Self-Trust and Internal Decision-Making for Women Leaders

You don't have a confidence problem. You have a self-trust erosion problem — and there's a big difference.

Most women in leadership have spent years building external credibility: the bio, the board seat, the reputation. But nobody taught us to trust the voice that already knew. In this episode, Lemon breaks down exactly why women stop trusting their own judgment, from the language used about little girls to code-switching to outsourcing our thinking to AI,and gives you three concrete practices to rebuild it.

We cover the small decision practice that builds the muscle without the stakes, the evidence journal that gives your brain proof your gut can be trusted, and the pre-mortem question that cuts through every major decision faster than anything else.

The women who end up in the rooms where decisions are made aren't more certain than you. They're just more practiced at trusting their own read.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

A lot of us have been taught to build external credibility. Heck, I even did an episode on it. We're talking about your bio, aboard seat, the reputation that you're cultivating. But what a lot of these leadership development podcasts and courses are missing is they're not teaching you how to trust the voice that already knew. A lot of women are out seeking leadership. We don't have a confidence problem. We have a self-trust erosion problem. And I think there's a big difference. Hi, I'm Lemon Price. Welcome back to the Well Lived Society, where we talk about leadership development for women and for women who specifically are looking to have more of a community impact. You want to be on a nonprofit board or, you know, you want to be on a civic committee. You're looking to join organizations that are bettering the community that you live in. And that's all we talk about here. But today I really want to talk about why women especially, we have a tendency to stop trusting ourselves and why I think we have like a trust problem. So as women, I think we're often socialized to differ, right? Where there's supposed to be general consensus, or, you know, we defer our authority, or we say, well, let me think about it. We actually never even like use no as a complete sentence, which is a whole other thing I could go on. We could do a whole episode about using no as a complete sentence. I actually just said that to my advisor last week. I was like, Did you know that's a whole sentence? No explanation needed. But here's the thing we, as girls, as women, I'm talking about as little girls, like especially the language we use just around even leadership behavior, right? We call little girls bossy instead of saying they have leadership capabilities or you know, they're sassy, or we just use these words with a negative connotation to them instead of highlighting the fact that these are leadership skills. Right? We don't do that to boys. And so from the time you're probably like three, I would say. I have a niece who's three, and you can really see her per her personality just blossomed right after she turned three. And you have to like watch some of the language we used to describe her or talk about her behavior because I my best friend, I we don't want her to grow up with a complex, right? My best friend, she's also a leader in her space. She's in luxury real estate and she's rolling with big dogs. And so she, and when I mean like big dogs, I'm talking like$15 million real estate deals. Okay, like big dogs. She doesn't have time. My best friend does not have time to second guess herself or her ability, her capabilities, her intelligence. She doesn't have time for that. And so what we don't want to do is put these projections of the world onto her. We don't want her to be worried about what everybody else thinks. What do you think? And so every time that we sort of like override our own instinct, it costs you something. And what actually happens is you bank a data point against yourself, which I know sounds so crazy, but you are creating a data set that says my own thoughts, my own feelings are not good enough. I shouldn't share them. They're not worth sharing, or I need to second guess. Or we're, we're, you know, we're checking against Chat GPT, which I can't stand. There are so many podcasts that I used to love. And these were very smart, capable women. And all of a sudden, with AI, and maybe this should be a whole other episode, we should talk about AI and leadership development. Maybe we'll do that in next in like two weeks. But I don't understand why all of a sudden we are second guessing ourselves. Why all of a sudden we're checking with AI to make sure that we know what we're talking about. I feel like chances are, if you're listening to this podcast, you probably went to school pre-AI. You wrote papers before AI, you did the readings before AI, you presented before AI. So, why all of a sudden are we outsourcing our skill set, our intelligence, our critical thinking skills to AI? I'm telling you, I think I'm gonna do a whole episode on this because it is something we've been having a hot debate about this, Georgia Southern lately, just talking to some of the faculty, especially with the undergrad, the work that's being handed in. I mean, students are leaving like full chat GPT prompts in their papers, which is mind-boggling to me. I think there's a way to ethically and responsibly use AI, but I don't want you to outsource your intelligence to it. And so stop second-guessing yourself with AI. The other thing that we're always doing is code switching, which I think compounds this ability to stop trusting ourselves. And I'm gonna have a really good guest on this summer to talk more about code switching. She's, I mean, incredible. I'm very grateful for the guests that I have coming on, which you'll start to hear guest interviews soon. I just did my first one. I have a bunch coming up. I'm very excited to share some of these guests with you. But code switching, right? So we're constantly translating ourselves for a different room. We are constantly changing our behavior. We're masking what we can and cannot share. We're policing ourselves. We're policing other people. That's the other thing we do as women. When we do that, we are losing sight of what we actually think. What do you actually think? Not what social media says you should