thinking That definitely stalks
a lot of the decisions that we're making. This really
does injure our self trust because we're constantly thinking, you know,
what if I'm wrong right now? What if I can't
handle the consequences?
Speaker 1 (07:29):
What if.
Speaker 2 (07:31):
You know, this one choice and the ten years of
choices that it leads me to mean that I end
up having a lot of regrets or I regret my
life as a whole. That's a classic for me feeling
like I can't trust myself right now because I don't
have certainty around how the decision I'm currently making is
going to like impact me in the future. And I'm
(07:52):
sure a lot of us are very familiar with this.
I think one of the most paralyzing experiences of our
twenties is just this general anxiety have about the future.
Someone said this to me the other day, and I
love it. Anxiety basically thrives in the gap between what
we can't control and what we think we can't handle.
If the world is uncertain and spoiler alert it is,
(08:14):
and your brain believes you're helpless, which you're not, anxiety
has a lot of room to operate. You're not helpless,
even if you do end up making a few wrong choices,
even if you do have moments of fear. Literally, there
are people who come back from hugely destructive life altering
decisions and still live out incredible lives. You will as well.
(08:36):
I know this probably won't do much to ease your anxiety, though,
and that's because cognitive behavioral models of anxiety really talk
about how there is this vicious cycle when it comes
to our lack of trust in the future. Anxious people
I count myself as one of them. We constantly overestimate
the threats in the environment or in the future, whilst
(08:59):
also underestimating our own ability to cope. And because we
seriously do not acknowledge how much power we really have
and how much resilience we really have, it just feels
like anything we could tastripize about, any big life altering
thing we can imagine each of them, could just be
(09:22):
the end of us. And we don't give ourselves enough
credit for the fact that we will probably be okay.
Not only will a lot of that stuff probably not happen,
but you are a lot more capable in those times
of crisis or even in those times of just like
a little bit of negativity than you think. You are.
The antidote to that spiral of course is once again
(09:44):
self trust, and that's sometimes the thing that feels the
hardest in those moments, but it is the truest anchor
you can find. A recent study I think it was
conducted last year at a university in South Korea, looked
at around eight hundred participants and it looked at what
the most effective emotional antidote to anxiety was. They looked
(10:06):
at things like hope, they looked at things like happiness,
they looked at things like trust. And what they found
was not only did trust actually end up improving hope
and improving happiness and reducing anxiety, but self trust in
particular was most influential compared to trust in others, or
trust in an organization, or a trust in a god
(10:29):
or a religion. Self trust, which was basically measured by
like confidence in our abilities, belief in our abilities, self respect,
it was the most influential thing measured in this study
for improving anxiety. And yet I don't think it gets
mentioned much in the literature. When you trust yourself. I
(10:50):
think the secondary thing that we've kind of been coming
to is that you stop needing certainty and outcomes which
you're never going to find anyways. You know you don't
have to know exactly how a situation will unfold because
you know you can handle it. So it takes a
lot of the warrior away. So often I think we
get like swept up in this idea that the antidote
to anxiety is control. If I could just predict or
(11:12):
manage every possible outcome, well, i'd feel safe. If I
just knew exactly how the situation would pan out, I
wouldn't worry. And so control becomes kind of like a
red herring that we are like constantly chasing, not realizing
that it is entirely an illusion and what keeps us
really deeply entrenched in an exhausting, anxious pattern of thinking.
(11:34):
It is like looking for a pot of gold at
the end of the rainbow. That's how I always think
about it. Trust, on the other hand, unlike certainty, is real.
It is the rainbow. It is practical, it is actionable,
and it turns the focus away from external to internal.
We no longer need the illusion of certainty or trying
(11:55):
to seek reassurance from others to know that we'll be okay. Instead,
we can be really secure in the knowledge that whatever happens,
you're going to be okay, and in that anxiety like
it doesn't have anything left, Like it really loosens its
gript because it's like, okay, maybe we can't predict when
the army will attack, but it doesn't matter because like
my forces, my emotional forces, my forces of resilience, are
(12:19):
super strong. So if self trust is so vital, why
do so many of us lack it? This is pretty
multi layered. I think the first reason is because yes,
there isn't that focus. It's also not taught for some
of us. You know, it's gonna sound so cliche, but
it always does seem to stretch back to childhood. If
(12:39):
you grew up in an environment where your opinions weren't respected,
where you were shamed for your mistakes or your feelings
were dismissed, you may have internalized the message that your instincts,
your relationship to your emotions, you know when you really
do require help, like all of those messages can't be trusted. Erickson,
(13:00):
we talk about him again a lot. He's very famous.
He developed the eight stages of psychosocial development back in
the fifties. He basically suggested and noted that of all
the stages that we go through from when we're a
child to when we're an adult. One of the most
important ones is this trust versus mistrust stage. This takes
(13:23):
place like around eighteen months to two years old, and
according to him, this period is so crucial because it's
when our view of the world and ourselves and our
personalities and our abilities are really shaped, even if we
don't have memory of that time. At this age, you know,
(13:43):
we are completely dependent on our caregivers, and so how
our parents obviously interact with us has a big impact.
Aspects that can really build a sense of trust are
things like the caregiver creating a safe environment for us
to make mistakes, or our caregivers being intentive to our needs,
or offering reassurance when we are scared or distressed, basically
(14:04):
saying like, oh, you're having a reaction, you're having an emotion,
you're having a feeling. Well, that must mean something. And
so by building trust in them and knowing that they're
going to give that feeling attention or some kind of solution,
we also build trust in ourselves. You know, hopefully that
kind of makes sense. Of course, you know, things wouldn't
(14:24):
have been perfect all the time. You know, when a
baby cries, sometimes it is really hard to figure out
what's wrong. But it's really about whether the trustworthy relationships
and interactions that we had outweighed the untrustworthy ones. If
the positive does outweigh the bad, then, according to Ericsson,
this gives us. This gives infants a good sense of
(14:45):
how to trust themselves as well and how to trust
the world around them all through that primary relationship. However,
if bad interactions outweigh the good, if untrustworthy interactions outweigh
the trustworthy ones, and you know, we as children, having
been able to rationalize why that may be, we instead,
(15:05):
as he suggests, begin to internalize that completely, begin to
turn it inward. Begin to believe we're unimportant, we're unlovable,
and also that we can't trust those around us. We
also can't trust ourselves, or we can only trust ourselves.
We lean towards hyperindependence, which can actually be equally unhealthy
(15:29):
because hyperindependence actually isn't necessarily about self trust. It's again
about control. Hyperindependence is about feeling like the only person
you can rely on is you because you don't trust
yourself in situations where you do need like a broader
set of skills, so I don't know if that makes
(15:51):
sense to me. It definitely does, and like I think
about that, I'm like, oh, yep, that definitely sits. But
it's just important to understand how like along the way,
think of trust as like this tree that has like
that needs to have really deep roots in order to
stand tall in adulthood and you know, in our twenties,
(16:13):
and if at any point something has poisoned those roots,
or something has made you believe that this tree is
shakable that you don't find support in the trunk of it,
like it's going to deeply injure you and harm you.
