E176: Self-Trust Begins When The Story Ends

In this powerful behind-the-scenes episode, I take you into a six-month coaching journey that reveals something universal about leadership, self-trust, and the stories we tell ourselves.

My client — an accomplished, caring, highly capable leader — came into coaching believing that every tense meeting, every system glitch, and every emotional reaction from her team meant something about her. Like so many high-achieving leaders I coach, she wasn’t overwhelmed by the work. She was overwhelmed by her interpretation of the work.

What unfolded next was nothing short of transformational.

In this episode, you’ll hear how she learned to:

• Stop taking responsibility for everyone else’s feelings
• Replace “I don’t know” with the far more powerful “I can figure this out”
• Shift from pressure → presence, chaos → clarity
• Regulate her emotional landscape instead of absorbing everyone else’s
• Lead with compassion, integrity, boundaries, and inner steadiness
• Recognize that self-trust isn’t about having the answer — it’s believing she can find one

You’ll also hear truths I shared with her — the kind that disrupt old patterns and open the door to identity-level transformation:

You’re not responsible for everything.
Uncertainty is not failure.
Chaos doesn’t mean you’re ineffective.
And your story is not the truth.

By the end of our work together, she wasn’t trying to “perform” leadership anymore.
She was inhabiting it — fully, authentically, intentionally.

If you are a leader who finds yourself overthinking, over-owning, or overwhelmed by the emotional climate around you… this episode is for you.

You’ll walk away with three powerful invitations:

1. Where are you confusing chaos with inadequacy?
2. Where are you picking up emotional weight that isn’t yours?
3. Where can you shift from “I don’t know” → “I can figure this out”?

Because coaching isn’t about becoming someone better.
It’s about becoming someone truer.

If this episode resonates and you’re ready to lead from clarity, steadiness, and self-trust instead of pressure and perfection, I invite you to book a clarity call through the link in the show notes.

Breathe deeply.
Lead gently.
And trust yourself more than you think you can.

Chapters

• 0:05 Welcome And Scene Setting
• 1:40 Why This Coaching Story Matters
• 3:22 The Meaning-Making Trap
• 5:57 You’re Not Responsible For Reactions
• 8:12 From I Don’t Know To I Can Figure It Out
• 12:18 Regulating Emotion Versus Rumination
• 15:30 From Pressure To Presence
• 18:06 Maturity: Focus On What’s Yours
• 20:45 Imperfection, Compassion, And Recovery
• 23:18 Coaching As Disruption And Expansion

