#86 3 Tips for Building Self-Trust
In the absence of self trust, we see a lot of other dominoes fall in terms of self worth and self respect. This is something almost everyone I work with struggles with to some degree and it’s a challenging piece of the puzzle when it comes to our personal growth in relationships. In today’s episode, I’m sharing 3 tips for building self trust to help you to go out into the world and make aligned choices.
WHAT WE’LL COVER:
Knowing yourself and your values
Trusting your own boundaries
Finding others to sense check
Knowing it’s not an instant fix
FURTHER LINKS & RESOURCES:
Apply for my 6-month Homecoming Mastermind
Follow me on Instagram: @stephanie__rigg & @onattachment
You might also like…
Episode Transcript
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You're listening to On Attachment, a place to learn about how attachment shapes the way we experience relationships and where you'll gain the guidance, knowledge and practical tools to overcome insecurity and build healthy, thriving relationships. I'm your host, relationship Coach Stephanie Rigg, and I'm really glad you're here. Um, hey, everybody. Welcome back to another episode of On Attachment. In today's episode, I'm going to be sharing three tips for building self trust.
0:00:35.27 → 0:01:16.87
Self trust is one of those things that virtually everyone that I work with struggles with. To some degree, it is a really, really challenging piece of the puzzle when it comes to our personal growth and our growth in relationships. And I think it's one of those things where, in the absence of self trust, we can see a lot of other dominoes fall in terms of self worth, self respect. I think they're very much an interconnected web. And it can be hard to make decisions that are in alignment for ourselves when we don't have that self trust in place, because it tends to then lead to a lot of doubt and anxiety and all of those things that make it hard to really have our own back in relationship.
0:01:17.02 → 0:02:15.04
So I'm hoping that through today's episode, I'll be able to share with you some relatively straightforward and actionable tips around how you can start building that relationship of self trust with yourself so that you can then go out into the world and build relationships and make choices from a more aligned place. Before we dive into that, a couple of quick announcements. You've got a few days left to make use of the 50% off sale, which I've been offering on my Master classes and my Higher Love course for the past month that will end on 30 June. So if you'd like to save 50% on my three Master classes, which are on Anxious Avoidant Relationships, Boundaries and Sex and Attachment, or my Higher Love Course, which is a breakup course, you can use the code June 50 at the checkout on my website for any of those products. The second quick announcement is just to share the featured review for today, which is Stephanie never fails to amaze me with her podcast.
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It's like she's in my head and knows exactly what I need each week. I've learned so much from Onattachment, not just with the podcast, but also with the Healing Anxious Attachment course. She's given me a new level of understanding and depth to relationships with other people and my relationship with myself. Thank you so much for that beautiful review. I'm so glad to hear that's been your experience and it's amazing that you've also done Healing Anxious Attachment and had a great experience there too.
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As a side note for anyone listening, healing Anxious Attachment is my signature programme that I run a few times a year, and I will be opening up enrollment again in July. So if you're interested in that, you can join the waitlist via my website so that you can be notified when doors open. If that was your review, please send an email to podcast@stephanierigg.com and my team will set you up with free access to one of my master classes as a way to say thank you. Okay, so let's dive into this conversation around building self trust. As I said, I'm going to offer you three tips here and I do that for the sake of ease of following the podcast and structural simplicity.
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But I do just want to emphasise that something as big as building self trust is not formulaic and it's not something where we can tick off, oh, I've done this, this and this, and therefore I am now healed and I trust myself and everything's fine. It's very much a process and it's one that we'll continue to hone and finesse and work on throughout our lives, right? We don't arrive at a destination of self trust in the same way that we don't arrive at a destination of any other goal in terms of our relationship with ourselves. And I think it's important to really remind ourselves of that so that we're not too rigid and perfectionistic in the way that we approach doing this work, right? It's a moment to moment growing and evolving rather than a journey with a clear destination that we need to achieve or reach.
0:04:03.53 → 0:04:47.09
So the first tip that I want to share with you is get clear on your values and your boundaries because you can't trust yourself if you don't know what those things are. It's really hard to advocate for yourself and to take care of yourself well in life and in relationships if you do not know what matters to you, if you do not know what you are okay with, right? I think so often a lack of self trust comes from not really having that internal compass on what we're okay with. And so we go with the flow a lot. We defer to other people, we follow their lead on what they think or believe or want or need and we shapeshift, right?
