Why You Don’t Trust Yourself (And How to Change That)

What if the thought isn’t the starting line? We dig into the deeper engine of change: the importance you assign to ideas, how meaning becomes identity, and why clarity and self-trust transform behaviour more reliably than forcing habits or chanting affirmations. This is a practical, compassionate guide to seeing the hidden choices shaping your life and shifting them without drama.

We start by challenging the common loop of results, actions and thoughts, asking instead: what made that thought important? When importance sets, it organises perception, narrows or widens what you notice, and quietly shapes your identity. From there, we explore how childhood meanings — often borrowed from other people’s fears — still run adult choices. You’ll hear why we do what we want rather than what we need, why “positive thinking” often signals unmet pain, and how fear hides in believable phrases like “I forgot” or “I don’t know,” stalling growth while sounding reasonable.

Then we move to the lever that actually shifts behaviour: trust. Quiet self-trust calms the nervous system, widens perception, and makes new actions available without force. We ground this in evidence from your own life — the hardships you’ve already survived — and show how remembering your resilience changes what you make important today. You’ll learn a simple, repeatable practice: notice one behaviour without fixing it, complete the sentence “this means X because Y” to reveal your drivers, and ask, “if I trusted myself, what would I do differently here?” These micro-shifts soften identity and update action naturally.

Along the way, we connect language, personality and results: the way you speak to yourself becomes the world you move through. Awareness precedes choice; when you can see the thought before it becomes emotion and hear the tone before it becomes identity, you no longer need pressure to change. You need clarity. If this sparked a pause, a new question, or relief, share it with someone who might need it, and subscribe, rate and review to help more listeners find it. 

Ready to go deeper? Check the show notes for ways to work together and continue the journey.

You can work with me privately, where we explore the meaning shaping your behaviour and consciously redesign how you respond and live.

Or you can join my membership — a community for ongoing growth,  awareness, integration, and real-time application of this work. 

https://vickyross.mvsite.app/products/courses/view/1171591/?action=signup

Both options are designed to move you from insight into lived change.

