As recently covered, the prerequisite to building trust as a leader is to cultivate a deep sense of self-trust. The most important (work) relationship you have is with yourself.
Executive presence has nothing on embodied presence. When you trust yourself, you carry yourself differently. A real leader is embodied. Trusting yourself means you move with more clarity, consistency, and congruency between your values, words, actions, and outcomes.
When you internally source your power and authority, it reflects in the quality of your presence, the willingness to take decisions, the faith in your movements, and in your adaptability and resilience amidst challenges.
As Maven Miara writes, “So why do so many women leaders struggle with self-trust? Because we’ve been conditioned to seek permission instead of power. Not anymore. Self-trust fuels confident leadership.”
Here are eight ways to build your sense of self-trust, and tips on how to apply each:
1) Know Thyself
To trust yourself, you must remain true to yourself. That means a willingness to un-know yourself and re-know who you are now. This means staying connected and listening within.
Self-awareness means recognizing the beliefs, patterns, conditioning, identities, and expectations that shape how you perceive and how you show up—yet, they are not your limitations. They are protective layers.
Beneath the layers, your essential self is always there. And wherever you are living in a way that is disconnected from who you really are, the truths of your being will be seeking to reach you.
Developing self-trust means coming back to trusting your own senses, instincts, values, preferences, perspectives, and intuition. You are able to sense what feels right to and for you and to discern what is not for you. Validating your intuition and inner knowing helps you to build self-esteem. Inner congruence reflects in your vitality.
Apply: Create moments of solitude to check-in with yourself. Keep small intentional rituals such as a five minute morning meditation. Journal to insightful questions that guide you to strip away stories and reconnect with your inner voice. Practice asking yourself what your needs or preferences are.
2) Practice Compassion and Emotional Awareness
Self-trust is also built on being connected to and responsive to your emotions and creating inner safety. Speaking to relationships, Linda and Charlie Bloom write in Psychology Today that self-trust is “having the conviction that you will be kind and respectful to yourself regardless of the outcome of your efforts.”
Self-trust requires you can trust that you will not be self-punishing when making mistakes. If the inner critic is constantly blaming and berating you, you will not feel safe to experiment and learn. If you are caught at self-protection, you will be unable to examine your experience for new insights.
Yet integrating the wisdom learned through mistakes is part of building self-trust and growing. It’s hard to do that as a non-forgiving perfectionist.
When self-criticism is usurped by self-compassion—the ability to be as understanding, supportive and encouraging as you would to someone else you deeply care about—you are able to expand as a human and leader.
Apply: When feeling triggered, breathe and check in with yourself about what you need. Ignoring your needs corrodes self-trust. Practice allowing feelings to be felt and pass through you, while garnering insight they may offer.
Create a self-gratitude journal where you acknowledge what you appreciate about yourself, challenges you’ve taken on, decisions you’re proud of, wins and successes and ways you trust yourself.
3) Be In the Present
If you lack self-trust, you are caught in past ruptures of credibility or you are worrying about the future. Sometimes, you are simply looking at the entire mountain, instead of taking each step as it comes.
Either way, you are caught in stories and removing yourself from the potent present moment. And, you are displacing your personal power instead of stepping into it exactly where it is—in the here and now.
Regret, worry, or burning out to make it work can parade as certainty and be oddly comforting. We project a false guise of certainty backwards or forwards, even if it’s unwanted: I won’t follow through or I won’t succeed or if I don’t force, it won’t happen.
The familiar story may feel safer to a tightly wound nervous system than embracing uncertainty and trusting in the moment (and yourself) to guide you and give rise to the right decisions and right actions.
As the Blooms point out, the paradox is fear and worry do not exist in the present, so being in the present is the ultimate protection.
Apply: Serious question. Have you ever thought of building your tolerance levels for being in the present moment? Without distraction? What would it would mean for you?
4) Release External Validation
At some level, when you don’t trust yourself, you will feel like an imposter not just at work, but in life. So you will be caught in seeking external approval and validation.
Chronic reassurance-seeking outsources the emotional labor of fear and anxiety and is crippling to self-trust. According to Gravitas Founder, Lisa Sun, the self-sustaining confidence of knowing your worth is most common among women over 50 years old. Tempering the urge for external reassurance certainly plays into this.
The ability to intentionally examine various angles or perspectives of an issue is a gift. Chronic second-guessing is a nightmare. When you have self-compassion, you are more willing to embrace uncertainty and make decisions, because your worth is not on the line.
Apply: Before you turn to someone else for an opinion or advice, get quiet, and ask your own. You may wish to both write the question and answer yourself. You may be surprised how much wisdom you’re sitting on.
5) Honor Your Boundaries
As Paulo Coehlo wrote, “When you say ‘yes’ to others, make sure you are not saying ‘no’ to yourself.” Author Caroline Myss talks about how ‘boundaries’ emerged into our everyday social language as we began to recognize ourselves as not only physical but also energetic beings.
Boundaries matter because self-trust requires a ‘sense of self’ to trust, and a sense of self requires discernment. When you lack integrity, you can be pulled in any direction or towards any whim, regardless of whether it’s aligned or resonant to your own inner truth.