0:04:47.21 → 0:05:23.69
And I think that the consequence of that is that we really don't have an internal anchor and it's really hard to trust ourselves if we don't have that internal leadership, right? As with anything, we tend to trust people who are clear and confident and have that strong sense of security about them, right? And when we don't have that within ourselves, it's very hard to have that relationship of trust. And I think there's a broader point to be made there, which is in the other tips that I'll share today as well. The same principles that apply to people outside of yourself who you would trust or not trust apply to yourself and your own relationship of self trust.
0:05:23.78 → 0:06:00.09
So if you are embodying traits or acting in ways that would not inspire much trust if it were another person, then don't be surprised if you struggle to trust yourself when you are behaving in ways that are flaky or inconsistent or lacking in clear values or whatever it may be. So this first one being get clear on your values and your boundaries, right? You cannot trust yourself if you are just floating rudderless around in the ocean because there's really nothing to hold on to there. So how you go about doing this? I think sometimes that in and of itself can be a challenging exercise for people who are not used to it.
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Because for a lot of us we will have learned and had that as a strategy, consciously or otherwise is just to be easy, right, to go with the flow, to defer to other people. So the idea of actually going out and figuring out what our values are or setting boundaries or even just identifying what the boundary is can feel overwhelming. We don't know where to start. And so I think that if that is you and you don't really know where to start, it can be helpful to reverse engineer based on situations where we felt really uncomfortable or anxious or any of those other emotions that might signal something about this situation is not okay for me. But I haven't maybe advocated for myself or spoken up because of all of those other strategies around trying to get certain needs for connection or belonging.
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Met. So if you know consistently okay when I overextend myself and say yes to everyone and try to be the helper and go out of my way to take care of everyone else, and then I feel really burnt out. About it that's going to lead me to not only be resentful towards them, but probably be resentful towards myself on some level and not really trust myself to say yes when I mean yes, but no when I mean no. So start reflecting on that and reverse engineering from experiences and situations. It's like you're going through and mining or auditing your own relational experiences and take those emotions or those almost those hangovers as feedback, right?
0:07:31.63 → 0:08:09.17
Go okay, that didn't work for me or that leaves me feeling really depleted or taken advantage of or any of those other kinds of emotions and get really clear on what those boundaries might be and what you really value. So you might value reciprocity, you might value reliability, you might value openness but get clear on what those are and then be willing to stand behind them. Okay? The second tip that I want to give you for building self trust, which is sort of related to this, that goes a little bit further, is follow through on your commitments to yourself. Now again, as I just said, you would not trust someone who consistently said one thing and then did another, right?
0:08:09.21 → 0:08:31.08
I think we can all agree on that and yet so many of us make commitments to ourselves and then don't follow through, right? We do something else. We say, we're going to go for a morning walk every day, but then by day three, we've stopped doing it. Or we say, we're going to not message our ex because we know that it's not good for us. And what do we do?
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We go and do it. Right, so when your word stops meaning anything to you, then of course you're not going to trust yourself because, again, you've not got the experience there that would justify trust. You've not got a pattern of behaviour that would engender any trust in the same way that it wouldn't with anyone else. So, again, let's stop seeing our lack of self trust as really confusing and a total mystery, when actually it might make a lot of sense if that is the backdrop. I was having a conversation with one of the women in my mastermind last week and she spoke to something which I think will be relatable for so many people.
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I won't give the specifics of the situation, but it was with someone that she had been seeing and she had said to them, actions speak louder than words, and I'm going to need you to be more consistent and reliable. But what I pointed out to her was that she had said that to them multiple times, right? So they'd continued to kind of go away and come back and go away and come back. And while she was advocating for herself by saying, actions speak louder than words, she was also making herself available to have that conversation again and again and again. And so what I put to her was, yes, sure, actions speak louder than words, but what are your actions saying, right, when you continue to hear this person out and hear their excuses and allow yourself to go around in the loop again and again and again, are your actions in alignment with your words?
0:10:01.72 → 0:10:54.95
Which are to say, this doesn't work for me because your actions might actually be signalling something other than that. So the point being there we need to follow through for ourselves and if we are behaving in ways that are inconsistent or unreliable, then we will not trust ourselves. And so one of the simplest, not necessarily easy, but certainly simple things that you can do to start building that self trust is follow through on your commitments to yourself. And I think relatably that really allows you to experience your own efficacy in a way that can be very powerful and can create a lot of momentum. We start to feel like, hey, I'm competent and capable and I am a reliable person, whereas when we repeatedly say one thing and do another, it's very destructive to our self worth and we stop respecting ourselves, basically, we feel like, oh, I'm just hopeless, right?
