Don't Trust Yourself

A friend going back to school for counseling told me something this morning that's been rattling around my head today. Don't trust yourself.

Sounds like the opposite of everything I usually talk about. But he's onto something. We all carry a blind spot, a bias that runs negative, and if we're not careful, fierce encouragement turns into fiercely trusting the worst voice in the room. Or even that subtle one that runs the script.

I get into the tractor beam that pulls people back into old self-talk after a great week. The IT leader who told me she's done climbing the corp ladder. And a barbell metaphor I use at the gym that applies to a lot more than lifting.

Maybe the move isn't trusting yourself less? Maybe it's not trusting the first habitual response, the old reflex that shows up before you've had a second to think, or even trust that system you've created.

This one's for anyone who's ever had a good month get undone by a bad Tuesday.

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Transcript

A Surprising Rule From A Friend

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Hey there, everybody. This is Mark. This is Fierce Encouragement. A quick check-in before we kind of launch off here. So I talked to my friend Paul this morning, one of my great friends. And if you're out there listening, Paul, love your brother. Now he's in his 60s. He's going back to school for counseling, going deep on therapy and modalities of healing. And he shared something with me this morning that has kind of been rattling around my head as I sat down to create this podcast today. And he said this out loud: don't trust yourself. Now that might sound like the opposite of everything I usually talk about here. So I just want to unpack this and let's get into, I think, why he's right. So Paul has been studying personality disorders in his program and learning lately. And he shared something with me that kind of made me pause and consider what I do here, but also how I coach.

Climate Vs Weather In Personality Patterns

SPEAKER_00 1:10

He said personality disorders are like the climate, not the weather. So the weather changes day to day, right? I talked about my power going out in the last episode, but the weather can change. The storms come through one day, beautiful sunshine the next, hurricanes, tornadoes. Uh, we know the drill. But the climate is more the overlying patterns of the weather. And that's that's something that's bigger and harder to shift, if you will. I think his point was this, at least this is what I took away from it. As a therapist and as a great coach, and as someone trying to help other human beings, he mentioned this that we can't fix the climate. Sometimes the job isn't about fixing the person. It's respecting where they're actually at in the moment. But here is where it kind of landed and resonated and made me think. He told me he wrote something on his arm to remind himself. It wasn't trust yourself. It was the opposite. He wrote down, don't trust yourself. And he said, That doesn't mean I stop being confident, Mark. I think instead he he intended uh to share that we all have kind of a personal bias, uh, a blind spot, um, especially in the way we see ourselves or the way we approach our days and our work and our life. And really, for a lot of us, this blind spot can run towards the negative or have more of that flavor. So we can get caught in that loop. Um, we reinforce that downward spiral, that negative downward spiral, even maybe without noticing it. So if we aren't careful, fiercely encouraging ourselves can become fiercely trusting uh that worst part or that worst voice in our

Stop Identifying With The Spiral

SPEAKER_00 3:32

head. So I've seen something like this with my clients consistently. And well, especially with some great conversations the past couple weeks. So someone will have a great week, um, a great month, even, making real progress, feeling plugged into their life, and then something small or major kind of goes off and goes wrong, and they get pulled back in, pulled back down, kind of like a tractor beam, uh, like we talk about from Star Wars. But we get pulled back in, right back into that sour self-talk, that um low energy, and maybe that feeling and that sense of pointlessness and lacking hope. And one client told me specifically this week that he felt like there was a pointlessness to the mess of all of it. He was just disconnected from everything he was doing. Now, I think about another client I've been working with for almost a year now. And when we first started, she said out loud that she wanted to work on her tone, her voice, her energy, the way she presented and showed up in big meetings with potential clients. And this is a big player. But over the year that she's done this real work, this deeper work, uh, with her therapy, with her self-mastery and discipline, with her cognitive behavioral tools, with breath work, she's really learned to say things like, Hey, this isn't me. I'm just having the experience of being sad. I am not the sadness. I'm having the experience of shutting down. I am not shutting down. I think this is a skill that we forget, the way we talk to ourselves, and not eliminating the feeling or trying to push back on the feeling of shutting down or being sad or angry, but separating ourselves from our reflexive response. And that's really, I believe, what Paul was kind of pointing at when we talked this morning. Maybe fierce encouragement isn't reacting to every wave that comes through us. Instead, maybe it's slowing down, naming those standards we would like to have for our day, for our weeks, for our lives. Maybe it's getting some help from someone we trust, building up our plan, building up our method, our system. And then really getting strict with not trusting that quick, uh, reflexive, reactive, responsive thing that shows up uninvited, trusting that system and working it instead of getting pulled into that tractor meme.