Another significant element of this is perfectionism. You can really
see that, like what we're not We're not just talking
about self trust again, We're talking about this competition between
(16:36):
control and a reliance on ourselves. At first, I think
perfectionism can actually kind of seem like trust, much like hyperindependence, right, Like,
we prove to ourselves that we are capable through pushing
beyond what we imagine. We strive for excellence and often
this excellence is rewarded. We prove that we can trust
our abilities. But if we believe our self worth is
(16:58):
conditional on never failing every single mistake becomes proof that
you can't trust yourself, and so you have to apply
more pressure. You have to apply more force onto yourself
to keep meeting your standard. This inner critic becomes a
lot louder in your twenties, when I think the stakes
become a lot higher and you begin to feel an
(17:18):
even greater sense of responsibility for your actions. Again, it's
not about making the right decision that will continue to
work out in the future forever or and ever. It's
just about being able to make a decision at all.
And often perfectionism is master's procrastination, which again is an
indicator of a lack of self trust. If you cannot
(17:39):
make a decision because you do not have confirmation that
everything isn't going to turn out absolutely perfectly how you
would like it, you are going to procrastinate on that decision.
You're going to experience major decision paralysis. That's your perfectionism
at play. Again. It shows that deep down you don't
really think that you're capable of handling what might come
(18:01):
if you can't predict or control the outcome from the
get go. I think also as a culture, we're also
conditioned to outsource authority and that further kind of damages
this tree or this compass or however you want to
visualize it. You know, algorithms these days tell us what
to buy. I don't know about you, but like I'm
(18:21):
just buying the first thing that shows up when I
google it, Like I don't really like trust myself to
know what I want. Sometimes, you know, career guides tell
us what the best route is and what our dream
job will be. Self help books give us like the
perfect formula if you can just bring yourself to follow it.
You know, advice isn't bad in itself, but when we
(18:43):
rely on it too much, we really do forget how
to hear our own voice. And over time the silence
of that voice feels like it's absence, when really it's
just like waiting for us to tune back in. These
external factors perfectionism, childhood, outsourcing your thought already, they all
kind of play into each other to make it really
(19:03):
difficult to break out and to just like come back
to what is a deep human intuition that we all have.
This is the other thing. Self trust also means reconnecting
with like a really ancient information system and a really
(19:24):
ancient intuitive system that perhaps we've kind of forgotten and
that perhaps we kind of don't have time to listen
to because we are so busy, because we are required
to make such urgent choices, because the stakes of this
like modern day, feel very fast. Intuition is not always
(19:48):
going to be the most urgent voice in the room.
It might actually be the most calm. It might also
need a little bit more time to rise to the surface.
I know that sounds counter to what you may expect
or imagine intuition as, which is like that immediate reactional
response to something happening in your environment that tells you
(20:10):
that you're in danger. But the intuition we're talking about
is like a sense of like the intuition around a
deeper sense of self. And I think in like a
modern context, we don't that intuitive sense of self doesn't
have as much breathing room. And so of course, when
we're constantly pushed into making quick, urgent decisions or wanting
(20:31):
to outsource our decision making, again, that muscle, that self
trust muscle atrophies and continues to weaken. So we're going
to talk about why that is, but also how we
can rebuild that muscle, how we can re here. I
don't know what's the right word. How we can I
(20:53):
gets tuned back into this like deep pool of self
knowledge and self trust that we all innately have after
this short break. I think if we want to learn
how to implement self trust into our lives, we need
(21:14):
to first really understand what that actually looks and feels like.
I think it can be tricky to describe, because, like
unlike external trust, where you can kind of assess how
reliable someone is by past performance, sometimes we aren't as
objective with ourselves. So here's your kind of guide to
(21:35):
I guess what it feels like. Firstly, self trust means
following through on promises. If you say you'll stop work
at six pm, you actually do it. If you commit
to calling your friend because they matter to you, you
follow through. If you set a goal, if you set
a boundary for your wellbeing, whether that's blocking someone, saying
no to a draining event, knowing when you need to
(21:57):
take a break, you don't abandon your self for the
sake of approval. You really understand that you are the
one who understands yourself the most. A really famous psychologist,
Carl Rogers, He described this as congruence, which is basically
when what you feel on the inside aligns with how
you show up on the outside. This is less about perfectionism,
(22:21):
it's less about consistency, it's less about control. The knowledge
that you can count on yourself the same way, maybe
even more than you want to count on others, is
just like this very deeply stable, calm feeling that there
(22:42):
is someone who has your back and that person is you.
I think self trust, actually I know self trust also
feels like compassion. Think about it. If you constantly punish
yourself when things go wrong, which they will, why would
you ever risk trying again keep beating yourself up when
you make a mistake because you literally didn't know any better.
(23:04):
That doesn't sound like someone who trusts that they're going
to be okay, even if it's not right now. But
in the end, self trust, if you want to build it,
it looks like speaking to yourself with the same tone
you would use with a really close friend or with
your baby sister, or with your childhood self. Instead of
saying like, oh my god, I should have known better.
(23:24):
I'm such an idiot. This was like totally avoidable. It's
more like saying, yeah, that was really hard, and this
is a great opportunity to learn, And in those self
directed moments of gentleness, you deepen that bond the way
that a child would respond to gentle parenting, or like
someone who lets them make errors and therefore allows them
(23:45):
to test their boundaries more, allows them to trust themselves
more because they know they are in a safe company.
The world can be really critical and really judgmental, Like
if you're looking for someone to hate on you, if
you're looking for someone to tear you down, you can
find someone like that pretty easily. So let someone else
take care of the harshness. Let someone else be your bully.
(24:07):
The least that we can do for ourselves is to
have our own backs. Self trust gives you the freedom,
I think, to make choices without guaranteeing outcomes or demanding guarantees.
Imagine like you're standing in front of two job offers.
This is actually an example that was given to me
by a listener at one of our live shows recently,
where she asked me, you know, I've got these two
(24:29):
job offers. I've just graduated university. One is super safe
and predictable. One is really risky, but it's super exciting.
She was talking about how she's kind of been sitting
on these offers for over a month out of fear
that she would make the wrong choice, out of fear
that that wrong choice would then spiral and ruin her life.
(24:50):
Trust me, it's actually harder to ruin your life than
you think. And really like what I said to her
was that not making a decision is the worst decision
that you can make. The thing is is that the
fact that you care so much shows that even if
you make the so called wrong choice, you are still
(25:11):
going to be able to act on your future interests
in like a way that will guarantee you will come
back to the right choice. What I mean by that
is that you obviously care a lot about your life,
and you care a lot about making it a good life.