0:10:54.99 → 0:11:26.10
I always do this, there must be something wrong with me. And we can get stuck in a lot of that guilt and shame which tends to be an emotion that spirals downwards rather than lifting us up. So if you do want to build your self trust, follow through on your commitments to yourself. And if you don't think that you can, then don't make those commitments right again in much the same way as you would approach that relationally with anyone else, whether it's a partner or a friend or family. Don't make commitments that you're not going to follow through on and really try to follow through on the commitments that you have made to yourself.
0:11:26.23 → 0:12:56.31
Okay, the third and final tip that I want to share with you on building self trust is find a trusted person or it might be a couple of people who you can sense cheque your intuitive read of a situation with. Now, there's some discernment required here and I want to acknowledge at the outset that that might sound counterintuitive when we're talking about building self trust and then having as one of the tips to have an external person that you are testing against. But to give you a bit of context for this one, I was reflecting on my own personal journey, and a few years ago I really didn't trust myself very much at all. And the relationship I was in at the time had me really doubting whether I was crazy, frankly, and whether I was asking for too much and whether I was justified in being upset with my partner or being frustrated or being angry because he wasn't able to validate that at all or take responsibility. So what I found very helpful in that situation was sharing those things with my therapist who I started working with around that time and having her validation and kind of mirroring back and echoing that the situation that I was in was objectively pretty frustrating and that I wasn't crazy to feel that way and that certain things weren't appropriate or acceptable.
0:12:56.49 → 0:14:01.20
And I think for me at the time, because I was in such a bubble, right, I was so in the thick of the relationship and I'd had the same arguments and conversations with my partner a million times. And you do start to doubt your read of a situation in the face of someone's really adamant, defensiveness and justification. And so I think that in circumstances like that, it can be really helpful to sense cheque and get a read of the situation from someone that you trust whose point of view is likely to be someone that you consider to be wise and thoughtful. So I think that a therapist or similar is a really good person to practise this with, rather than a friend who might jump to your defence and pile on on someone in a way that might not be as helpful as it feels at the time. But I think that finding that balance between validation and outsourcing is the trick here.
0:14:01.22 → 0:14:43.89
And that's the discernment that I'd invite you to practise because we don't want to go into that space of I don't trust myself. So I'm just going to ask everyone's opinion all the time on what does this mean and what do you think about this, because I have no idea and I don't trust myself. That is where it can entrench the lack of self trust rather than alleviate it. But I do think that sharing how you're feeling and sharing what you're struggling with, with someone who can see that and validate you can be really, really helpful in then building your confidence to make that call for yourself going forward and not need to lean on other people's read of a situation so much. So perhaps that third one is really in circumstances where you might be doubting your perception of reality.
0:14:44.05 → 0:15:41.29
Maybe in a relationship, maybe there's I hesitate to use the word gaslighting because I think that it's very much thrown around on social media and leads people to be quite on high alert in their relationships in a way that's probably not helpful to throw around terms like that. But you know what I mean, where you're really struggling to find a clear view of the situation and feeling like you're maybe going crazy or you're so stricken with doubt that you actually do need the support of an outside read. So I think that that can be helpful to do that with the help of a therapist or similar. Okay, so that was three tips for building self trust. As I said at the outset, this isn't something that we can change overnight because for a lot of us, the lack of self trust is a symptom of broader struggles in relationship and as I said, is often intermingled with low self worth, a lack of self respect and some of those other things.
0:15:41.36 → 0:16:19.91
So it is part of the process. It is something that will build over time as you start to get really clear on who you are and what you want and you start having your own back. But it is possible and it is a really, really important and rewarding thing to do to build up that self trust because as I said, it's really hard to navigate relationships from an anchored and secure place when you don't have that baseline of self trust. I hope that this has been helpful. If you've enjoyed this episode, I'd be so grateful if you could leave a review or a rating, depending on where you're listening, but otherwise I look forward to seeing you again soon.
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Thanks guys. Thanks for joining me for this episode of On Attachment. If you want to go deeper on all things attachment, love and relationships, you can find me on Instagram @stephanie__rigg or at stephanierigg.com and if you enjoyed this episode, I'd be so grateful if you could leave a review and a five star rating. It really does help so much. Thanks again for being here and I hope to see you again soon.