How to Trust Yourself by Seeing How Far You've Come

One year ago, on International Self-Care Day, I launched Love From the Inside Out with one simple promise: to release one episode every week for an entire year.

In this one-year anniversary episode, I'm reflecting on what a year of showing up has taught me about self-trust, consistency, perfectionism, confidence, and why so many women in midlife struggle to recognize how far they've come.

I had no idea where that commitment would lead.

I didn't know if anyone would listen. I didn't know what I was doing. I just knew there was something I wanted to create, and I wanted to prove to myself that I could follow through.

One year later, after more than 50 episodes, listeners in 65 countries and territories and 481 cities worldwide, and as I wrap up this season of the podcast, I've realized the greatest thing I built wasn't a podcast.

It was trust in myself.

But this episode isn't really about podcasting.

It's about something I think so many women in midlife struggle with: moving from one accomplishment to the next without ever stopping long enough to recognize how far we've come.

I also reflect on the incredible kindness of this community—from thoughtful messages and reviews to cards, gifts, and conversations that have reminded me there's a real person on the other side of every episode. Your encouragement has not only kept me going, it's helped shape the direction of this podcast.

If you've been second-guessing yourself, waiting until you feel "ready," wondering why nothing you accomplish ever feels like enough, or constantly moving on to the next goal without stopping to acknowledge your progress, I hope this conversation reminds you that the evidence of who you're becoming is already there—you may just need to slow down long enough to see it.

In this episode, you'll learn:

• How to trust yourself by recognizing how far you've come
• Why self-trust is built by keeping promises to yourself
• The surprising relationship between consistency and confidence
• Why so many women rush past their own growth
• Why we rarely feel like we've done enough—even after accomplishing something meaningful
• How perfectionism keeps us from acknowledging our progress
• One of the most overlooked forms of self-care
• Learning to celebrate yourself without waiting for someone else's approval
• Why honoring your growth isn't selfish—it's necessary
• Lessons from one year of Love From the Inside Out
• A look ahead at what's coming next for the podcast

Also in this episode:

• Celebrating one year of Love From the Inside Out
• More than 50 episodes published
• Listeners in 65 countries and territories and 481 cities worldwide
• The beginning of Season 3—with the first conversation episode of Love From the Inside Out

If this episode resonates with you, I'd love to hear from you. Send me a message on Instagram or Facebook and tell me one promise you've kept to yourself recently—or one way you've grown that you haven't stopped to acknowledge yet. I'd genuinely love to hear your story.

And if you've been listening this past year, thank you. Whether you've listened to one episode or all of them, left a review, shared the podcast with a friend, sent a thoughtful message, or simply invited me into your walks, workouts, or morning coffee, I don't take a single minute of your time for granted. You've helped shape this community more than you know.

Keep Listening

If today's conversation resonated with you, you may also enjoy Why Choosing Yourself Feels So Uncomfortable, where I explore why keeping promises to yourself can feel so difficult—and how self-trust is built one small choice at a time.

🎧 Listen here: https://www.buzzsprout.com/2369290/episodes/19434060

If today's episode spoke to you, I think you'll love Notes From the Inside Out. It's where our conversations continue between episodes—one thoughtful note at a time.

Once a month, I'll send you a personal note with reflections, practical insights, encouragement, and a few things I'm loving or learning as I navigate this season of life alongside you. My hope is that each note helps you trust yourself a little more and reminds you that you're not doing this alone.

✨ Sign up for Notes From the Inside Out HERE.

I'd truly love to meet you there.

Because you're not disappearing.

You're recognizing the woman you've been becoming all along.

🎧 Connect & Get More:
• Instagram: @susan.kricun
• Drop in my DMs and share your story or ask a question.
• Sign up for my newsletter for free resources and updates.

🎶 Music Credit:
“Seize the Day” by Andrey Rossi, via #Uppbeat (uppbeat.io/t/andrey-rossi/seize-the-day)

✨ Support the Show:
• Leave a review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or anywhere you listen
• Share this episode with a friend who could use a little more love—right where it matters most.

