It’s Better To Trust Yourself And Be Wrong Than To Not Trust Yourself At All

Have you ever struggled to make a decision or enter into a commitment because you didn’t trust your ability to make the right choice? How many times have you gotten a feeling in the pit of your stomach that something was not right? Did you pay attention to your intuition or did you ignore it? Deep in our core, we know what is best for us. So why don’t we trust that?

Some of us were taught as a child that we can’t trust ourselves. Maybe we weren’t able to trust our loved ones or our loved ones were unable to trust us. Sometimes life experiences shatter our trust in ourselves. Perhaps you can recall an event in which you trusted yourself and the outcome was disastrous and painful. The inability to trust yourself can stem from not knowing who we are and what’s important to us. Other times, we know what is right for us but we fail to honor that because of fear, external pressure, or a belief that we are not worthy.

But, even if we didn’t have a reason to not trust ourselves from our past experiences, it is literally steeped into our culture. We have been taught since childhood, that our doctor knows best, our boss knows best, our teacher knows best, and our parents know best. We were never taught to listen to our intuition. So we often have no idea if we should trust ourselves or not. We haven’t learned to trust ourselves.

So when we do make decisions that don’t turn out as planned, even if the red flags were there, but we ignored them. Or, we truly made the best decision we could at the time. Ask any successful entrepreneur about her process of decision-making. She will probably tell you she weighed all the pros and cons and tried to anticipate any problems. She might have looked to the experts for helpful insight. In the end, she made the most informed decision she could. If you ask her if all her decisions were the right ones, she will tell you no. Life changes; people change. Just because something doesn’t work out the way you wanted does not mean you cannot trust yourself in the future. 

Intuition or our “gut” knowing is more than weighing the pros and cons, it’s not about asking the “experts”, those we deem smarter than us, for their opinion. It’s not about doing what others have done, just because it worked for them. Intuition is learning to trust your own self.

Trusting yourself is essential to loving yourself. You know yourself better than anyone and no one is going to take care of you except you. Until you trust yourself, you will not be able to fully trust anyone. When you don’t trust yourself, you will seek guidance from everyone else. Your life will be outer-focused, and people will make decisions about your life for you. 

Make your personal decisions based on what’s most important to you and what works best for you. It’s okay to ask other people’s opinions as long as you are willing to pay the most attention to YOUR feelings. If you are unsure of yourself, take the time to really listen to your gut. If you have a relationship with a Higher Power, spend time in prayer or meditation and ask that the truth be revealed to you.

Learning to trust your intuition, your higher knowing takes time and training, and you won’t always get it right. You need to learn to ‘feel’ in your body what feels right, and what doesn’t. And, how that shows up for you will not necessarily be how it shows up for someone else. The more we test our intuition and discover that it’s telling the truth, the more we begin to trust ourselves.

So try some experiments. The next time you feel confused about a decision, pay attention to your gut-level reaction. Don’t rationalize or talk yourself out of your feelings. Go with it and see how it turns out. Really feel into your body and see where and how something that ‘feels’ right sits in YOUR body, how something that ‘feels’ wrong sits in YOUR body. You can even make a list of times you trusted your intuition and if things went well or not. The more you practice trusting yourself, the easier it will become. If you trust yourself and find out later it was a mistake, learn from it and move on. It’s okay to be wrong. It’s better to trust yourself and be wrong than to not trust yourself at all.