So it's not like that's going to go away and
disappear just because you make a choice that maybe wasn't right. Also,
(25:32):
there's no way of knowing if the other choice would
have been better. But say you're really unhappy in the
risky job, say you're really unhappy in the safe job,
that's not the end of your options. That's not the
end of your ability to change things or to make
a different decision. You are going to be okay because
you have that sense of investment and care, because you
(25:52):
trust yourself, You trust that you will not abandon yourself.
That's perhaps, you know, the deepest sign of self trust.
It's resilience. That's really what I'm describing resilience. There is
a developmental psychologist and I cannot remember her name, but
she calls resilience ordinary magic. You know, it's not superhuman.
(26:12):
It's not like the wild to come by. Very regular
normal people recover adapt growth from decisions that didn't work
out in their favor all the time. And having resilience
is kind of just having the ability to just acknowledge
a bad outcome, acknowledge that it sucks and say okay.
(26:33):
Is ruminating on this and obsessing over this actually going
to change anything or help me? Probably not the best
way I can learn from this. The best way I
can move on is to integrate what I've learned, retune
that deep intuition that I have, retune or you know,
in hindsight, rethink about the signs that were there or
(26:54):
weren't there, and keep trying. I think as well, and
I keep saying this, but I just want to rein
force it. Self trust is really just a sense of calm,
and that's why I think that it is the opposite
of anxiety. Anxiety. Anxiety wants to like shift everything into
high gear and it wants you to get somewhere as
(27:16):
fast as possible. It wants you to get the answers
as fast as possible. And if it doesn't feel like
you're moving, well, it's gonna like it's gonna put a
bit of a spark in you to do that. And
I think that's where like a lot of that, you know,
very quintessential anxiety anxious feeling comes from. It wants to
rush you. It wants you to be urgent. It wants
you to just like figure things out, even if it's
(27:38):
not the best decision for you. Self trust feels like
calm in comparison. It really is a physical sensation of
just like feeling like your feet of family planted, feeling
like you're going to be okay, feeling like you do
have some kind of like invisible armor, not against the
bad things, but against being sunk by those bad things.
(28:03):
So the good news is that self trust isn't something
you either have or you don't have. It's not something
you're born with. It's not like some genetic blessing like
we said, it's ordinary magic, and it's something that you
can build it through, you know, daily choices, through small experiments,
through conscious reflection, even when it might bring up some
(28:25):
hard stuff that you don't want to look at. I
think something really helpful to get us back in touch
with this internal compass in our self trust is again
just to like check back in with your intuition instead
of jumping into a choice, pause, acknowledge the anxiety or
acknowledge the indecision, and just ask yourself, what does my
gut tell me in this in this moment is the
(28:45):
right move and what is an even deeper part of
myself tell me about my abilities and my capabilities even
if it isn't. When you face a decision, take a minute,
take a few days, even if this is for something
as small as what you want for dinner or what
activity you want to do that day, Write down your
(29:06):
initial instinct, step away from it for a second, come
back to it, and perhaps act on it before you
seek external advice and see what the consequences are. See
learn from the consequences instead of seeing the consequences as punishment.
Think about the reasons that you often trust others. It's
(29:26):
likely that the reason you do is because they're kind,
because they're consistent, because they keep promises, because they show
up for you. These are all things that we need
to start doing for ourselves. Start with some super small,
simple promises that you can make to yourself. If you've
been wanting to get fit up, promise yourself that you
will go to the gym twice a week, or that
(29:49):
you will go in one round this week. This is
something that I've been doing a lot. I'm training for
like a half marathon at the moment, and you know what,
it's not very fun. I actually really don't enjoy it
as much as I I thought I was going to.
But I made a commitment and it has been like
this beautiful exercise and being like, Okay, I'm going to
follow through with things that I decided to do the
(30:10):
same way that I would want someone else to follow
through if they'd made a promise to me. Keep the promise,
Keep the promise. Don't let yourself down, don't let yourself
feel less worthy of your time and your energy than
someone else. You know, by having this kind of respect
(30:31):
for ourselves. In these small ways, we do really start
to strengthen the narrative that like us and our unconscious
or our subconscious, us and the parts that sometimes actually
want to act against us, we are a team. We
can work together, we can make things happen, and we
can survive the things that we didn't necessarily want to happen,
but it happened anyways. Next come the small scale experiments.
(30:54):
I always say this, and I will continue.
Speaker 1 (30:56):
To do so.
Speaker 2 (30:57):
Life is not a recipe. I think that there is
this when you think about how life is sometimes described,
it definitely has this like a to B two see idea,
like you do this, and then once you've done that,
you do that, and then once you've done that, you
do this, and like there is there is a right
way to go about things. No, it's not a recipe.
It's a series of experiments. It's a series of experiments
(31:19):
where you are the subject. And whether these things work
out or not, it doesn't matter, Like it still teaches
us things sometimes, like the most successful experiments in science
are the ones that don't work out because both of
those outcomes contain information. So you need to be experimenting,
you need to be seeing like your life is a
(31:40):
series of smaller chapters and opportunities to redirect yourself rather
than just this like one long linear, continuous line where
you know you have to make the right decision every
single step of the way, otherwise the line is broken.
Totally not the case. Self trust, I think really grows
in active practice. I think it could be super helpful
to choose low stakes decisions where you can follow through
(32:04):
on your instincts or just test them, trying new places
even if you don't know if it's going to be good,
deciding when to leave an event, speaking up in a
meeting when you feel like that pool in your chest
to do so, doing things you'd normally you want to
do with someone else doing them alone, and being like, hey,
I survived. This whole process is about really gaining and
(32:24):
gathering evidence of how capable you truly are. Remember your
comfort zone feel safe because it's predictable, because again, it
satisfies the need for control. It's easy to control an environment,
whether it's emotional or physical, that you already like understand
every inch of. But it's also where your growth will stagnate.
(32:45):
And I'm going to take an educated guess and say
that you wouldn't be listening to this episode if you
were actually happy staying stagnant, like, that's not why you're here.
Expansion zone is where true learning and true self trust happens.
It's a space of discomfort is also totally necessary to grow.
(33:07):
The way we move into this zone is again through microactions.
Something I always say about risks is that they don't
necessarily have to be spontaneous and large to still be
expansive and to still be a risk. You don't need
to quit your job and move across the world to
show that you can trust yourself again. Just start with
something small. Start with something small that you may also
(33:32):
know won't work out, so that you can kind of
again as an experiment, see how you will still survive.
See how even though you didn't know the outcome, the
outcome was not as bad as you probably suspected. I
also think something really crucial to add to this is
(33:53):
to stop explaining yourself when you make either small or
big decisions that feel intuitively wrecked to you. Fight the
need to explain it to family, to colleagues, to friends,
to people you don't even know you know. I had
this experience the other day where I think I've talked
about this a little bit. Me and my boyfriend aren't
(34:13):
moving overseas, soom we're moving to London. And it was
my mom's sixtieth on the weekend and we were in
Melbourne for that and one of her friends, who I love,
she's a close family friend, but one of her friends
like was talking to me and she was kind of
drilling me on, like, well, why are you moving to London?