Here's to your success

Vicky

Transcript

Welcome Back And Today's Focus

SPEAKER_00 0:04

Hi, and welcome back to Rise Up. This is part two, and today we're going to talk about fear, identity, and the trust that changes everything. My name is Vicky Ross, and I'm your host. So, Rise Up isn't about rising up for yourself in your life, it's about wanting more, and it's about learning how to create that life that you actually want. So, in order to be able to rise up, you need to understand yourself, have an awareness, have some tools for change. So, in part one, we looked at the architecture of behavior, and we talked about how things start with thought, internal dialogue, as soon as the thought becomes important, physiology, action, and then results. But today we are going to take that information and we're going to go even further back, you know, deeper, because there is a big question about where does the thought begin? So, what we talked about in part one is not the full story, and I'm hoping that today I'm going to be able to give you a much fuller story so that you're able to start seeing yourself. So, the big question is why don't people go back far enough to make the change? You know, so most people stop at the behavior side. So, if you think about what I said last week, is that we look at results and then we look at what actions we've taken that create the results and we try and change the behaviors. So, this is where most people stop. They just keep trying harder and harder until they stop trying to change the behavior so they can get a different result. Some people may have gone to a seminar, read a book, and realize that we have to go further back from the behavior and go through feelings and emotions, go back to the thought, so they go back as far as the thought. But what I'm saying is that we need to go even deeper than that. We need to sit and think and ask ourselves, what is it that made that thought that creates the feeling, that creates the action, and then has a result? What made that thought important? Because you have thousands of thoughts. Why that one? Why that one in that moment? So Ady Ashanti, who's a very lovely spiritual teacher, always says that the most important thing in your life is what you decide is important. Very, very simple statement, but it's powerful because importance shapes your experience. So whatever you decide matters, that will organize your perception, how you see the world, how you see experiences, how you see life. It will then influence your reactions and it will then create an identity. So the more you see things in a certain way, and then you behave in a certain way because of what you see, that becomes your identity. Now that there's nothing good or bad about any of that, okay? Because as you know from other podcasts and any of you that have worked with me, I don't believe in good and bad and right and wrong. I believe in only one thing. Asking the question is this giving me the results that I want? That's it. If it's not giving you the results that you want, you need to start asking yourself, what stops me from changing? Because life will throw you curveballs. There's no question around that, it will happen. Life can be unfair, and you can think positively, you can override negative thoughts, but still you will not get the results that you want. And that will become very, very frustrating. It might make you feel cynical. Because the truth is that positive thinking doesn't create change, clarity does. Let me say that again. Positive thinking doesn't create change. If you're making an effort to think positively, it tells me that actually what you're thinking and feeling is negative stuff. You want to override that, and therefore you have positive thoughts. But they're not coming because that's what you believe or that's what you're feeling, it's what you desire, it's what you are lacking, and therefore you're hoping that positive thinking will change. Clarity is what brings change. So you might say, Well, I don't know what I want. And I again in another podcast, I talk about how we are so bombarded with so many negative things on social media, on the news, at work. There's just so much negativity flying around everywhere that we've been very well trained unconsciously to know exactly what we don't want. So our focus and our energy and our attention is on all things that we don't want rather than on the things that we do want. So most people are very good at being able to start rattling off all the things that don't that they don't want, but not what they do want. And here's something to sit with. You always do what you want to do, not what you need. People do what they want, they don't do what they need. And you will say, no, no, no, that's not true. Yeah. You may want health, but you don't want to sacrifice eating donuts and eating cream cakes and eating, you know, bacon rolls and all that. You don't you don't want to sacrifice that. You want to eat the bacon rolls and so on. Now you need to stop eating those because that's good for your health and it will help you achieve your goal. But you don't do what you need, you do what you want because that's what we do. That's a human nature thing. So it's really, really important knowing this to really understand and focus what you want. So the real question becomes: why are you doing what you're doing? When consciously you say you want something different. So consciously you might be going, I want this or I want that, but unconsciously you behave in a different way and you're sabotaging yourself. And then, of course, here's what we do is that we then start badmouthing ourselves, we think badly of ourselves, and all you know just goes down the rabbit hole. So here's the deeper layer. The way that you have learned to be as a human being is shaping the life that you're living. You have learned to be this way, you have learned to have certain reactions, and these certain reactions come because there's certain meaning, and these meanings have been given to you as a result. You behave, in other words, you're being a certain way, and the way that you behave and your being shapes your life. So if you don't like that, you need to change that. So your internal identity is organizing your external experience. I would suggest that you really stop this and think about this. Stop the podcast to think, pause it, not stop it, pause it. I'll say it again. Your internal identity is organizing your external experience. So, right now, in ways that you may not fully see, you're participating in creating the reality that you experience. You're the one that's doing it, you're participating in it, in whichever way you react, and in the way you organize things, and the way you create things, and the things that you choose to do, and the things that you choose not to do. All of these things are creating the reality that you experience. So when clarity begins, you start to look at your life honestly and say, This is not what I desire anymore. Or maybe you find that part of your life is fine, but another part isn't. What part do you not desire anymore? And here's something really, really important. The meaning that you attach to different things in your life, more than likely, I kind of I'm guessing that most of you listening to this haven't examined this meaning. And I want you to think that this meaning has been unconsciously assigned to you at a time where you had no experience and no reference