High Achiever Burnout And Self Doubt

SPEAKER_00 6:51

So I also had another first session with a client today, and great person. Spent 15 years or more, I think it was, as a high-level COO. Again, high achiever, really driven, definitely not lazy, wanting to help people, but they talked about how they kind of lived in this stressful environment for a very long time. She loved the mission of the job. Um, she loved the people, the learning, really connected with kind of like the whole philosophy. But it was this that kind of made her leave. The culture at the top in the in the big rooms, I guess, was the opposite of what they preached and uh tried to enforce with everybody else in the organization. Immediate responses to emails were expected, no matter the time of day or night. Um, they wanted them to put out the fires immediately. No trouble, no difficulties, right? No room to not be available, no space to just be a person and enjoy your downtime and kind of integrate and learn. So she ended up leaving that role, and now she moved over to a new role and a new kind of career. But she is obviously older, and she's carrying what I kind of basically named as post-traumatic stress from the old one. And it was just it was shocking because there is self-doubt everywhere from this leader. And she's saying to herself, like, Am I doing enough? Um Am I doing it right? Am I learning the right way? Will I be criticized? Am I even showing up in the right way? Am I even up to this? And I asked her, after she kind of got through that, how she creates space and time for herself. I asked her how she slows down and practices recovering. And she went on and she told me she loves to read at night. She really loves to volunteer in her community, she loves to work out and do her exercises when she can get there. And I said, those things are great, those things are wonderful. Um, but I what about one layer deeper? How do you actually slow down? How do you actually pause? How do you actually be present with yourself? There was a long gap and some tears, and she said that that question made her sad. She also said right after that that she said, I quote, I know I should make time for that, unquote. She did go on to tell me that she does pray the rosary most days for her adult children out of uh fear. And then I asked her, Do you ever pray a rosary for yourself? Another long pause. And with a choked up voice, she said out loud, you know, I don't do that much. Maybe once or twice in the past few months. She couldn't really remember. That's the work, that's the lift, that's the heavy part of this work. And I told her that this is the sharp edge, this is the bleeding edge where we're gonna go live and work on this together. There's so many of the women I get to work with that carry some of the same pattern, and they're really excellent at doing for everyone around them, their teams, um, their family, their friends, their communities, their church. They're always adding more to their to-do list. But in connecting with them, it never really feels like they're subtracting and slowing down to connect and fill up their own cup. And I get it, you know, I really do. This slowing down can feel wrong. It can feel selfish. It's something we weren't taught, it's something you know, good girls don't do or good boys don't do. It can even feel like you're failing as a mom or as a partner or even as a leader. But I think here is a really bold truth, an apparent thing that nobody says out loud often enough.

Subtracting Instead Of Adding More

SPEAKER_00 12:04

We're surrounded by people, personal and professionally in our lives, and these people aren't doing any of their own inner work. And without really meaning to, they'll use the relationship they have with you to meet their own needs instead of building up something mutually. So fierce encouragement, used the right way, isn't about reacting to everything that's asked of you. It's asking, hey, where can I create a powerful moment in my day? Where can I pause? Where can I give myself an order, a real directive, connect it with my purpose? Where can I slow down and actually follow what I really, really want? I had another conversation in the past couple weeks with a uh a female IT leader, and she shared something else that kind of connects to this, and also obviously is still in my mind as I'm talking about it. And I think it's kind of universal, so let me know if this lands or not. She said this out loud. I don't want to climb the corporate ladder anymore. I just want to be a good servant leader to my people and help drive real, positive, valuable change for the organization. And that sounds great. And I believed her. But the leaders uh above her and around her, they talk about to her about how they really dismiss the younger generation of workers coming in for exactly this. Um they resent them because I think that they're the younger ones, and they won't tolerate a soul-sucking job. They won't play this status game just to play it, just to be there. And I think there's something deeper and new and powerful here, and maybe that's a new demand we can make of ourselves as leaders, as parents, as business people, as friends. Where are we habitually sabotaging ourselves? What's that one thing? What's that one thing if we just stop doing it, if we let it go, would make every part of our life easier. Maybe it's the self-attacking. Maybe it's refusing to ask for help. Maybe it's the isolation, maybe it's the food, the drink, the scrolling. We keep adding more and more, more books, more podcasts, more courses, more inputs. We keep trying to fix things from the outside. But the real move, more and more, is learning to subtract, learning to say no, creating healthy boundaries, and learning to check in with that deeper, steadier, more in tune part of ourselves. That's the part of us that can actually connect to the purpose, connect those orders to deeper valuable things in our lives. This is the part of us that we should be building trust with and taking those orders from.