Doesn't like everyone kind of do that, Like what's your plan?
Do you have a plan? Like do you know where
you're going to live? Like what if you can't find
(34:34):
anywhere to live? Like what if you don't like it
and you need to come home? Like have you thought
about that? And I just felt trapped and having to
explain something. You know, I don't even know if it's
going to turn out right yet, but I trust that
if it doesn't, AM going to be you okay, And
I trust that this is where I want to be.
And it immediately got me, you know, a very defensive
(34:55):
and be very insecure and in like a state of
doubting myself. And afterwards, I was talking to my cousin
who is wires beyond her years, and she was like
you should have just said I don't know yet, but
I'm excited to find out and left it at that,
Like why did you feel like you know? I think
what she said was like the fact that you, like,
in your act of explaining it to this person, maybe
(35:16):
you were trying to explain it and justify it for yourself,
but you don't need to because you already have that
intuition and intention and deny to do that. And that
is literally all you need. No one needs to know
your reasons, especially since you're the one who's going to
face the outcome anyway. It's not personal. It's not meant
to shut them down. It's meant to protect your ability
to hear your desires and feel directed by your compass.
(35:40):
It really is, you know, so marvelous when you let
yourself be a little bit afraid, and so marvelous when
you let yourself make a decision that you don't know,
you don't know the outcome of, and you still show
up for that. And I know I'm using like a
lot of therapy speak and a lot of like self
help language. I think the real thing is that you
(36:04):
don't really understand the brilliance of self trust until you
really experienced a moment where you're in a situation where
you really can't trust anything else or you really can't
trust anyone else. Then you just have to be the
one who like is fully there for you and fully
says like I'm gonna be okay, and I'm gonna be okay,
even if this is like a complete mess around, even
(36:26):
if this is like a complete explosion. I am grounded
in my confidence. I am grounded in the fact that
sometimes I don't know how capable I am until there
is a situation that stretches me to my limits. And
then that's like my new that's my new level, right,
(36:46):
Like that's new, that's my new threshold. And then something
else will And then by being in that threshold, there's
like a whole new, a whole new like environment of
opportunities to become available. And once you've mastered those, like
another level will open up by you extending yourself and
by you saying I'm going to be okay, I'm going
(37:07):
to be okay in this. I trust myself, I trust
my abilities, I trust my intuition. And the more you
operate with that manual in mind, and the more you
operate with that perspective, like the stronger and stronger this
muscle becomes until I don't know, I feel like you
can really do anything, and I feel like you're willing
(37:27):
to make risks, take risks at the drop of the hat.
You're willing to leave situations you don't want to be in.
You are willing to leave relationships you don't want to
be in, friendships, you don't want to be in jobs
you don't want to be in because you know that
something better will come along, or that you'll be able
to create that better situation for yourself. So that's just
(37:48):
a convolated way of saying self trust is important. I
hope that it's something that you continue to focus on.
I hope that you can see it now as a
bit of an antidote for a lot of what we
fear and a lot of what you know we desperately
want to cling onto, which is control, uncertainty. You can't
have those things, but you can have self trust in
(38:09):
the face of them. I want to thank our researcher,
Libby Cobbert for her help on this episode. If this
helped you, make sure you share it with a friend,
share it on social media, share it, I don't know,
with a parent or with a colleague, whoever, if you
want to hear more about this topic, if you want
to see more content like this, you can also follow
(38:30):
us on Instagram at that Psychology Podcast. People always ask
me about the name. This is like a total tangent,
But someone the other day was like, why is it
that psychology podcast when that's not the name of your podcast,
and I was like, because the Psychology of your twenties
was too long to like show up. So anyways, that's
where you can find us. We do like these cool
(38:50):
summaries of these episodes if you want something to refer
back to as well, if you feel called to do so,
leave a five star review. Make sure you're following along
or subscribe wherever you are listening to this episode. And
until next time, stay safe, be kind, be gentle with yourself,
trust yourself, and we will talk very very soon,
Hello everybody, and welcome back to the Psychology of Your Twenties,
the podcast where we talk through some of the big
life changes and transitions of our twenties and what they
mean for our psychology.
Speaker 2 (00:23):
Hello everybody, Welcome back to the show. Welcome back to
the podcast. New listeners, old listeners. Wherever you are in
the world, it is so great to have you here
back for another episode as we of course break down
the psychology of our twenties. If you have been around
for a little while, you might remember that at the
(00:43):
start of each year, I kind of like to set
a theme for the next twelve months to come as
part of like our Welcome to the New Year like
podcast series that I do every new year. For twenty
twenty five, this year's intention it was the year for
trusting yourself, which to me, I think really meant like
(01:05):
letting yourself be a little bit afraid, trusting yourself in
situations you haven't been before, honoring your intuition, amongst many
other things. And today I wanted to kind of return
to that New year pledge and do like a check
in for like the final what is it like, final
third of the year. I'll be honest and I said
(01:27):
this in the initial episode. Trusting myself is something I've
always struggled with. I can think of so many moments
where I knew deep down what was the right decision
for me, but I still asked five other people what
they thought, or I still hesitated everything from when I
(01:47):
wanted to break up with my first boyfriend to literally
like the other week, I was at Ikia and I
was like trying to decide what lamp to buy. This
like opinion shopping that I often do, either leads me
to an outcome that I don't really want, not because
of the other people but because of me, or it
takes me so much longer to act on things that
were pretty emotionally in time sensitive, And later on I
(02:10):
look back and I think, why did I not just
listen to myself? Like in hindsight, it was so clear
what I wanted, it was so clear what I was
being called to do, and I just didn't have that
sense of trust that I actually was making the right
decision or that I could trust my intuition. Maybe you
have been here too, that kind of like the tug
(02:31):
of war between your own instincts and the pressure of
outside voices. It's definitely not easy, especially in your twenties,
when I feel like we'd all just love for someone
to give us the answer and to like kind of
play your life for you like a video game. But
what I've learned is that trusting yourself doesn't actually mean
you're always going to get it right, the same way
(02:52):
that if you put someone else in charge of your life,
they wouldn't always get it right either. It doesn't guarantee
an outcome. What it really does is just give a
sense of I trust myself, which means I'm going to
be fine anyways. And as I always say, the opposite
of anxiety isn't calm, it's actually trust. So building that
internal anchor and that internal system and process is like
(03:15):
one of the most crucial things that we can do
during this decade. So in today's episode, we're going to
dive into why self trust is honestly so hard, how
trust can be the antidote to a lot of innate
fears that this decade of life brings up for us,
and how we can kind of rebuild the connection with ou,
(03:36):
this inner voice that we all have, even if you
can't hear it very clearly right now, How can we
rebuild that relationship using some essential psychology tools. I really
hope that you guys enjoyed this episode, because if there's
one relationship that's going to carry you through life, it
is the one you have with yourself. And learning to
trust that person, the one who will make every decision
(03:58):
for you, be with you for every outcome, see you
through every setback, that is going to make you feel
a lot more capable. So, without further ado, let's get
into how we can fully trust ourselves. Trust is one
of those words where I think tend to place in
(04:19):
the hands of others a lot. You know, we talk
about whether we can like trust our friends, whether our
partners are trustworthy, whether like the people we've worked with
have like gained our confidence, whether we can like trust politicians.