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© 2025–present Susan Kricun.  Love From the Inside Out® is a registered trademark of Kricun Media, LLC.

All rights reserved. All opinions are my own. This podcast is educational, not medical or legal advice.

Transcript

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SPEAKER_00 0:00

The answers you're looking for aren't outside you. They're already within you. I'm Susan, and this is Love from the Inside Out. So tomorrow is International Self-Care Day, which feels especially meaningful because that's the day I launched this podcast exactly one year ago. And I remember thinking at the time that it felt like a pretty perfect day to put this out into the world. I don't know that I fully understood why yet. I thought I was launching a podcast about self-care and self-trust and finding your way back to yourself in midlife. And I was. But here I am, a year later, and I can see that I was also doing something else. I was making a promise to myself that I would keep showing up for this thing, even when I didn't totally know what I was doing. And let me just say, there were weeks when I really had no idea what I was doing. And that's really what I want to talk about today. Not just the fact that this podcast is turning one, although I'm definitely taking a minute to celebrate that. But more than anything, I want to talk about what happens when you keep showing up for something that matters to you before you feel fully ready. Because maybe you have your own version of this. Maybe it's not a podcast, but maybe it's a conversation that you've been avoiding, or a creative idea that you have, or a health goal. It could be a shift in your relationship, or maybe it's a business idea, or setting a boundary, or just some part of your life where you just keep thinking, I'll start when I feel more confident. I'll do it when I know exactly how it's gonna go. And what this year has taught me is that sometimes confidence does not come first. Sometimes the promise comes first, and then very slowly, you become the person who knows that she can keep going. If this conversation resonates with you, I would love for you to follow or subscribe so these episodes keep showing up for you. And if you know someone who might need this reminder, this could be a good one to send. And before I go any further, I just want to quickly mention something I've been sharing more about lately. I previously talked about launching a newsletter, and I've decided to take it in a new direction with a new name. It's called Notes from the Inside Out. If you've already signed up, you don't need to do anything. You'll receive the new version when it's ready. And if you haven't signed up yet, it's going to be more like a note from a friend than a regular podcast update with personal reflections and some simple resets and reminders and things worth sharing, and episodes that you may want to revisit when you need a little encouragement or just a moment to reconnect with yourself. You can join the waiting list at lovefromtheinsideout.co. That's lovefromtheinsideout.co. If you've ever started something that mattered to you before you felt ready, maybe you know what I mean. It's exciting, but it can also bring up every little voice in your head that says, Who do you think you are? Are you sure you can do this? And what if nobody cares? And what if you can't keep going? That was definitely part of it for me. I knew how to tell stories and I knew how to write and to communicate, but podcasting, oh, that was a whole new world for me. There was the recording and editing and uploading and figuring out the titles and show notes and all of the technology and the things that you just don't know until you're already in it. And honestly, the hardest part early on wasn't even learning the technology. It was the balance between getting it done and wanting it to be perfect. That nearly took me out some weeks because I would sit there trying to get the episode right, and then I'd realize I was making it way harder than it needed to be. I was taking something that came from a very real place in me and running it through my perfectionist brain until it started to feel heavier than it really needed to feel. And that's not really how work is supposed to be. It's supposed to be honest and useful and feel like a real conversation. And I had to learn that in real time. I had to learn that done and true is so much better than perfect and tortured. And that's not just about podcasting. I think that's true for a lot of things in life, especially in midlife. So many of us have something we want to do or say or change or create, and we keep waiting until we know exactly how it's gonna go. We want that whole map first, and we want the competence first. And we definitely want the proof that it will work before we begin. But this podcast has taught me that sometimes, and really oftentimes, you don't get the competence first. Sometimes you get one next step, and then you get another one, and eventually you look back and realize you've become more capable because you just kept going. That's the part that I think matters for all of us. Because keeping a promise to yourself doesn't always feel exciting while you're doing it. Sometimes it can feel really clunky and inconvenient, and sometimes it feels like you're figuring it out five minutes before it needs to be done. But every time you follow through, even imperfectly and most