Transcript

Cynthia: 0:05

Welcome to Uncharted and Unfiltered, The Journey Back to You. I am Cynthia Jameson, your host, and this is where we break free from the noise and dive deep into what truly matters. You. If you're tired of the shoulds, the expectations, and the pressures to fit into a mold that doesn't serve you, you're in the right place. This isn't a podcast about easy answers or sugar-coated advice. This is your invitation to reclaim your path, embrace the unknown, and become the bold, unapologetic version of yourself that's been waiting to show up. It's time to get unfiltered. Let's get started. Hello, hello, friends, and welcome back to Untreadered and Unfiltered, A Journey Back to You. I hope that you're having the most amazing start to your week. As I record this, it is Monday. It was a beautiful snowy day here in Fredericton, New Brunswick. And I met with my running group nice and early. We did a six and a half kilometer run and then had the most amazing coffee. There's something about getting up early before the world even starts to wake up and being out there and amongst the trails and the deer, the snow, the people, the laughter, the frustration, all of it. There's something absolutely incredibly beautiful about that. That's how I started my day. And I have had an incredible day of coaching clients, which always leaves me feeling so inspired, so grateful and thankful to be able to do this work. And today I have what I think is an incredible episode for you because I want to take you behind the scenes of a coaching journey, one that unfolded over the past six months and revealed something profound about leadership, self-trust, and the stories we tell ourselves. And I am going to keep this person, my client, anonymous, of course, because what matters isn't who she is, but what her journey illuminates in all of us. Because the themes that surfaced in our work together are universal and they live inside of so many high-achieving, high-responsibility leaders. And that is why I wanted to share this with you. This was not a journey of learning new tactics or absorbing more information. It was a journey of identity, of examining the quiet narratives that run the show and the courage that it takes to stop believing the narratives that shrink us, that discount us, that make us smaller. So let's start there. When my let's talk a little bit about the leadership story that was running my client's life. So when she started coaching, she was an accomplished leader, steady, caring, capable. But underneath that competence was a pattern that I see in so many leaders, which is whenever something went wrong around her, she immediately made it mean something about her. So an example is when there was a tense meeting, she would say, like, I must be ineffective. When she experienced a difficult coworker, her narrative was, I failed somewhere. When there was a glitch in the system or a system problem, if you will, her narrative was this reflects me in my leadership. And when people, because people are human, have had emotional reactions, responses, her beautiful brain made that mean that I am responsible for fixing all of this. And it's always so fascinating to me. I mean, this is the beauty of having space between you and the thing that is happening within your life. For me, I could totally see that she wasn't overwhelmed by the work. She was overwhelmed by her interpretation of the work. And before we go any further today, I want you to hear this clearly from me. What is happening is rarely the problem. What you make it mean about you, the meaning making, is the problem. And that realization right there became the foundation for everything that unfolded next for my client. Here is the truth. You are not responsible for everyone else's feelings on your team, in your organization, in your community, etc. And one day after a messy meeting that my client had, she said to me, I just feel like I'm responsible for how everyone reacts. And this is where coaching becomes transformational. Not because I comforted her, which of course I would do that, but also because I told her the truth. And with so much love and clarity and lived experience, I said to her, you're not responsible for how everyone reacts. And you never were. And it's so fascinating. And I don't know if anyone has ever given you this sort of uh feedback before, but her body went immediately, like it went on alert. It's like her body kind of froze a little bit, it got really, really stiff, and then this exhale and this softening became. Because here's the thing: most leaders who care deeply end up carrying emotional burdens that were never theirs, because they confuse being responsible in a situation with being responsible for everyone in it. Do you see the difference? And that confusion when I think that I'm responsible for everything and everyone in it, that confusion is what creates burnout, resentment, and self-doubt, because you're then thinking that you're responsible for everything, which has you then spiraling in doubt about how you can do it all, manage it all. And the moment that my client put that emotional weight down, everything started to shift. Her nervous system had an entirely different experience because it didn't feel responsible for everything. And that shift opened the doorway to something even bigger for her. My client's biggest reframe was from I don't know to I can figure this out. And I want to just give a little context here because this is something that my my client's brain decided that it was it was like a default pattern. And once she stopped taking responsibility for everyone else, something really interesting happened because she could finally start to hear the voice inside of her, the one that had been saying, I don't know, for years. And for her, every time uncertainty showed up, which was all the time when you think about the world we're living in, right? For most of us, we don't have to look too far to feel uncertain. And for her, that sentence was automatic. I don't know. And here's the moment that coaching becomes identity work. Because I asked her, is that actually true? Or is it just familiar? Because uncertainty in and of itself is not failure. Uncertainty is simply an invitation to grow into the next evolution of who you are, how you lead. And that is really, really important. And so her new sentence became I can figure this out, which was her reframe that shifted everything. And she was able to then use that for herself whenever she would eavesdrop on her beautiful brain, and she could hear this. I don't know. That was her cue. Actually, let me shift gears, take a breath, give myself a pause, and step into the energy of actually, I can figure this out. And leaders, that one sentence changed everything for my client. It was the sentence that enabled her to move from self-doubt to her own inner resourcefulness. She could then create her plan of what is she, what is the thing that she wants to do, right? Like it just allowed the energy and the awareness to go to a much bigger, more spacious place. It also moved her from internal chaos, feeling like she is responsible for everything, to this space of emotional regulation. She was able to calm her whole system down enough to regulate her own emotional state. Rumination, and I may have said this before, but it feels like another pertinent place to put it. Rumination is like a rocking chair. You can rock all day and get nowhere. Rumination in and of itself, in the way that I think about it, isn't particularly helpful. What is particularly helpful is to create time and space in a regulated way so that you can sit and problem solve with yourself, with a colleague, with your leader, with whomever you feel is important to problem solve with. And so this reframe allowed her to move in that way. It also allowed her to move from a state of pressure, feeling tense, feeling like she had so much responsibility and so much pressure to be everything for everyone. It allowed her to shift out of that. And she was able to shift into a state of presence. This is what my intention is. Oh, this is who I want to have in