Boundaries are not to keep others out, but to keep you whole and integral. They reflect an inner valuing and authentic contract with self. Some people even create an inner boundary with their inner critic. Your boundaries discern between what resonates and nurtures your being and what does not.
Sure, you could commit to your boss, meet every deadline, and keep every promise you’ve made to your team. But let’s say you’re entirely misplaced in this area of work and burning yourself out to do it. Will you trust yourself? Well, you may trust yourself to betray yourself.
Keeping promises to others does not alone build self-trust, if the promises violate your inner knowing or are inauthentic to you. Real self-trust and organic boundaries come from being aware enough of what your inner truths and values are, and knowing that you will not betray them.
Apply: Identify where are you saying ‘yes’ when it’s truly a ‘no’ for you. What would ‘no’ feel like? Is there anywhere in life where you are violating your own boundaries?
6) Keep Your Word With Yourself
If you habitually break your word with yourself, how can you build self-trust? Lying to yourself, even in small ways, wreaks havoc within. When you don’t believe yourself, you don’t believe in yourself. But nothing builds self-trust faster than keeping your word with self.
Keeping promises with yourself means validating what matters to you and assigning this as much importance and priority as outside demands. When you meet the commitments you make with others, but always compromise the ones you made with yourself, you are sending your cells a message: you don’t matter.
If someone treats you like you’re not important to them, do you trust them? In order to rebuild self-trust, you need to treat your word with yourself at least as importantly as you do your word with others.
Identify what is really important to you, and be transparent with yourself about it. Show up consistently to yourself in small ways, and let it build, step by step, towards momentum, results, and more self-trust.
Apply: Listen in and clarify what is important to you. Where are you ignoring this? Where are you keeping your word with self and where are you bending it? Set reasonable and achievable commitments, treat them as real, and acknowledge when you fulfill them. Be realistic.
7) Take On Risk And Challenge
If you rarely take on new challenges, explore new expressions, or take yourself out of your comfort zone, you won’t have the experiences which build more self-trust.
One risk you can take to build self-trust is to speak up in a room where you’d normally hold back. Put your weight behind the value of your voice and your perspectives, rather than asking permission to.
Expanding into new skills is a way to build self-efficacy and increase a sense of personal competence. Through putting yourself into the valuable role of beginner in unfamiliar territory, you learn you are capable and adaptable to challenges and setbacks. You may discover gifts and capacities beyond the ones you knew.
Apply: Choose one thing you are already curious about and invest in growing in that area. Check the first challenge that comes to mind—is it truly out of your comfort zone? If you’re an adrenaline junkie, a marathon may not be the challenge. Yin yoga might be.
8) Practice Accountability
When you take accountability for your own perspectives, actions, behaviors, and outcomes, you build self-trust. Accountability is a sign that you trust yourself, because when you err, you do not collapse into shame or deflect responsibility. Rather, you see the moment as an opportunity to step even more into integrity.
Even more than to others, ownership demonstrates your credibility to yourself. Not only do you hold what happened differently, you feel and experience it differently, too.
You know you have grown when you can own your part in an undesirable outcome. Or when something that would have wilted you becomes an insight from which to learn. Equally, owning your part helps you to discern what is not yours to own or internalize.
Being accountable also means a willingness to see and honestly assess the reality in front of you. Because when you do this, you can move from a place of grounded empowerment. It means being honest even when it’s hard to, including with yourself.
Apply: Notice how taking accountability, and owning your part, has helped to liberate you and for you to grow. Where in life would you like to see more clearly and take more accountability? How can you start?
BONUS: Trust in Life
Self-trust is not hyper-independence and it’s also not being a control freak.
It’s trusting yourself enough to cultivate dynamics of interdependence, because you are able to extend that trust to others who have also earned it. Connection, collaboration, and co-creation depend on this. How we trust others (or don’t trust) reflects our self-image and how much we trust ourselves. If you required others to always do exactly as you wished, you would never trust them.
If you require yourself to flawlessly do exactly as you wished, you will likely never trust yourself. From models of understanding such as Human Design, not everyone is meant to work or create or make decisions the same. What makes us effective and what fulfills us expresses differently. Being curious about how we work helps us to build trust.
But it goes even further, if you require life to always be exactly as you wish it to be, you will not trust in life. Paradoxically, self-trust requires a willingness to surrender. When you trust in something greater than yourself, call it life or universal forces or the divine, not everything comes down to you and what you alone can control.
When you value yourself, humility breeds self-trust. And the more you are able to release your grip on the wheel, and be receptive to be guided by life, the more willing you may be to trust when you know your hands belong there.
By: Aimee Hansen is a long time writer and heart coach with theglasshammer.com. Her recent work includes “This Book is a Retreat” co-written with Marianne Richmond.
If you would like to work with Aimee or any of our coaches including Nicki Gilmour our head coach and founder, please click HERE for a free, exploratory call with Nicki who can match you with the right coach for you (we have six coaches, all with different backgrounds who can help you depending on what you need).