importantly, imperfectly, you're quietly building a different relationship with yourself. You start to become someone that you can count on. When I started, I told myself I was going to give this one year. One year of dropping an episode every week, one year of learning and creating and experimenting and figuring it all out and just seeing what happened. And I also told myself when I got to this point, I would check in honestly, not with what I thought I should do, and not with what would look good from the outside, but with how it actually felt for me on the inside. Was this still a yes? Did I still want to keep going? And as I got closer to this date over the past few weeks, the answer became really clear. It's a resounding yes. And I am just getting started. This morning, I was thinking about all of this because I had one of those nights where I woke up around 3:30 from a really bad dream. You know, the kind of dream that feels so real that even after you wake up, it takes just a while to shake it off. I laid there for a bit and decided to do a meditation because I knew I needed to get out of that loop in my head and back into my body. It helped a little, but then I fell back asleep and I woke up a bit later feeling really puffy and slow and just kind of off. And of course, it was just one of those days where I had to squeeze a full day of work into about four hours. So immediately my brain was like, okay, let's have another cup of coffee. Just push through and get it done. And I almost did. But I also knew that another cup of coffee probably wasn't going to give me what I actually needed. It might have gotten me through the next hour, but probably in that really wired, tired, and slightly cranky way that is just not exactly my favorite version of myself. What I really, really needed was to move. So I got on the Peloton and did a 20-minute sweat steady ride. And if you listen to last week's episode, you'll recognize where this is going because that ride is actually what sparked the whole conversation around mental fitness. Jess King said something during the ride that made me think, yeah, that's it. That's the thing that carries us when motivation disappears. So I don't want to repeat that whole conversation here because I really went into it last week. But the reason I'm mentioning it again is because it connects right back to what I've been thinking about at this one year mark. A year of podcasting didn't happen because I felt motivated every week. Let's be clear about that. It happened because I kept coming back to the promise, the one that I made to myself, and that's where this ties into self-care for me. Because I think self-care gets talked about in a way that can feel a little too neat sometimes. Like it's all about baths and candles and skincare and vacations. And yeah, I really like all of those things, and I'm not knocking any of it. But the kind of self-care that I'm thinking about today is way, way, way less glamorous than that. It's the self-care of listening to yourself when you already know what you need. It's the self-care of not abandoning the thing that matters to you just because it got hard. It's the self-care of being honest about what actually helps, even when it's not the easiest thing in the moment. And that's what this podcast has been for me. It's been creative and meaningful and beautiful at times, but it's also required a lot from me. It required me to learn new things and to keep going when I just wasn't sure if anyone was listening. It required me to get more comfortable being seen, and it also required me to let episodes go out into the world without overworking them to death. And somewhere along the way, I think I stopped feeling like I was trying to become someone who had a podcast and started feeling like, oh, this is actually part of who I am now. That really surprised me. And the other thing that surprised me is how much this became a legacy project for me. That definitely was part of the original pull for me. I wanted to leave my voice in the world and to share stories from my life and my family and the things I've lived through and learned from. I wanted there to be something here that felt true and lasting, even if I didn't totally know what it was going to become. But I don't think I expected how beautiful it would feel to be inside the process of creating it. In some ways, doing this podcast has given me a front row seat to my own life. I've gone back through old stories and old relationships and old dreams and a lot of old versions of myself. I've revisited moments with my family and memories that I hadn't thought about in years. And also lessons that I don't think I fully understood until I started talking through them here. And that has been truly one of the most unexpected gifts. It's felt like a trip down memory lane at times, but also like a way of making meaning out of all of it. I launched with the intention of doing interviews and conversations pretty quickly, but then I ended up doing an entire year of solo episodes. More than 50 of them, which I gotta say still really amazes me. Apparently, I have a lot to say, which, if you know me, that probably makes perfect sense. But still, it surprised me because I never felt like I ran out of things to talk about. If anything, one idea kept leading to the next, whether it was about body changes and menopause or self-trust and overthinking and boundaries, relationships and identity burnout, things like grief and joy and even