Learning to Trust Yourself Again | Bonus
This episode is part of The Things We Carry, a solo series shaped by the themes that keep showing up after more than two hundred conversations on The Life Shift.
Today I am talking about self trust and what it means to rebuild it after years of doubt, shame, or fear. Trusting yourself is not a single moment. It grows slowly through messy progress, small choices, and the courage to keep showing up even when you feel uncertain.
In this reflection, I talk about the back-and-forth nature of healing, the quiet bravery it takes to listen to your own voice, and the way small wins can slowly rewrite the stories you once believed about yourself. Self trust is not perfect confidence. It is the willingness to face your own feelings, try something new, set a boundary, or simply stay with yourself when things feel hard.
If you are in a season where trusting yourself feels out of reach, I hope this episode gives you some gentleness. You do not have to be fully healed to begin. You do not have to silence every doubt. You can start small. You can take one step. You can remember that the younger version of you deserved care, and the current version of you does too. You have always been enough.
This is the mini solo series, The Things We Carry, small moments and themes that keep me thinking way after the conversations on the Life Shift podcast. Hey there. This is one of the short solo episodes that I created to kind of look at the themes that come up a lot in the conversations that I have on the Life Shift podcast. So I like taking a little time to look at what keeps showing up and it feels like it's overdue after 200 plus episodes here. So today I want to talk about something that kind of is maybe always on my mind. And it's about trust, self-trust, and how it shows up after years of doubt and shame and all that noise that we carry around inside us. So I was thinking about Jennifer's story. She spent years in therapy, and at times she felt like she wasn't moving forward at all. It was a back and forth dance of healing, right? But then there was this moment, a a years in when she looked back and saw how far she had come. Not perfect, she wasn't fixed, but she was there. That journey of learning to be with herself, with her feelings, even when they weren't great, something I definitely feel. It's such a subtle, powerful kind of self-trust to really know that you can face your own messiness and still come back to who you are. And then there was Heidi. She shared how she spent years looking outside of herself for answers, researching, trying this and that. But the real turning point was when she turned inward, became curious about her own experience. She called it meeting herself for the first time. And it kind of struck me as bravery, the bravery that it might take to slow down enough to listen, to experiment gently with what feels good, and to keep showing up and trusting that process. It wasn't born overnight. It just grew as she stacked small wins, those quiet moments when belief in herself kind of snowballed just enough to carry her forward. Justin's story also came to mind. Quitting drinking, starting a band, trying new things, like a medium rare steak that cracked the ice of childhood beliefs about himself. He talked about how these small successes became proof that he could change, that he could trust himself to handle the discomfort of being different. even when his younger self might have been punished for it. And I think about how many of us carry that fragile hope, that fear that if we step out, everything could fall apart. But those small cracks in the old stories kind of make room for something new. And what I notice in all of these stories is how self-trust grows from doing the work. From messy, imperfect progress, definitely not a straight line, kind of like a spiral. Sometimes circling back, sometimes stepping forward. And there's always fear. That weight of old shame, the quiet voice that says you're not enough or you don't deserve to feel better. I know that voice. Sometimes I still wrestle with it. But the way Jennifer found space for all of her feelings or Heidi's commitment to belief despite doubt or Justin's choice to try something new again and again. They show us that trust is a muscle. It's built one small choice at a time. And I'm thinking about that younger version of myself too, the one who sometimes hid behind a mask, afraid to show it fully for fear of rejection or failure. Sometimes I think about what it would have meant for that kid to hear that it's okay to be broken, to not have all the answers, to take the time needed to heal and find their way back. And I wonder what small moments today are kind of planting seeds for that trust in you. Maybe it's a quiet moment of self-compassion or the courage to say no when you need to, or simply noticing that you survived another day, even when it was hard. We all know I'm not perfect at this, and I'm definitely learning through all of these conversations. And there are days when trust feels so far away, but I gotta keep coming back to it because it's the foundation for all the other things we hope for. It's where we can find the strength to set those boundaries. to definitely choose ourselves and let go of what no longer serves us. So maybe today we can all take a moment to notice those line in the sand moments, the moment when you first saw something had to change. Could be recent. Maybe it was a long time ago. But wherever it is, let's honor it because it was the beginning of a journey towards trusting yourself more deeply in all your messy, beautiful humanity. Keep trusting yourself. You are enough. And you were enough all along.
