What If Self-Trust Is the Safety You’ve Been Looking For?

There’s a card pinned to the corkboard in my office. It’s one of Danielle LaPorte’s #truthbombs, and it says: Uncertainty is key to creativity.

My friend Gervase Kolmos pulled it for me intuitively years ago at one of her retreats, before I had any idea the next decade of my life would be full of uncertainty. At the time, the idea felt pretty foreign to me, a little scary, but deep down I intuitively knew there was a reason it was coming up for me. It’s still pinned there, and I’ve come to think it’s one of the truest things about living a life that actually feels like yours.

It’s been on my mind a lot lately, along with self-trust. I don’t mean the vision-board version. I mean the kind that lets you make a decision without running it past five people first, and take the next step before you know how the story ends. It’s the quiet knowing that says: I don’t know what happens next, but I know I can handle myself.

That last part matters, because I think a lot of us confuse certainty with safety.

We want to know the relationship will work before we let ourselves be vulnerable. We want to know the business decision is right before we make it, and that the money will come back before we spend it on ourselves. When we can’t know those things, we go looking for more: more information, another opinion, another podcast, another sign from the universe. (I love a good sign, for the record.) Sometimes that’s wisdom. Sometimes that’s intuition. Sometimes it’s fear in a really convincing outfit.

I know this one personally. I decided to sell my agency long before I could actually let it go, and no amount of reassurance closed that gap. I didn’t need more certainty. I needed to trust that I’d be okay on the other side of the decision. (Spoiler alert: My subconscious mind needed to know I was still worthy ... without the fancy “agency owner” title.)

Your subconscious is keeping receipts

You can consciously believe you trust yourself while a subconscious belief quietly says otherwise. It’s like driving with one foot on the gas and one on the brake. Biologist Bruce Lipton estimates the subconscious runs about 95% of what we do, so that brake matters. Your conscious mind can change its opinion in a second. The subconscious works from what’s familiar, and it doesn’t update just because you had a good insight.

Do you follow through when you say you will? Do you keep the boundary, or quietly drop it the first time someone sighs? Can you change your mind when something truly doesn’t fit anymore, without deciding you were foolish to want it in the first place? Can you sit with being uncomfortable for a minute without assuming something has gone wrong?

Each of those small moments is a repetition. Every time you follow through with yourself, you’re teaching the deeper part of you something simple: I can count on me.

This is a big part of why I love PSYCH-K®. We’re not stacking a positive thought on top of an old belief and hoping it sticks. We work with the belief underneath. Then you get to back it up with what you choose next, and that’s what makes the new belief start to feel true.

Trusting myself completely has been one of the biggest focuses of my own subconscious work, and trusting my intuition came right along with it. Every single one of us is born with bang-on intuition. We simply don’t trust ourselves enough to act on it. Once I learned my own self-trust, a lot of doors opened that I couldn’t have planned my way into.

Self-trust needs honesty first

It’s hard to trust yourself if you aren’t being honest about what you want. I don’t mean what would look successful, what would keep everyone comfortable, or what you think you should want by now based on everyone else’s highlight reel. I mean what you actually want. How do you want to make money? What kind of business do you want to build, and what kind of life do you want it to support? What are you done trading for approval or security or someone else’s idea of success?

Sometimes the next step isn’t doing more. Sometimes it’s getting honest enough to stop doing the things that aren’t yours anymore.

That can be uncomfortable. For about six years I traded client calls and networking events for homeschooling, gardening and keeping bees. It was a full 180 from the agency-owner, lifestyle-blogger version of me, and stepping away from my old professional circles was harder than I expected. It was quiet, a bit lonely and not without FOMO. Thankfully I eased into my “new” life during the COVID era, so a lot of people were shifting into a slower timeline. But for me ... I stayed there much longer (and still am there in a lot of ways).

Something I have been reminded of: discomfort isn’t automatically a warning sign. Sometimes it’s just what it feels like when you stop leaving yourself behind to keep everyone else at ease. And that doesn’t always feel warm and fuzzy inside ... but sometimes that feeling, the feeling you’ve been avoiding, is exactly what you need to sit with.

You don’t have to know what’s coming

This is the part I keep coming back to. You don’t need to become someone who never feels uncertain. You need to become someone who knows she can move through uncertainty, which is a very different goal.

You can be scared and decide anyway. You can disappoint someone and still know you did the right thing for yourself. You can get it wrong and adjust. You can start over (I have, more than once) and figure it out as you go. Honestly, there’s a lot of freedom in realizing you don’t need a guarantee to move forward. You just need yourself. (And maybe a friend who knows which card to pull.)

Try this today

Put both feet on the floor, take a slow breath, and notice what’s holding you up. Then ask yourself:

Where am I waiting for certainty when what I actually need is to trust myself?

Don’t force an answer. Just notice what comes up. If something you’ve been avoiding surfaces, ask one more question:

What would I do if I trusted myself to handle however this turns out?

Maybe it’s a decision, a boundary, a conversation you keep putting off, or something you’ve quietly wanted to try. The next step is probably smaller than you think. Take one piece of it today: send the email, say the no, book the thing. You don’t have to make a promise about the future. You only need one moment where you choose yourself and follow through.

Eventually, self-trust stops being something you have to talk yourself into. You just know. Not because life got predictable, but because you became someone who knows she’ll be there for herself when it isn’t.