Trust is like this leap of faith for another person,
where if you're wrong, you can obviously fall pretty far.
(04:41):
But the deeper, more unsettling question that's often left unasked
is do I trust myself? Not only do I trust
myself in my judgments of those people, but do I
actually believe that I can rely on my own judgment,
my own instincts, my own ability to handle whatever life
is going to bring me Or is it the case
(05:02):
that I kind of hide behind other people's opinions, hide
behind indecision, hide behind kind of doing nothing. For many
of us, especially in our twenties, you know, the answer
is we probably don't trust ourselves fully. I at least
I go back and forth, sometimes feeling like I'm so
in my element, I'm so prepared for whatever happens in life,
(05:25):
and other times like just really feeling like the wind
could blow me over. And that's not because we're weak
or incapable. It's because our twenties are like uniquely challenging
to this self trust. We've talked about this term before
emerging adulthood. This is a term that was coined by
the developmental psychologist defree n It, and he uses it
(05:48):
to describe how uniquely tumultuous this period of our lives
is and how we are kind of playing what he
calls a roleless role, often shifting by hour, by day,
by week between different perspectives and essentially different versions of
ourselves and trying to find the right ones or one
against like the backdrop of some pretty life defining choices,
(06:11):
meaning that you are sometimes going to make wrong choices.
According to the future version of you. Sometimes you're going
to make wrong choices that later on you might regret.
That doesn't mean you can't trust yourself. It means that
you made the best decision at the time with what
you knew now, and you made the best decision at
(06:33):
the time with the identity that you thought was most
true to yourself. But that doesn't always help. We don't
always have that perspective. We can actually be rather cruel
to our past selves and about the decisions that we're
currently making, and it means that we can feel kind
of alienated from our own selves, Like why did I
think that was a good idea? You know? Why did
I end up here? Why did I think that was
(06:55):
a good decision. That's like a classic thing in our twenties,
especially as we get into our later twenties, of like Wow,
why did I wear that? Why did I date that person?
Why did I say that thing? Why did I take
that job? Not remembering that you know at the time,
that's what felt like the right thing to do. It's
all part of it. There's also this undercurrent of fear
(07:16):
and kind of like what if thinking That definitely stalks
a lot of the decisions that we're making. This really
does injure our self trust because we're constantly thinking, you know,
what if I'm wrong right now? What if I can't
handle the consequences?
Speaker 1 (07:29):
What if.
Speaker 2 (07:31):
You know, this one choice and the ten years of
choices that it leads me to mean that I end
up having a lot of regrets or I regret my
life as a whole. That's a classic for me feeling
like I can't trust myself right now because I don't
have certainty around how the decision I'm currently making is
going to like impact me in the future. And I'm
(07:52):
sure a lot of us are very familiar with this.
I think one of the most paralyzing experiences of our
twenties is just this general anxiety have about the future.
Someone said this to me the other day, and I
love it. Anxiety basically thrives in the gap between what
we can't control and what we think we can't handle.
If the world is uncertain and spoiler alert it is,
(08:14):
and your brain believes you're helpless, which you're not, anxiety
has a lot of room to operate. You're not helpless,
even if you do end up making a few wrong choices,
even if you do have moments of fear. Literally, there
are people who come back from hugely destructive life altering
decisions and still live out incredible lives. You will as well.
(08:36):
I know this probably won't do much to ease your anxiety, though,
and that's because cognitive behavioral models of anxiety really talk
about how there is this vicious cycle when it comes
to our lack of trust in the future. Anxious people
I count myself as one of them. We constantly overestimate
the threats in the environment or in the future, whilst
(08:59):
also underestimating our own ability to cope. And because we
seriously do not acknowledge how much power we really have
and how much resilience we really have, it just feels
like anything we could tastripize about, any big life altering
thing we can imagine each of them, could just be
(09:22):
the end of us. And we don't give ourselves enough
credit for the fact that we will probably be okay.
Not only will a lot of that stuff probably not happen,
but you are a lot more capable in those times
of crisis or even in those times of just like
a little bit of negativity than you think. You are.
The antidote to that spiral of course is once again
(09:44):
self trust, and that's sometimes the thing that feels the
hardest in those moments, but it is the truest anchor
you can find. A recent study I think it was
conducted last year at a university in South Korea, looked
at around eight hundred participants and it looked at what
the most effective emotional antidote to anxiety was. They looked
(10:06):
at things like hope, they looked at things like happiness,
they looked at things like trust. And what they found
was not only did trust actually end up improving hope
and improving happiness and reducing anxiety, but self trust in
particular was most influential compared to trust in others, or
trust in an organization, or a trust in a god
(10:29):
or a religion. Self trust, which was basically measured by
like confidence in our abilities, belief in our abilities, self respect,
it was the most influential thing measured in this study
for improving anxiety. And yet I don't think it gets
mentioned much in the literature. When you trust yourself. I
(10:50):
think the secondary thing that we've kind of been coming
to is that you stop needing certainty and outcomes which
you're never going to find anyways. You know you don't
have to know exactly how a situation will unfold because
you know you can handle it. So it takes a
lot of the warrior away. So often I think we
get like swept up in this idea that the antidote
to anxiety is control. If I could just predict or
(11:12):
manage every possible outcome, well, i'd feel safe. If I
just knew exactly how the situation would pan out, I
wouldn't worry. And so control becomes kind of like a
red herring that we are like constantly chasing, not realizing
that it is entirely an illusion and what keeps us
really deeply entrenched in an exhausting, anxious pattern of thinking.
(11:34):
It is like looking for a pot of gold at
the end of the rainbow. That's how I always think
about it. Trust, on the other hand, unlike certainty, is real.
It is the rainbow. It is practical, it is actionable,
and it turns the focus away from external to internal.
We no longer need the illusion of certainty or trying
(11:55):
to seek reassurance from others to know that we'll be okay. Instead,
we can be really secure in the knowledge that whatever happens,
you're going to be okay, and in that anxiety like
it doesn't have anything left, Like it really loosens its
gript because it's like, okay, maybe we can't predict when
the army will attack, but it doesn't matter because like
my forces, my emotional forces, my forces of resilience, are
(12:19):
super strong. So if self trust is so vital, why
do so many of us lack it? This is pretty
multi layered. I think the first reason is because yes,
there isn't that focus. It's also not taught for some
of us. You know, it's gonna sound so cliche, but
it always does seem to stretch back to childhood. If
(12:39):
you grew up in an environment where your opinions weren't respected,
where you were shamed for your mistakes or your feelings
were dismissed, you may have internalized the message that your instincts,
your relationship to your emotions, you know when you really
do require help, like all of those messages can't be trusted. Erickson,
(13:00):
we talk about him again a lot. He's very famous.
