The Psychology of your 20s - 334. How to fully trust yourself

Episode Date: September 19, 2025

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. ORDER MY BOOK Follow Jemma on Instagram: @jemmasbeg Follow the podcast on Instagram: @thatpsychologypodcast For business: [e-mail]    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.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an I-Heart podcast. Guaranteed Human. 2%. That's the number of people who take the stairs when there is also an escalator available. I'm Michael Easter. And on my podcast, 2%. I break down the science of mental toughness, fitness, and building resilience in our strange modern world.

Put yourself through some hardships, and you will come out on the other side a happier, more fulfilled, healthier person. Listen to 2%. That's TWO. on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands. I vowed, I will be his last target. He is not going to get away with this.

He's going to get what he deserves. We always say that trust your girlfriends. Listen to the girlfriends. Trust me, babe. On the IHart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. On The Look Back at it podcast. For 1979, that was a big moment for me. 84 was big to me.

I'm Sam J. And I'm Alex English. Each episode, we pick a year, unpack what went down, and try to make sense of how we survived it. With our friends, fellow comedians, and favorite authors. Like Mark Lamont Hill on the 80s. 84 was a wild year. It was a wild year. I don't think there's a more important year for black people.

Listen to look back at it on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, what's good, y'all? You're listening to Learn the Hard Way with your favorite therapist and host Keer Games. This space is about black men's experiences, having honest conversations that it's really not safe to have anywhere, but you're having them with a licensed professional who knows what he's doing. How many men carry a suit or armor. It signals to the world that you're not to be played with. And just because you have the capability that does not mean that you need to. Listen to learn the hard way on the AHA radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.

In 2023, Bachelor star Clayton Eckerd was accused of fathering twins. But the pregnancy appeared to be a hoax. You doctored this particular test twice, Ms. Ellen's, correct? I doctored the test ones. It took an army of internet detectives to uncover a disturbing pattern. Two more men who'd been through. the same thing. Greg Gillespie and Michael Marantini. My mind was blown. I'm Stephanie Young. This is Love Trapped. Laura, Scottsdale Police. As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces

consequences. Listen to Love Trapped podcast on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello everybody and welcome back to the psychology of your 20s, the podcast where we talk through some of the big life changes and transitions of our 20s and what they mean for our psychology. 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 20s. If you have been around for a little while, you might remember that at the start of each year, I kind of like to set a theme for the next 12 months to come as part of like our welcome to the new year like podcast series that I do every new year. For 2025,

this year's intention, it was the year for trusting yourself, which to me I think really meant like 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 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 wanted to break up with my first boyfriend to literally like the other

week I was at IKEA 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 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 of war between your own instincts and the pressure of outside voices. it's definitely not easy, especially in your 20s, 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 learnt is that trusting yourself doesn't actually mean you're always going to get it right, the same way 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 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 our, 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 enjoy 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 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. We, I think, tend to place in 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. 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 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 20s, 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, whatever happens in life. 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 20s 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, Jeffrey Arnett, and he uses it 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, 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 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,

How did I end up here? Why did I think that was a good decision? That's like a classic thing in our 20s, especially as we get into our later 20s 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 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? What if, you know, this one choice and the 10 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 sure a lot of us are very familiar with this. I think one of the most paralyzing experiences of our 20s is just this general anxiety we 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 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. 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 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 catastrophize about, any big life altering thing we can imagine, each of them could just be 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 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 800 participants, and it looked at what the most effective emotional antidote to anxiety was. They looked 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 in,

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 organisation or a trust in a God 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 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 worry 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 manage every possible outcome, well, I'd feel safe. If I just knew exactly how this 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. 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 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 grip 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 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 going to sound

so cliche, but it always does seem to stretch back to childhood. If 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. Eric Erickson, we talk about him, again, a lot. He's very famous. He developed the eight stages of psychosocial development back in the 50s. He basically, 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 place like around 18 months to like 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, we know 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 attentive to our needs, or offering readurance when we are scared or distressed, basically 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 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 Erickson, this gives us, this gives infants a good sense of 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 haven't yet been able to rationalize why that may be, we instead, as he suggests, begin to internalize that completely. begin to turn 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 because hyperindependence actually isn't necessarily about self-trust. It's again about control. Hyper independence 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 sense.