getting dressed and trying to feel like yourself again. All the things that so many of us are carrying, especially in this part of life when it can feel like everything is shifting. And we're trying to figure out who we are now. And that's really what this show has been all about. It's about women in midlife finding their way back to themselves, not because everything is falling apart, but because so much is changing and it can take time to figure out who you are now. And I also want there to be room in these conversations for beauty and fun and music and friendship and style and for feeling good in your own skin again, even when your body and your life don't look exactly the way that they used to. Because I don't think most women in midlife are looking for someone else to tell them how to fix themselves. We've all had enough of that. What we're often looking for is language for what we're already feeling, a reminder that we're not the only ones. A little honesty, a little hope, and maybe a laugh when we need one. And sometimes just a voice in our ear saying, You are still here, and there's still so much life ahead. A year ago, I hoped this podcast might help one person feel less alone. Honestly, that was enough for me. And now, a year later, these episodes have been downloaded and listened to in 65 countries and territories, and 481 cities worldwide. That still feels pretty surreal to me. I mean, I'm sitting here recording in a room by myself, and then I see numbers like that, and I think, wait, there are actually people listening to this all over the world. Someone could be walking her dog in one city and driving to work in another, maybe folding laundry somewhere else, or sitting on an airplane listening while she's trying to make sense of her own life. That part has been incredibly moving to me. Because those aren't just numbers. They're people. They're women with real lives and real stories and real things that they're trying to figure out. And when someone sends me a message or tells me that an episode helped them name something they were feeling or made them feel less alone, or gave them something to think about, that has been the fuel for me. It just really has meant so much. So as I'm sitting here at the one-year mark, I feel proud. I really do. And I have to tell you, that's not always easy for me to say out loud. In fact, I wonder if it's hard for you too. I think a lot of women, especially in midlife, accomplish something meaningful and then almost immediately move on to whatever comes next. We barely stop long enough to let it sink in. We tell ourselves it wasn't that big of a deal or that we were just doing what anyone would have done. We're often so good at celebrating everyone else that we forget to celebrate ourselves. And I've been thinking about why that is. Maybe it's because life keeps moving, and maybe it's because we're taught not to make too much of ourselves, or because at this stage of life there are fewer people standing on the sidelines saying, I am so proud of you. Our parents may not be here anymore. Our children may be grown up and friends are busy living their own lives. And while we're still surrounded by people who love us, I've realized that maybe one of the invitations of midlife is learning to become the person who can sincerely look at herself and say, I am so proud of you. I am proud because I kept showing up when I didn't know what I was doing. I'm proud because I figured things out along the way. I'm proud because I didn't quit just because it felt hard or confusing or imperfect. And I'm proud because something that once felt like a dream became something real. And that still feels a little emotional for me to say. And it's also helped me realize that celebrating ourselves isn't about having a big ego. Not at all. It's about honoring our growth. Maybe one of the most overlooked forms of self-care is taking the time to honor your own growth before you rush on to what's next. So I've been thinking about how I want to mark this anniversary, and not because I think it has to be extravagant. Quite the opposite, actually. I don't want to rush past it in the way I think so many of us rush past the things we worked really, really hard for. I haven't decided exactly what that looks like yet. Maybe it's celebrating over dinner with someone I love or taking the afternoon off, or maybe it's doing something that's just simply for me. Whatever it is, I want it to be intentional because I think that's part of self-care too. Not just taking care of ourselves when we're exhausted or burned out, but taking the time to acknowledge ourselves when we've done something we're genuinely proud of. And if you're listening today, maybe there's something in your own life that's worth pausing to recognize too. Maybe nobody fully understands what it took for you to do the thing that you did, but you do. And maybe today is a really good day to honor the promise you kept to yourself. And as I think about what this past year has meant to me, I also keep coming back to how grateful I am. I'm grateful for everyone, every single person who has listened, shared an episode, sent me a message, or told me that something here made them feel a little more like themselves. That has been one of the very, very best parts of this whole experience for me. And one of the things I never expected was how many of you would take the time to reach out. Some of you have sent messages after an episode, and some of you