He developed the eight stages of psychosocial development back in
the fifties. He basically suggested and noted that of all
the stages that we go through from when we're a
child to when we're an adult. One of the most
important ones is this trust versus mistrust stage. This takes
(13:23):
place like around eighteen months to two years old, and
according to him, this period is so crucial because it's
when our view of the world and ourselves and our
personalities and our abilities are really shaped, even if we
don't have memory of that time. At this age, you know,
(13:43):
we are completely dependent on our caregivers, and so how
our parents obviously interact with us has a big impact.
Aspects that can really build a sense of trust are
things like the caregiver creating a safe environment for us
to make mistakes, or our caregivers being intentive to our needs,
or offering reassurance when we are scared or distressed, basically
(14:04):
saying like, oh, you're having a reaction, you're having an emotion,
you're having a feeling. Well, that must mean something. And
so by building trust in them and knowing that they're
going to give that feeling attention or some kind of solution,
we also build trust in ourselves. You know, hopefully that
kind of makes sense. Of course, you know, things wouldn't
(14:24):
have been perfect all the time. You know, when a
baby cries, sometimes it is really hard to figure out
what's wrong. But it's really about whether the trustworthy relationships
and interactions that we had outweighed the untrustworthy ones. If
the positive does outweigh the bad, then, according to Ericsson,
this gives us. This gives infants a good sense of
(14:45):
how to trust themselves as well and how to trust
the world around them all through that primary relationship. However,
if bad interactions outweigh the good, if untrustworthy interactions outweigh
the trustworthy ones, and you know, we as children, having
been able to rationalize why that may be, we instead,
(15:05):
as he suggests, begin to internalize that completely, begin to
turn it inward. Begin to believe we're unimportant, we're unlovable,
and also that we can't trust those around us. We
also can't trust ourselves, or we can only trust ourselves.
We lean towards hyperindependence, which can actually be equally unhealthy
(15:29):
because hyperindependence actually isn't necessarily about self trust. It's again
about control. Hyperindependence is about feeling like the only person
you can rely on is you because you don't trust
yourself in situations where you do need like a broader
set of skills, so I don't know if that makes
(15:51):
sense to me. It definitely does, and like I think
about that, I'm like, oh, yep, that definitely sits. But
it's just important to understand how like along the way,
think of trust as like this tree that has like
that needs to have really deep roots in order to
stand tall in adulthood and you know, in our twenties,
(16:13):
and if at any point something has poisoned those roots,
or something has made you believe that this tree is
shakable that you don't find support in the trunk of it,
like it's going to deeply injure you and harm you.
Another significant element of this is perfectionism. You can really
see that, like what we're not We're not just talking
about self trust again, We're talking about this competition between
(16:36):
control and a reliance on ourselves. At first, I think
perfectionism can actually kind of seem like trust, much like hyperindependence, right, Like,
we prove to ourselves that we are capable through pushing
beyond what we imagine. We strive for excellence and often
this excellence is rewarded. We prove that we can trust
our abilities. But if we believe our self worth is
(16:58):
conditional on never failing every single mistake becomes proof that
you can't trust yourself, and so you have to apply
more pressure. You have to apply more force onto yourself
to keep meeting your standard. This inner critic becomes a
lot louder in your twenties, when I think the stakes
become a lot higher and you begin to feel an
(17:18):
even greater sense of responsibility for your actions. Again, it's
not about making the right decision that will continue to
work out in the future forever or and ever. It's
just about being able to make a decision at all.
And often perfectionism is master's procrastination, which again is an
indicator of a lack of self trust. If you cannot
(17:39):
make a decision because you do not have confirmation that
everything isn't going to turn out absolutely perfectly how you
would like it, you are going to procrastinate on that decision.
You're going to experience major decision paralysis. That's your perfectionism
at play. Again. It shows that deep down you don't
really think that you're capable of handling what might come
(18:01):
if you can't predict or control the outcome from the
get go. I think also as a culture, we're also
conditioned to outsource authority and that further kind of damages
this tree or this compass or however you want to
visualize it. You know, algorithms these days tell us what
to buy. I don't know about you, but like I'm
(18:21):
just buying the first thing that shows up when I
google it, Like I don't really like trust myself to
know what I want. Sometimes, you know, career guides tell
us what the best route is and what our dream
job will be. Self help books give us like the
perfect formula if you can just bring yourself to follow it.
You know, advice isn't bad in itself, but when we
(18:43):
rely on it too much, we really do forget how
to hear our own voice. And over time the silence
of that voice feels like it's absence, when really it's
just like waiting for us to tune back in. These
external factors perfectionism, childhood, outsourcing your thought already, they all
kind of play into each other to make it really
(19:03):
difficult to break out and to just like come back
to what is a deep human intuition that we all have.
This is the other thing. Self trust also means reconnecting
with like a really ancient information system and a really
(19:24):
ancient intuitive system that perhaps we've kind of forgotten and
that perhaps we kind of don't have time to listen
to because we are so busy, because we are required
to make such urgent choices, because the stakes of this
like modern day, feel very fast. Intuition is not always
(19:48):
going to be the most urgent voice in the room.
It might actually be the most calm. It might also
need a little bit more time to rise to the surface.
I know that sounds counter to what you may expect
or imagine intuition as, which is like that immediate reactional
response to something happening in your environment that tells you
(20:10):
that you're in danger. But the intuition we're talking about
is like a sense of like the intuition around a
deeper sense of self. And I think in like a
modern context, we don't that intuitive sense of self doesn't
have as much breathing room. And so of course, when
we're constantly pushed into making quick, urgent decisions or wanting
(20:31):
to outsource our decision making, again, that muscle, that self
trust muscle atrophies and continues to weaken. So we're going
to talk about why that is, but also how we
can rebuild that muscle, how we can re here. I
don't know what's the right word. How we can I
(20:53):
gets tuned back into this like deep pool of self
knowledge and self trust that we all innately have after
this short break. I think if we want to learn
how to implement self trust into our lives, we need
(21:14):
to first really understand what that actually looks and feels like.