the meeting. Oh, these are going to be the boundaries of the meeting. These are going to be the topics. Like it really shifted everything for my client. And why this is so important is because this is the heart of self-trust. Self-trust is not about having the answer at all. Self-trust is believing that you can find one. This identity shift. She actually switched from like what she was thinking, I have to fix everything to I don't have to fix everything. And once she began trusting her ability to figure things out, this other realization surfaced for her. She didn't have to fix it all. She didn't have to please everyone. She didn't have to carry the emotional climate of every room. You can just imagine the heaviness of that. And she said something that I think every leader needs to hear. I can't get stressed about every little thing anymore. It's not sustainable. I have to focus on what's mine. And that is the moment that she stepped into a new place of leadership maturity. And here's the insight that I invite you to take with you. Chaos does not mean you're ineffective. It simply means you're human and you're leading. And as she grew, she began to confront something that I see in leaders everywhere. Not the reality of failure, but the fear of being seen in imperfection. This is the way the brain works, right? There's always this another, it's trying so hard to protect us that it has all these beautiful different parts of us that are needing certain things. And as soon as we, you know, created space for one thing, it shifted it down to something else. And she said, and I mean, I've said this myself, and you probably have too. Sometimes I get frustrated with myself when things don't go as planned. I mean, have you ever had that happen? But now here's the difference. Now she meets that frustration with compassion and with recalibration. She gives herself the moment to vent, she gives herself a breath, a pause, she creates a new plan, and she gives herself a reset. And this is how leaders evolve, not through perfection, but through recovery and commitment. And I think it's so fascinating. I've just finished a session with another beautiful client. And this whole idea of like our default patterning, our conditioning, and how we can so often find ourselves doing what we've always done because we don't have a model for what we haven't explored. And if we've never had someone model for us that everything isn't our fault, that we have that we aren't responsible, then we really purely don't know what that is. And the result of that is a nervous system that is so afraid to because it feels unsafe to try the new thing. Whatever the new thing is, it doesn't matter. It really doesn't matter. If it's something new to your body, your body doesn't feel safe enough to even explore it. And so it's creating safety for you to be able to explore that. Which brings us to this another revelation around coaching. And here's what I think about coaching. I mean, many people think coaching is supportive, and I think it is too. It absolutely is. But also coaching is disruptive in the best possible way. This is actually proof that disruption is not a problem. That disruption is expansion, it's evolution. It's like the best possible thing we could ever have. And through our work, I challenged my client. I challenged her stories, I challenged her interpretations, I challenged her limiting beliefs, I challenged the part of her that confused responsibility with self-sacrifice. And she was courageous enough to, and you need to hear this because this is not everybody's path, but it was her path. But she was courageous enough to face all of it, to sit with the discomfort of creating a new way of leading, to sit with the discomfort of not picking up everyone else's uh emotional weight. And that I just want to pause there for a moment. Because sitting with the discomfort, the only way out is through, and we can't keep avoiding it, we can't keep bypassing it. We must learn to work with our nervous system enough that we can lead ourselves through these new experiences, this new paradigm that we are entering into from a leadership perspective. And I know I've said this a hundred times, maybe a million times, but coaching is not about telling someone what to do. I actually just had a client who wanted me to tell them what to do, and I'm like, actually, that's not what we do here. And if you want my advice after the session, I'm happy to send you some of my advice from my lived experience. However, let's figure out your way. Not my way. This is all about your way, your leadership style, how you want to say it, how you want to be, who you want to be. Coaching is about holding up a mirror so that you can see the story that you've been living inside of, the strength that you have been underestimating, or the strength that you have been overusing, and the leader that you've been all along. Now, my clients' breakthroughs were not about learning new leadership techniques. There was a little bit of that, but they were about uncovering the identity that was. Already there beneath the fear. And that brings us to where she ultimately landed. Which is a leader who trusts herself. By the end of our work together, she told me, I feel so much more empowered. I bring things up when they matter, but I speak with value, not noise. And I am learning to choose compassion over frustration. She did not become someone new. She became more herself, more her her own authentic leadership style. She found her leadership stance, her style, which was compassion plus integrity, plus clarity, plus high expectations. And she stopped performing that leadership and started inhabiting it, living it, being the demonstration, embodying it. And if I distilled her whole journey into three truths for you, they would be this you are not responsible for what isn't yours. Uncertainty is an invitation, not a threat. And self-trust is built in the small moments when you choose clarity over story. And the best part she is just getting started. I love this so much. It just delights me so much to witness the evolution of each and every client of mine when they come to work with me. So I want to leave you with this. Here's some questions for you to think about. Where in your leadership are you confusing chaos with inadequacy? Where are you picking up emotional weight that isn't yours to carry? Where are you saying, I don't know? When the truth is I can figure this out. Where are you believing a story that shrinks you? And who might you become if you stopped? Because this, this right here is the heart of coaching, not becoming someone better, but becoming someone truer, more authentic. And so if you're listening to this and recognizing that you are living inside of a story that is smaller than you are, if you are ready to release responsibility that was never yours, if you are ready to lead from clarity, steadiness, and self-trust rather than pressure and perfection, then I want to invite you into one-on-one coaching with me. This is the work that transformed leaders, not at the tactical level, but at the identity level. And if you are ready to explore what that could look like for you, you can book a clarity call through the link in the show notes. And until next time, I invite you to breathe deeply, lead gently, and trust yourself more than you think you can. Take care. See you next week. I hope that you're walking away feeling more aligned with your true self, more confident in the choices ahead, and ready to leave the safe path behind, knowing you've got everything you need within. Remember, the journey to you isn't about finding one perfect direction. It's about trusting yourself enough to explore all of it. If you're ready to dive deeper, join me for the next episode and don't forget to subscribe so that you never miss the next step on your path. I invite you to join my mailing list at www.cynthia JamesonCoach.ca, where we'll deepen our relationship and you can claim your copy of your inner compass, a guide to charting your course to authenticity. Until next time, stay unfiltered, stay true, and most importantly, stay you.