Have you ever struggled to decide or enter a commitment because you didn’t trust your ability to make the right choice? How many times have you gotten a feeling in the pit of your stomach that something is not right? Did you pay attention to your intuition, or did you ignore it? Deep in our core, we know what is best for us. So why don’t we trust that?
Some of us were taught as children that we can’t trust ourselves. We couldn’t trust our loved ones, or our loved ones were unable to trust us. Sometimes life experiences shatter our trust in ourselves. You can think of a time when you trusted yourself, but it turned out badly and hurt you. The inability to trust yourself can stem from not knowing who you are and what’s important to you. Other times, we know what is right for us, but we fail to honor that because of fear, external pressure, or a belief that we are not worthy.
Sometimes we make decisions that don’t turn out as planned. Sometimes, the red flags are there, and we ignore them. Other times, we truly make the best decision we can. Ask any successful entrepreneur about her process of decision-making. She will tell you that she weighed all the pros and cons and tried to anticipate any problems. She might have looked to the experts for helpful insight. In the end, she made the most informed decision she could. If you ask her if all her decisions were the right ones, she will tell you no. Life changes, and people change. Just because something doesn’t go as planned doesn’t mean you can’t trust yourself in the future.
Trusting yourself is essential to loving yourself. You know yourself better than anyone, and no one is going to take care of you except you. Until you trust yourself, you will not be able to fully trust anyone else. When you don’t trust yourself, you will seek guidance from everyone else. Your life will be outward-focused, and people will make decisions about it for you.
Make your personal decisions based on what’s most important to you and what works best for you. You can ask other people’s opinions as long as you are willing to pay most attention to your own feelings. If you are unsure of yourself, take the time to really listen to your gut. If you have a relationship with a higher power, spend time in prayer or meditation and ask that the truth be revealed to you.
During my spiritual coaching training, we were taught to listen to our intuition. A lot of us questioned: “How do we know if we’re right?” In other words, how can we know for sure if we can trust ourselves? You don’t know for sure unless you test it out. As spiritual coaches, we were told to say whatever our intuition told us and then wait to see how the client reacted. The more we test our intuition and discover that it’s telling the truth, the more we begin to trust ourselves.
So, try some experiments. The next time you feel confused about a decision, pay attention to your gut reaction. Don’t rationalize or talk yourself out of your feelings. Go with it and see how it turns out. You can even make a list of times you trusted your intuition and things went well. The more you practice trusting yourself, the easier it will become. If you trust yourself and later find out it was a mistake, learn from it and move on. It’s okay to be wrong. It’s better to trust yourself and be wrong than not to trust yourself at all.