I think it can be tricky to describe, because, like
unlike external trust, where you can kind of assess how
reliable someone is by past performance, sometimes we aren't as
objective with ourselves. So here's your kind of guide to
(21:35):
I guess what it feels like. Firstly, self trust means
following through on promises. If you say you'll stop work
at six pm, you actually do it. If you commit
to calling your friend because they matter to you, you
follow through. If you set a goal, if you set
a boundary for your wellbeing, whether that's blocking someone, saying
no to a draining event, knowing when you need to
(21:57):
take a break, you don't abandon your self for the
sake of approval. You really understand that you are the
one who understands yourself the most. A really famous psychologist,
Carl Rogers, He described this as congruence, which is basically
when what you feel on the inside aligns with how
you show up on the outside. This is less about perfectionism,
(22:21):
it's less about consistency, it's less about control. The knowledge
that you can count on yourself the same way, maybe
even more than you want to count on others, is
just like this very deeply stable, calm feeling that there
(22:42):
is someone who has your back and that person is you.
I think self trust, actually I know self trust also
feels like compassion. Think about it. If you constantly punish
yourself when things go wrong, which they will, why would
you ever risk trying again keep beating yourself up when
you make a mistake because you literally didn't know any better.
(23:04):
That doesn't sound like someone who trusts that they're going
to be okay, even if it's not right now. But
in the end, self trust, if you want to build it,
it looks like speaking to yourself with the same tone
you would use with a really close friend or with
your baby sister, or with your childhood self. Instead of
saying like, oh my god, I should have known better.
(23:24):
I'm such an idiot. This was like totally avoidable. It's
more like saying, yeah, that was really hard, and this
is a great opportunity to learn, And in those self
directed moments of gentleness, you deepen that bond the way
that a child would respond to gentle parenting, or like
someone who lets them make errors and therefore allows them
(23:45):
to test their boundaries more, allows them to trust themselves
more because they know they are in a safe company.
The world can be really critical and really judgmental, Like
if you're looking for someone to hate on you, if
you're looking for someone to tear you down, you can
find someone like that pretty easily. So let someone else
take care of the harshness. Let someone else be your bully.
(24:07):
The least that we can do for ourselves is to
have our own backs. Self trust gives you the freedom,
I think, to make choices without guaranteeing outcomes or demanding guarantees.
Imagine like you're standing in front of two job offers.
This is actually an example that was given to me
by a listener at one of our live shows recently,
where she asked me, you know, I've got these two
(24:29):
job offers. I've just graduated university. One is super safe
and predictable. One is really risky, but it's super exciting.
She was talking about how she's kind of been sitting
on these offers for over a month out of fear
that she would make the wrong choice, out of fear
that that wrong choice would then spiral and ruin her life.
(24:50):
Trust me, it's actually harder to ruin your life than
you think. And really like what I said to her
was that not making a decision is the worst decision
that you can make. The thing is is that the
fact that you care so much shows that even if
you make the so called wrong choice, you are still
(25:11):
going to be able to act on your future interests
in like a way that will guarantee you will come
back to the right choice. What I mean by that
is that you obviously care a lot about your life,
and you care a lot about making it a good life.
So it's not like that's going to go away and
disappear just because you make a choice that maybe wasn't right. Also,
(25:32):
there's no way of knowing if the other choice would
have been better. But say you're really unhappy in the
risky job, say you're really unhappy in the safe job,
that's not the end of your options. That's not the
end of your ability to change things or to make
a different decision. You are going to be okay because
you have that sense of investment and care, because you
(25:52):
trust yourself, You trust that you will not abandon yourself.
That's perhaps, you know, the deepest sign of self trust.
It's resilience. That's really what I'm describing resilience. There is
a developmental psychologist and I cannot remember her name, but
she calls resilience ordinary magic. You know, it's not superhuman.
(26:12):
It's not like the wild to come by. Very regular
normal people recover adapt growth from decisions that didn't work
out in their favor all the time. And having resilience
is kind of just having the ability to just acknowledge
a bad outcome, acknowledge that it sucks and say okay.
(26:33):
Is ruminating on this and obsessing over this actually going
to change anything or help me? Probably not the best
way I can learn from this. The best way I
can move on is to integrate what I've learned, retune
that deep intuition that I have, retune or you know,
in hindsight, rethink about the signs that were there or
(26:54):
weren't there, and keep trying. I think as well, and
I keep saying this, but I just want to rein
force it. Self trust is really just a sense of calm,
and that's why I think that it is the opposite
of anxiety. Anxiety. Anxiety wants to like shift everything into
high gear and it wants you to get somewhere as
(27:16):
fast as possible. It wants you to get the answers
as fast as possible. And if it doesn't feel like
you're moving, well, it's gonna like it's gonna put a
bit of a spark in you to do that. And
I think that's where like a lot of that, you know,
very quintessential anxiety anxious feeling comes from. It wants to
rush you. It wants you to be urgent. It wants
you to just like figure things out, even if it's
(27:38):
not the best decision for you. Self trust feels like
calm in comparison. It really is a physical sensation of
just like feeling like your feet of family planted, feeling
like you're going to be okay, feeling like you do
have some kind of like invisible armor, not against the
bad things, but against being sunk by those bad things.
(28:03):
So the good news is that self trust isn't something
you either have or you don't have. It's not something
you're born with. It's not like some genetic blessing like
we said, it's ordinary magic, and it's something that you
can build it through, you know, daily choices, through small experiments,
through conscious reflection, even when it might bring up some
(28:25):
hard stuff that you don't want to look at. I
think something really helpful to get us back in touch
with this internal compass in our self trust is again
just to like check back in with your intuition instead
of jumping into a choice, pause, acknowledge the anxiety or
acknowledge the indecision, and just ask yourself, what does my
gut tell me in this in this moment is the
(28:45):
right move and what is an even deeper part of
myself tell me about my abilities and my capabilities even
if it isn't. When you face a decision, take a minute,
take a few days, even if this is for something
as small as what you want for dinner or what
activity you want to do that day, Write down your
(29:06):
initial instinct, step away from it for a second, come
back to it, and perhaps act on it before you
seek external advice and see what the consequences are. See
learn from the consequences instead of seeing the consequences as punishment.
Think about the reasons that you often trust others. It's
(29:26):
likely that the reason you do is because they're kind,
because they're consistent, because they keep promises, because they show
up for you. These are all things that we need
to start doing for ourselves. Start with some super small,
simple promises that you can make to yourself. If you've
been wanting to get fit up, promise yourself that you
will go to the gym twice a week, or that
(29:49):
you will go in one round this week. This is
something that I've been doing a lot. I'm training for
like a half marathon at the moment, and you know what,
it's not very fun. I actually really don't enjoy it
as much as I I thought I was going to.
But I made a commitment and it has been like
this beautiful exercise and being like, Okay, I'm going to
follow through with things that I decided to do the
(30:10):
same way that I would want someone else to follow
through if they'd made a promise to me. Keep the promise,
Keep the promise. Don't let yourself down, don't let yourself
feel less worthy of your time and your energy than
someone else. You know, by having this kind of respect
(30:31):
for ourselves. In these small ways, we do really start
to strengthen the narrative that like us and our unconscious
or our subconscious, us and the parts that sometimes actually
want to act against us, we are a team. We
can work together, we can make things happen, and we
can survive the things that we didn't necessarily want to happen,
but it happened anyways. Next come the small scale experiments.