To me it definitely does and like I think about that. I'm like, yeah, that definitely sits. But it's just important to understand how like along the way think of trust as like this tree that needs to have really deep roots in order to stand tall in adulthood and, you know, in our 20s. And if at any point something has poisoned those roots or something has made you believe that this tree is shakeable, 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 control and a reliance on ourselves at first i think perfectionism can actually

kind of seem like trust much like hyper independence 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 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 20s when I think the stakes become a lot higher and you begin to feel an 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 never. 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 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 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 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 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 authority.

They all kind of play into each other to make it really 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 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 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. And 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 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 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-hear, I don't know what, what's the right word, how we can I get I get to tune back into this like deep pool of self-knowledge and self-trust that we all innately have after this short break. 2%. That is the number of people who take the stairs when there is also an escalator available. I'm Michael Easter.

And on my podcast, 2%. I break down the science of mental toughness, fitness, and building resilience in our strange modern world. I'll be speaking with writers, researchers, and other health and fitness experts, and more, to look past the impractical and way too complex pseudoscience that dominates the wellness industry. We really believe that seed oils were inherently inflammatory. We got it wrong. Many of the problems that we are freaked out about in the world are the result of stress. Put yourself through some hardships, and you will come out on the other side a happier, more fulfilled,

healthier person. Listen to 2% that's TWO% on the I-Hart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to my new podcast, learn the hard way with me, your host, and your favorite therapist,

Kear Games. And in recognition of mental health awareness month, I'm bringing over a decade of my own experience in the mental health field and conversations with so many incredible guests. I'm talking, Tripp Fontaine, Ryan Clark. Sometimes when we're in the pursuit of the thing, We get so wrapped up in the chase that we don't realize that we are in possession of the thing.

And we're still chasing it. And we don't know when we've done enough. Because people scoreboard watch. Life becomes about wins and losses. Steve Burns, Dustin Ross, because you find it important to be a good person while you hear on Earth. Are you a good person because you're afraid? Because that's two different intentions, bro. Absolutely.

And that's two different levels of trust. I want you to just really be a good person. Join me, Keir Gaines, is we have. real conversations about healing, growth, fatherhood, pressure, and purpose on my new podcast, learn the hard way. Open your free iHeartRadio app, search Learn the Hardway, and listen now. In 2023, former bachelor star Clayton Eckerd found himself at the center of a paternity scandal. The family court hearings that followed revealed glaring inconsistencies in her story. This began a years-long court battle to prove the truth.

You doctored this particular test twice in someone's strength. I doctored the test ones. It took an army of internet detectives to crack the case. I wanted people to be able to see what their tax dollars were being used for. Sunlight's the greatest disinfected. They would uncover a disturbing pattern. Two more men who'd been through the same thing. Greg Lepin and Michael Marantini.

My mind was blown. I'm Stephanie Young. This is Love Trap. Laura, Scottsdale Police. As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences. Ladies and gentlemen, breaking news at Amaricopa County as Laura Owens has been indicted on fraud charges. This isn't over until justice is served in Arizona. Listen to Love Trapped podcast on the Iheart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

There's two golden rules that any man should live by. Rule one, never mess with a country girl. You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes. And rule two, never mess with. her friends either. We always say that trust your girlfriends. I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of the girlfriends, oh my God, this is the same man. A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist. I felt like I got hit by a truck. I thought, how could this happen to me? The cops didn't seem to care, so they take matters into their own hands. I said, oh hell no. I vowed. I will be his last

target. He's going to get what he deserves. Listen to the girlfriends. Trust me, babe. On the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Remember when Diana Ross double-tap Little Kim's boobs at the VMAs? Or when Kanye said that

George Bush didn't like black people. I know what you're thinking. What the hell does George Bush got to do a little Kim? Well, you can find out on the Look Back at it podcast. I'm Sam Jett. And I'm Alex English. Each episode, we pick you here, unpack what went down. and try to make sense of how we survived it.

Including a recent episode with Mark Lamont Hill, waxing all about crack in the 80s. To be clear, 84 is big to me, not just because of crack. I'm down to talk about crack all day, but just so you all know. I mean, at this point, Mark, this is the second episode where we've discussed crack, so I'm starting to see that there's a through line. We also have AIDS on the table right now, so. Thank you finishing that sentence.