think, not what the news says, not what AI says, not what somebody on Instagram says, not even what I think. I feel like you're very rarely going to hear my opinion on a lot of things because I don't want to necessarily influence how you think about things. I will talk about leadership development. We're gonna talk about it holistically, but it's not my goal to tell you what to think and how to think. I don't stop outsourcing that, okay? And what happens is when we we start outsourcing to AI or social media, or we start policing ourselves and we're we create this data set. What happens is we've created these women women who are brilliant. You are brilliant, smart, capable women, and you second guess yourself privately on a regular basis. And so I want to talk about what self-trust actually looks like in a leadership context. I think that self-trust is not arrogance, right? It is just being decided, right? Knowing what you think and feel before a room pressures you into a different thought. Now, what I am not saying is don't be influenced by others, right? I I it's one of my favorite things about being back in graduate school. I am in school with people who are 23 and I'm in school with people in their 50s. Okay, so I'm like hanging out in the middle. Everybody has such different and unique life experience. I actually just had this conversation with a student because they felt like they couldn't share or speak up as much. Literally just because they didn't have the same life experience. So one of the classes I took this last semester was local government. And as a homeowner, our professor was bringing in city managers and county managers and you know, people who who impact my taxes, right? And I want to ask some questions. There's some things our city is doing, there's some things our county is doing. And so I had real questions about it because they were sitting 10 less than 10 feet in front of me. So I had real questions for them. And so, because of that, some of the younger students felt like they couldn't speak up because they don't have the same necessary like buy-in or life experience that I have. And that's not true. That's not true. And so I'm like, it is so important for you to speak up and talk about things because there's things that I'm hearing from 25-year-old students that like I haven't thought of, right? I don't see it the way they do, but it's really interesting to hear their perspective and their take on things. And so I want you to be open, but I also want you to be like, I know what I believe. I know that I'm smart, I know that I'm capable, I know how I, you know, I have the skill set behind me to handle this problem or to answer this question or whatever it is. You have the skill set. And so self-trust shows up in, you know, how you're gonna vote in a board meeting. Are you firm on your values? Do you know? And again, I'm not saying you can't be open. Like I just had we had a vote on our board in March, April, something like that. Maybe March, March. And I thought I was gonna vote fully in one direction. I was like really convinced I knew exactly how I was gonna vote. I was going to give a full amount of funding in one direction. And then after I gathered some information, I was like, okay, actually we can do a partial amount and we can cover, you know, like we can at least cover the big expenses, and that's fine. I still voted, like I knew that funding this endeavor, the request, was exactly what I wanted to do. I knew that about myself. I knew that's how I was going to vote. I had the information in front of me. I knew that's how I would vote. My vite, my vote changed slightly based on having more information, knowing what was feasible, getting more insight on what something actually costs, right? But I still knew my values. Like I wanted to fund this certain request because I value what the request was for. Right. Self-trust looks at how you send an email and whether you send the email or not, whether you say yes to an opportunity before you feel ready. I'm gonna tell you right now, 99.9% of the time, you do you are not ready for the thing you're asked to do. You don't feel ready. You never feel like you've arrived. It's never, it's never gonna happen. It is never going to happen. So stop waiting for some like magical moment where you're gonna be like, oh my gosh, I am ready for everything now and it's wonderful. It's not gonna happen. Okay, it's just not gonna happen. And so I use like my own internal decision-making framework, right? Like, does it align with my values? That's what I was just talking about with this board vote that I had. It aligned with my values. Do I have enough information? And what does my own track record tell me? What are the things that I legitimately value? When am I putting my weight behind? Not just what I say that I put my weight behind for my actually showing up. And then self-trust is also knowing when you don't know. And being able to say that clearly instead of performing certainty. When people ask me questions, I have no idea. I'm like, I actually have no idea. I'm gonna look that up. Or like, let me get a little more info and get back to you. That is okay. I do not have to be the smartest person in the room. I do not have to, like, I'm not on an episode of Jeopardy where I feel like I have to know every obscure answer under the planet. Like, that is just not reality. So, self-trust to me is also knowing when it's okay to say, I don't know. I don't have the answer. I don't know. That is, that's okay. Actually, you should do that more. You should absolutely do that more. So, how do we how do we fix self-trust? How do we rebuild the self-trust? Okay. Number one, we're gonna do some small decision practice. So we're gonna start making some low-stakes decisions quickly and without revisiting them. The goal really is to build the muscle, not necessarily strategy. And when I'm talking small decisions, I'm talking about gym, yes or no? What am I having for dinner? Like things that don't actually matter in the grand scheme of things. I'm talking decisions that you can make in under two minutes. I my best friend and I, we joke, she has like a uniform that she wears every day. She's like, I'm taking out the decision fatigue and just making this decision. She literally wears like athleisure every day, unless she has like a showing or she's meeting a client. It is straight up