(30:54):
I always say this, and I will continue.
Speaker 1 (30:56):
To do so.
Speaker 2 (30:57):
Life is not a recipe. I think that there is
this when you think about how life is sometimes described,
it definitely has this like a to B two see idea,
like you do this, and then once you've done that,
you do that, and then once you've done that, you
do this, and like there is there is a right
way to go about things. No, it's not a recipe.
It's a series of experiments. It's a series of experiments
(31:19):
where you are the subject. And whether these things work
out or not, it doesn't matter, Like it still teaches
us things sometimes, like the most successful experiments in science
are the ones that don't work out because both of
those outcomes contain information. So you need to be experimenting,
you need to be seeing like your life is a
(31:40):
series of smaller chapters and opportunities to redirect yourself rather
than just this like one long linear, continuous line where
you know you have to make the right decision every
single step of the way, otherwise the line is broken.
Totally not the case. Self trust, I think really grows
in active practice. I think it could be super helpful
to choose low stakes decisions where you can follow through
(32:04):
on your instincts or just test them, trying new places
even if you don't know if it's going to be good,
deciding when to leave an event, speaking up in a
meeting when you feel like that pool in your chest
to do so, doing things you'd normally you want to
do with someone else doing them alone, and being like, hey,
I survived. This whole process is about really gaining and
(32:24):
gathering evidence of how capable you truly are. Remember your
comfort zone feel safe because it's predictable, because again, it
satisfies the need for control. It's easy to control an environment,
whether it's emotional or physical, that you already like understand
every inch of. But it's also where your growth will stagnate.
(32:45):
And I'm going to take an educated guess and say
that you wouldn't be listening to this episode if you
were actually happy staying stagnant, like, that's not why you're here.
Expansion zone is where true learning and true self trust happens.
It's a space of discomfort is also totally necessary to grow.
(33:07):
The way we move into this zone is again through microactions.
Something I always say about risks is that they don't
necessarily have to be spontaneous and large to still be
expansive and to still be a risk. You don't need
to quit your job and move across the world to
show that you can trust yourself again. Just start with
something small. Start with something small that you may also
(33:32):
know won't work out, so that you can kind of
again as an experiment, see how you will still survive.
See how even though you didn't know the outcome, the
outcome was not as bad as you probably suspected. I
also think something really crucial to add to this is
(33:53):
to stop explaining yourself when you make either small or
big decisions that feel intuitively wrecked to you. Fight the
need to explain it to family, to colleagues, to friends,
to people you don't even know you know. I had
this experience the other day where I think I've talked
about this a little bit. Me and my boyfriend aren't
(34:13):
moving overseas, soom we're moving to London. And it was
my mom's sixtieth on the weekend and we were in
Melbourne for that and one of her friends, who I love,
she's a close family friend, but one of her friends
like was talking to me and she was kind of
drilling me on, like, well, why are you moving to London?
Doesn't like everyone kind of do that, Like what's your plan?
Do you have a plan? Like do you know where
you're going to live? Like what if you can't find
(34:34):
anywhere to live? Like what if you don't like it
and you need to come home? Like have you thought
about that? And I just felt trapped and having to
explain something. You know, I don't even know if it's
going to turn out right yet, but I trust that
if it doesn't, AM going to be you okay, And
I trust that this is where I want to be.
And it immediately got me, you know, a very defensive
(34:55):
and be very insecure and in like a state of
doubting myself. And afterwards, I was talking to my cousin
who is wires beyond her years, and she was like
you should have just said I don't know yet, but
I'm excited to find out and left it at that,
Like why did you feel like you know? I think
what she said was like the fact that you, like,
in your act of explaining it to this person, maybe
(35:16):
you were trying to explain it and justify it for yourself,
but you don't need to because you already have that
intuition and intention and deny to do that. And that
is literally all you need. No one needs to know
your reasons, especially since you're the one who's going to
face the outcome anyway. It's not personal. It's not meant
to shut them down. It's meant to protect your ability
to hear your desires and feel directed by your compass.
(35:40):
It really is, you know, so marvelous when you let
yourself be a little bit afraid, and so marvelous when
you let yourself make a decision that you don't know,
you don't know the outcome of, and you still show
up for that. And I know I'm using like a
lot of therapy speak and a lot of like self
help language. I think the real thing is that you
(36:04):
don't really understand the brilliance of self trust until you
really experienced a moment where you're in a situation where
you really can't trust anything else or you really can't
trust anyone else. Then you just have to be the
one who like is fully there for you and fully
says like I'm gonna be okay, and I'm gonna be okay,
even if this is like a complete mess around, even
(36:26):
if this is like a complete explosion. I am grounded
in my confidence. I am grounded in the fact that
sometimes I don't know how capable I am until there
is a situation that stretches me to my limits. And
then that's like my new that's my new level, right,
(36:46):
Like that's new, that's my new threshold. And then something
else will And then by being in that threshold, there's
like a whole new, a whole new like environment of
opportunities to become available. And once you've mastered those, like
another level will open up by you extending yourself and
by you saying I'm going to be okay, I'm going
(37:07):
to be okay in this. I trust myself, I trust
my abilities, I trust my intuition. And the more you
operate with that manual in mind, and the more you
operate with that perspective, like the stronger and stronger this
muscle becomes until I don't know, I feel like you
can really do anything, and I feel like you're willing
(37:27):
to make risks, take risks at the drop of the hat.
You're willing to leave situations you don't want to be in.
You are willing to leave relationships you don't want to
be in, friendships, you don't want to be in jobs
you don't want to be in because you know that
something better will come along, or that you'll be able
to create that better situation for yourself. So that's just
(37:48):
a convolated way of saying self trust is important. I
hope that it's something that you continue to focus on.
I hope that you can see it now as a
bit of an antidote for a lot of what we
fear and a lot of what you know we desperately
want to cling onto, which is control, uncertainty. You can't
have those things, but you can have self trust in
(38:09):
the face of them. I want to thank our researcher,
Libby Cobbert for her help on this episode. If this
helped you, make sure you share it with a friend,
share it on social media, share it, I don't know,
with a parent or with a colleague, whoever, if you
want to hear more about this topic, if you want
to see more content like this, you can also follow
(38:30):
us on Instagram at that Psychology Podcast. People always ask
me about the name. This is like a total tangent,
But someone the other day was like, why is it
that psychology podcast when that's not the name of your podcast,
and I was like, because the Psychology of your twenties
was too long to like show up. So anyways, that's
where you can find us. We do like these cool
(38:50):
summaries of these episodes if you want something to refer
back to as well, if you feel called to do so,
leave a five star review. Make sure you're following along
or subscribe wherever you are listening to this episode. And
until next time, stay safe, be kind, be gentle with yourself,
trust yourself, and we will talk very very soon,
Host
Jemma Sbeghen
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