Pre Preparing Like A Strength Coach

SPEAKER_00 15:56

There's one more thing here that Paul and I talked about this morning on our phone call that I wanted to share too. It was about pre-preparing. Pre-preparing for those personality disorders that we talked about at the top, but pre-preparing, not waiting for the moment to get hard before we get ready for it. It really reminded me of something I coach as a strength coach at the gym constantly. How you approach the bar, the weight bar, matters just as much as the lift to your the lift itself. Your grip, your bracing your core, your deep breath, your posture, getting your feet under the bar, kind of tensing up the body a little bit before you lift. So people can get really casual about how they approach the barbell. And those first few seconds, that casualness in a sense, it shows up in our lifts. So if we bring intensity and care and mindfulness to every approach, every time our lifts get easier. And this isn't because the weight shifts uh or changes, that is. It's rather because I think we've approached and we've trained the approach, we've trained how we show up in those first few moments. And I think this is where this kind of matters most. Um well, it and it it's the way we talk to ourselves about it. So if we say to ourselves, I'm gonna get five reps at this weight in, and we only get three or four, and you might need a hand getting the bar up in the last one, why do we call this failure? Why do we feel that failure in our head? Our body doesn't know the difference. You're lifting weights. You're pushing against that resistance and building up muscle. But your body isn't, you know, responsible uh for the outcomes. It's just doing that heavy lifting. It's our mind that has this energy and vibration of failure. Why do we do that to ourselves? We're so good at it. Either I did or didn't, all or nothing. But what if there is no failure per se? What if we're just training with that gas we had in our tank that day, with the sleep we had, with the day we had, with the week we're having? What if we bring that same intensity when we start our day? When we approach those difficult, crucial conversations? What if we pre-prepare for that moment when we sit down to write, to coach, to lead? Or maybe we just practice pre-preparing to be present with our kids. Get down on the floor and play with them for 20 minutes instead of open up the phone or let them play at the park while we're scrolling. I think the approach, planning, giving yourself that kind of directive, that order, that's the practice. And in the way, in a certain way, we can let go of the outcomes. They'll take care of themselves if we pre-prepare and get ready as we approach.

Build A System And Find Your People

SPEAKER_00 20:02

So maybe it is not that we shouldn't trust ourselves. Maybe it's we shouldn't trust that first habitual instinctive response in a sense. I think that old cultural conditioning, that angry, frustrated, defeated, sad, reflexive part of ourselves that shows up before we've even had a few moments to think or check our plan. Well, this is the hard work. This is the heavy lift in a sense. And it will undo you. I've failed at it, you'll fail at it again and again. But I think this is exactly where a good, healthy, fierce encouragement lives. Getting up that next time again and again, knowing that it's worth it, building your plan and finding your people, your person who can walk it with you. So, hey, I just want to thank you for listening. I want to thank you for being here with this one. And honestly, if something landed for you, um, please slow down and sit with it before you move on and try to rush right past it. This isn't a shopping mall. Use it and let it land and ingrain it, put it into your life. And honestly, if you're in a place and a season of your life where you feel that you can't slow down, or where your prayers are for everybody else and not for any for yourself, or where you might feel like you keep adding, adding, adding instead of learning how to say no, learning to create those boundaries and subtracting what you don't need. I want you to know that there's nothing wrong with you. There's nothing inherently wrong with you if you're running on that old program. You just need a new system. That program kept you safe, but your next evolution won't come from doing the same things that you did. And if a conversation might help you, there's a link in the show notes to apply. No pitch, no sales, just a real, honest, authentic conversation about what path you're on, what you're working on, and where you're actually going. You're a good person. Now you might be struggling, and really both of those can be true at once. Until next time, keep fiercely encouraging yourself and know that you're worth it. I appreciate you. Have a good day, have a good evening wherever you're at, and we'll catch you next time on Fierce Encouragement. Okay now. Bye bye.