have left comments or reviews, or subscribed, or shared the podcast with your friends. A few have even sent the most thoughtful cards and gifts, which completely surprised me and touched me more than you probably realize. Every single one of those moments has mattered a lot. Not because they make me feel successful, but because they remind me that there is a real person on the other end of these conversations. When someone tells me an episode helped her name something she was feeling or made her feel less alone, or felt as though I was talking directly to her, well, I think this is exactly why I keep showing up week after week. Your messages have Encouraged me more than you'll ever know, and they have reminded me that vulnerability creates connection, and they've helped me continue to shape the direction of this podcast. Every note, every comment, subscription, review, and shared episode gives me a better understanding of what's resonating and where we might go together. So thank you, truly. Thank you so much. I know your time is valuable. The fact that you choose to spend part of it listening to this podcast, and that some of you take even more time to share your thoughts with me or publicly support the show is something I will never take for granted. And I also want to say this: the gifts of doing this have far outweighed the hard parts. There were many weeks when it was stressful. There were weeks when I was tired, and there were weeks when I wondered why I had decided to make this weekly commitment to something that required so many moving parts. But when I look back now, the stress isn't what stands out most. What I feel most is gratitude. I feel changed by this experience, and I feel way more connected to myself because of it. And I'm so excited about where this podcast is going from here. Next week, I'll be sharing my first conversation episode of Love from the Inside Out. It's with Kim Costa, author of Live in Your Wheelhouse, and it felt like such a beautiful place to begin year two, because our conversation is about what it means to live in alignment, not just in your mind or heart, but in your actual home and your daily life. This was always part of the vision of this podcast. From the beginning, I knew I wanted to have conversations with people, and I am excited that the time finally feels right to begin bringing those voices into the show. There will be more conversations ahead with women and experts, authors, and people whose stories and work I think belong in this space. The thread will always be the same. What helps us come back to ourselves and trust ourselves and navigate change and ultimately create lives that feel good to live? That's the kind of conversation I want to keep having here. And I want this next year to feel even more like a real conversation. Not just me putting episodes out into the world, but something we keep building together. So I'd really love to hear from you as we move into year two. You can always send me a DM on an Instagram or Facebook and just tell me which episodes have stayed with you the most or what you'd love to hear more of. That would actually be incredibly helpful for me as I keep sharing this. Because I don't want this to feel like I'm just putting episodes out into the world and hoping that they land somewhere. I want it to feel like we are building something together. A real conversation. A circle of women who are honest about what this part of life feels like, but who are also really clear that we are not done yet, not even close. And that's what brings me back to where this started. Maybe the deeper self-care message for me this year is that self-care is not always about doing something extra. Sometimes it's keeping the promise you made to yourself. Sometimes it's letting something be good enough so it can actually exist. Sometimes it's listening to the part of you that knows what matters even when your mind is making a lot of noise. And sometimes it's looking back after a year and realizing that you did the thing. It wasn't perfect or easy, but you did it. And maybe that's enough to remind you that you can keep going too. And before you move on to whatever comes next today, I hope you'll take just a minute to think about something you've done this past year that deserves a little more acknowledgement than you've given it. It doesn't have to be something the world applauded. Maybe it's something only you fully understand. But that doesn't make it any less worth celebrating. Sometimes the person who needs to recognize your courage is you. So if there's something you've been waiting to start, or something you've started and then you set it down, or something you keep telling yourself you'll do when you feel more ready, maybe take this as your little nudge to take one next step. Not the whole plan, just one next step. Because a lot can happen when you keep a promise to yourself. And one more quick reminder before I go. If you want to join the waiting list for notes from the inside out, you can go to lovefromtheinsideout.co. That's lovefromtheinsideout.co. Thank you so much for being here with me today and for being part of this first year of Love from the Inside Out. If this episode resonated with you, I'd love for you to share it with someone who might need this reminder. And if you haven't already, please follow or subscribe so we can keep having these conversations together. From my heart to yours, thanks so much for listening. With love and gratitude.