How To Trust Yourself - Before You Can Trust Someone Else

Many people ask me how to trust someone again. My first answer is you need to learn how to trust yourself first.

Many people ask me how to trust someone again. My first answer is you need to learn how to trust yourself first. Trusting yourself gives you the capability to make decisions for yourself and confidence to do it.

You can never truly trust someone else until you learn to trust yourself first. Building trust in yourself builds your confidence in how you show up in the world and makes you feel and appear trustworthy to those around you.

Trust Your Gut

The first step in learning how to trust yourself is learning what it feels like to feel your gut reaction. Your gut is your first reaction, and comes from a place deep within. Your gut or intuition guides you and protects you.

Intuition comes as an instinct without story. Often, I ask clients a question and say, “what is the first thing that comes to your mind?” As you have experiences, especially ones that make you doubt yourself, you start to second guess your gut. Starting to pay attention to what your gut reaction is and what your gut is telling you is the first step to trusting yourself again.

Take Accountability

The second step in learning how to trust yourself is taking accountability for your actions and choices. It takes learning to accept your choices, thoughts, and be responsible for your actions to truly trust yourself. We all try and sometimes we fail too. You will likely learn more from failures and missteps than you do from something that comes easily. Often, learning to trust yourself comes from failing and taking accountability for the choice you made.

Don’t Take Things Personally

The third step in learning how to trust yourself is don’t make everything about yourself. Listening to your gut, learning what it tells you to do and taking responsibility for your actions leads to not taking things personally. This includes not making it your responsibility to fix others or their problems, and also not making everything about you.

Figure out what you believe and how you feel. Listen to the stories you tell yourself about why something happened or what you need to do about it. If you jump to conclusions quickly, are you judging yourself or others? Are you trying to please others?

One of my favorite books is The Four Agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz. He says nothing others do is because of you.

Separate Your Emotions From Story

The fourth step in learning how to trust yourself is separating your emotions from the stories you tell yourself. Our brain does such an excellent job of coming up with stories about why something happened, what someone meant, or what will come next. It uses our experience to come up with logical reasons and we hear them so clearly and they make so much sense that we believe them as fact.

Learn to question your assumptions and stories as fact or emotional reaction. Be aware of your triggers and how reacting emotionally might serve your ego more than your own healing.

Alone Time

The fifth step in learning how to trust yourself is getting comfortable with being alone. Being alone gives you time and space to build your strengths, find your weaknesses, and see the difference. As you create space to be alone, you teach yourself who you are and that there is only one you. No one can teach you how to be you. No one can live your life or make your decisions for you.

Forgiveness

The sixth step of how to trust yourself is learning to forgive. Allowing success and failure in your life, rise and fall of daily emotions and stories without judgment will encourage forgiveness of self. Holding onto mistakes and missteps in your life is like walking down the road backwards. If you are looking back, you will see where you have been, but you can’t be aware of what is ahead of you including pitfalls and walls to stop your progress.

Forgiveness allows you to focus on where you are going and also lets you see the progress you have made. Don’t whitewash what happened, be honest with your part, that is where you will know if you need to take accountability or make different choices moving forward.

Start moving forward and take steps to trust yourself again or at all.