Yes. I don't think there's a more important year for black people. Really? Yeah. For me, it's one of the most important years for black people in American history. Listen to look back at it on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I think if we want to learn how to implement self-trust into our lives, we need to first really understand what that actually looks and feels like. I think it can be tricky to describe because 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, I guess, what it feels like. Firstly, self-trust means following through on promises. If you say you'll stop work at 6pm,

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 well-being, whether that's blocking someone saying no to a draining event, knowing when you need to take a break, you don't abandon yourself 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, 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 like there 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? If you keep beating yourself up when you make a mistake because you literally didn't know any better, 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, you know, your baby sister or with your childhood self.

instead of saying like oh my god i should have known better 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 to test their boundaries more allows them to trust themselves more because they know they are in 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. 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 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.

Trust me, it's actually harder to ruin your life. 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 going to be able to act on your future interest 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, 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 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. It's not, like, the while to come by, very regular normal people recover a, grow 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, 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 weren't there and keep trying. I think as well, and I keep saying this, but I just want to reinforce 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 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 going to 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 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

firmly 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. 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 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 compass and 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 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 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, like, learn from the consequences instead of seeing the consequences as punishment.

Think about the reasons that you often trust others. It's 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, you will go to the gym twice a week or that you will go on one run 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 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 decide to do the same way that I would want someone else to follow through if they had 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 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 happened anyways. Next come the small scale experiments. I always say this and I will continue to do so. 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 to C 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 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 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 series of smaller chapters and opportunities to redirect yourself rather than just this 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 can be super helpful to choose low-stakes decisions where you can follow through 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 pull in your chest to do so doing things you'd normally, you know, want to do with someone else doing them alone and being like, hey, I survived. This whole process is about really gaining and gathering evidence of how capable you truly are. Remember, your comfort zone feels 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. 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. Our expansion zone is where true learning and true self-trust happens. It's a space of discomfort. It's also totally necessary to grow. 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 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 to stop explaining yourself when you make either small or big decisions that feel intuitively correct 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 are moving overseas soon. We're moving to London. And it was my mom's 60th 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 anywhere where 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 in 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, I'm going to be okay. And I trust that this is where I want to be. And it immediately got me, you know, A, very defensive and B, very insecure and in

like a state of doubting myself. And afterwards, I was talking to my cousin, who is wise beyond her years. And she was like, you should have just said, I don't know yet. But I'm not. 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 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 does neither 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. 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, you know, 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 and you just have to be the one who like is fully there for you and fully says like I'm going to be okay and I'm going to be okay even if this is like a complete mess around even 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?

Like that's my 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 that 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 to be okay in this. I trust myself. I trust my abilities.

I trust my intuition. And the more you like 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're willing to make risks that 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 a convoluted 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 on to, which is control uncertainty. You can't have those things, but you can have self-trust in the face of them. I want to thank our researcher Libby Colbert 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 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 20s was too long to like show up. So anyways, that's where you can find us.

We do like these cool 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 subscribed. 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. 2%. That's the number of people who take the stairs when there is also an escalator available. I'm Michael Easter. And on my podcast, 2%. I break down the science of mental toughness, fitness, and building resilience in our strange modern world. Put yourself through some hardships and you will come out on the other side,

a happier, more fulfilled, healthier person. Listen to 2%. That's TWO% on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands. I vowed. I will be his last target. He is not going to get away with this.

He's going to get what he deserves. We always say that trust your girlfriends, Listen to the girlfriends. Trust me, babe. On the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. On the Look Back at it podcast. From 1979, that was a big moment for me. 84 was big to me.

I'm Sam Jay. And I'm Alex English. Each episode, we pick a year, unpack what went down, and try to make sense of how we survived it. With our friends, fellow comedians, and favorite authors. Like Mark Lamont Hill on the 80s. 84 was a wild year. It was a wild year. I don't think there's a more important year for black people.

Listen to look back at it on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, what's good, y'all? You're listening to Learn the Hard Way with your favorite therapist and host, Kear Games. This space is about black men's experiences, having honest conversations that it's really not safe to have anywhere, but you're having them with a licensed professional who knows what he's doing. How many men carry a suit or armor? It signals to the world that you're not to be played with. And just because you have the capability that does not mean that you need to.

Listen and learn the hard way on the AHA radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. In 2023, Bachelor star Clayton Eckerd was accused of fathering twins. But the pregnancy appeared to be a hoax. You doctored this particular test twice, Ms. Owens, correct? I doctored the test once. It took an army of internet detectives to uncover a disturbing pattern. Two more men who'd been through the same. same thing. Greg, Lesbian. Michael Mancini. My mind was blown. I'm Stephanie Young. This is Love Trapped.

Laura, Scottsdale Police. As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences. Listen to Love Trapped podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an IHeart podcast. Guaranteed human.