athleisure every single day. And it's like a joke. She's like, oh, I got my uniform on. Her mom made me comment. She's like, Oh, you're wearing your uniform today. Like, it make decisions that are low stakes that don't really make a difference in your life, but it is building the muscle to make decisions quickly. Because here's the thing when you also make decisions and then you don't follow through, you start second guessing yourself. You're also training yourself that, like, again, you can't be trusted, that you don't follow through, that you your decisions are not worth sticking through. So we're gonna make very small decisions that are that can be made very quickly. I'm talking again, under two minutes. We're not gonna revisit them, we're not gonna second guess them, we're not going to, we're not doing anything. And sometimes those decisions suck. Like the the other day, I didn't feel like cooking. And so we were like, let's just order pizza. It was the worst pizza. I don't, it was so bad. It was trash. Okay. Glenn and I both looked at each other and we're like, wow, we really that was bad. Cooking would have been a better decision. And so instead of feeling bad or being like, wow, we made the wrong decision, it's like, okay, that's a data set. That was not the right, that was not the right pizza place to order from. We will in the future either A, order from a different spot or B, we will just make the food ourselves. Because it would have taken just as long to cook, but I digress. Small decisions that do not impact anything. And then I want you to get an evidence journal. So I want you to write down every time your instinct was right. And this is, I'm telling you, this is gonna be anything. Like I brought my umbrella today and then it rained. My instinct was right. I mean, write those things down. I always know it's gonna rain because my knee hurts. Old cheerleading injuries, my knee hurts every time it's gonna rain. And I'm like, oh, I know it's gonna rain. Or it smells like rain in the morning. I'm like, it's gonna rain today. So I write those things, like, write them down. Put them in a notes app in your phone, like do something with them. Your brain's only job is to protect you and keep you safe. And so it is going to look for evidence that you are right. Again, no matter what you believe, whether you believe your instinct is right or you believe your instinct is wrong, your brain is looking for ways to prove that you are correct to keep you safe. So we're going to create this evidence journal to prove that you are right way more often than you think you are, that your gut can be trusted. So I want you to go get one. I don't care if you go to the dollar store today, go get one and write it down. And then we're gonna do like a pre-mortem check. Okay. So before a big decision, I want you to ask like, if I knew I couldn't fail and I didn't need anyone's approval, what would I do? That answer is usually the right one. If I wasn't going to fail and I didn't need any approval, what decision would I make? And again, you're not gonna ask ChatGPT or Claude or any of those things, what decision you're gonna make. What would you do in your gut? What is your gut telling you to do? What is the years of practice and theory and things that you have learned? What experiences do you have that will tell you what to do? Okay. I want you to do that. That is that's your big, it's your big thing here for me this week. I want you to do those three things. Again, you're going to start making small decisions that have no real impact on your life. We're gonna write down in a journal every time that our instinct was correct. And then I want you to ask yourself before a big decision, if I knew I couldn't fail and I didn't need anyone's approval, what would I do? I'm gonna tell you right now, the women who get board seats and civic appointments, they win on wards, the room, they get to be in the rooms where decisions get made, they are not more certain than you. They're not. They might just be more practiced at trusting their own belief system, their own thoughts, their own feelings. I can tell you right now that having some external credibility without an internal self-trust is like building a house with no foundation. And so, since we've spent so much time talking about credibility and visibility and what that actually looks like and being trusted, now you have to trust yourself. We we already built the house. I want you to trust the person who is living in that house. Trust the person living in that house. So I'm gonna encourage you again this week. I'm just shameless plug here because we had a lot to celebrate last week. So make sure that you are filling out the application for the Civic and Board Fellowship. I'm giving one seat away for the summer cohort. So you're gonna want to do that. Fill it out. I'm telling you, you're gonna be so glad that you did. I also have a new little freebie that you guys can get. It's in the show notes for you. But it is literally just how to know if you're ready for a board seat. And it breaks it down into like five different areas, and you can evaluate yourself in those five areas. We can figure out what your strengths are, where we need some improvement, and we can build a whole strategy around improving those things. So you're gonna want to go get that. It's in the show notes for you. And those are like the big things. Oh, if you love the show, please rate it, review it, share it with your friends, go post it on the social, tag me in it. Let's talk about it because I just think this is really important. I think it's so important to work on your own self-trust as you're in the leadership development space. So, one thing I want you to do this week is make one decision that you've been sitting on, and I don't want you to revisit. Okay. I just want you to decide. That's it. That's the only thing you have to do. So next week, I'm really excited. My first guest interview will be out with Nicole Meihaufer. We're talking, we talked a lot about philanthropic giving and finances and how do you set yourself up to be in this position to volunteer more, to serve more, to to live the life that you kind of want to have. So I'm very, very, very excited for that episode. So stay tuned. Also, I'll be telling you who's getting the free seat next week. So come join me on the episode, and I will see you all next week. Tootaloo.