in your life. So it is still your childhood meanings that were assigned because you didn't have experience, you didn't have reference. So when something happened, somebody showed you by their reaction and their explanation what it means, and therefore that meaning has been assigned. It's not what you would have chosen. So maybe the restlessness that you feel is not dissatisfaction, maybe it's just overdue alignment. So overdue in designing a life that feels like yours. Maybe it's overdue in living on your terms. So if it's it's that simple, really. I don't know making it simple. I appreciate, really appreciate that is more complicated than that. But in the essence, that is the basics. So the question then comes in okay, so what stops us? If this is what it is, what stops us? Well, most behavior is driven by pleasure or fear. And if we are honest, more often it's fear. For instance, let's look at the scenario. Let me give you an example. If you were sitting in your lounge watching TV and you got a phone call to say, Congratulations! You have won two million pounds. And you know, you can come anytime from now until the next 30 days to claim and collect your prize. Now, some of you, I appreciate, are in that car and you're going to get it. But let's just say, well, it's six o'clock in the evening, we're about to have dinner and we've got 30 days, we can get it tomorrow. You carry on watching dinner, and then there's a fire in your kitchen. You're not going to go, oh, it's all right, we'll just carry on finishing our dinner and then we'll go and put the fire out. You will be at that house, so you will go out. Whereas you may not go and claim your money straight away because you've got lots of time. We are more driven to react for anything that we are scared of or anything that is threatening our safety, our survival, than we are for the pleasure. So the truth is, and it's it's because we're human beings, that we are more motivated to move away from what scares us than move towards what fulfills us. It's survival. That's all it is. And survival, just so that you know, it's not the same as alignment. We work because we're scared of failure. We stay in relationships or stay in places because we're scared of being abandoned. We procrastinate because we're scared we won't be good enough. We control because we're scared of uncertainty. We people please because we're scared of rejection. We avoid difficult conversations because we are scared or uncomfortable of conflict. We keep achieving because we're scared of being ordinary or that what we have achieved wasn't again good enough, and therefore we have to push more and become more and do better. So fear can be very, very subtle, and it hides in logic, it hides in responsibility, it hides in the this is just who I am. It hides in the oh, I don't know. It hides in the I forgot. So if you hear those kind of things coming out of your mouth or somebody, you know that they are hiding, suppressing, masking fear. It hides in anything it can that prevents you from seeing yourself clearly and making new choices. Because let's face it, if somebody goes, I don't know, and you believe that and you don't push them, well, that's it. That's the end of that conversation. If we say, Why do you keep doing that? Oh, I don't know. Well, you can't go further than I don't know. So therefore, the actual answer of what motivates it, whatever, negative behavior stops because I don't know. Oh, I forgot, I don't know. Oh, I just did it and I forgot. I don't know why I do it. So here we forget it and we don't know. And literally, I remember Dr. Richard Bandler always saying with people that say, Oh, I don't know, or why do you do this? What happens here? I don't know, I don't know. He goes, I do the not knowing, it's a behavior to behave as if we don't know. We know everything there is to know about ourselves. Nobody knows you better than you know yourself. Even your suppressed memories, nobody knows them, and nobody can access them better than you. So when you kind of feel, oh, I don't know, I don't know, this is just too much, just tell yourself right now, for all the reasons, whatever, I am doing the not knowing. So when you see that you're hiding these things because it it stops you from seeing yourself clearly, you can now, instead of doing that, become aware of it and then ask yourself, how do I change this behavior? Ask, what am I scared would happen if I didn't do this? So if I didn't pretend to not know, what am I scared is gonna happen? Or if I didn't forget, or if I didn't feel that I was not good enough, what what would happen? What would happen here? What am I scared will happen? And then ask yourself, is that fear real right now? Or is it a thought that I made important? So most of the time, it's a thought that you've made important. So underneath that, we have to ask ourselves, what meaning have I assigned to this? Because once something has meaning, it becomes an identity. So at this point, you may have decided this means I'm not enough, or this means I can't trust people, or this means I have to work twice as hard, or this means it works for others, but not for me. So you can ask the you can figure out which one of those sentences fits your narrative and then complete it this way. Say, this means I'm not enough because, and just notice what comes to you after the because. So this means I can't trust people because this means I have to work twice as hard because this means it works for others, but not for me, because and just notice those voices that are finishing the sentence. And you can ask yourself, is this voice mine? And you'd probably notice that often it's not your voice, but sometimes it would be your voice because you've already now concluded that you're not good enough, or it's still somebody else's voice. And if you've never revisited that, you're still operating from a belief system that you never consciously created or chose. So, what changes behavior is not positivity, it's trust, a deep, quiet trust that says, no matter what happens, I will be okay. And this is in class I often get people to think about all the adversity that they have experienced in life, and say to them, you know, in that moment it was so awful, but today you're here to tell the story. Today you're here to share with somebody what you overcame, the adversity, the thing that made you rise up, the thing that made you believe in yourself and fight. And then we forget it. So then we go back to pretending and acting that we haven't got that amazing inner strength that helps us push through, that helps us survive, that that power that's inside of us. We kind of forget about it, and then we go back to going, I don't know if I'll survive this, and we lose the trust rather than know that no matter what happens, I'll be okay. And therefore, I can trust that because I've survived whatever it is that you survived. I survived this, I survived this, I survived this. This too shall pass, and I will survive this. But when you allow yourself to remind yourself that you are stronger than you're playing, you've got such beautiful inner wisdom and you have survived and endured, and therefore trust that, trust yourself, everything can change. Because if you trust yourself, you don't act from panic. If you trust yourself, you don't cling on to what is dysfunctional. If you trust yourself, you won't avoid things because you know that no matter how uncomfortable something is, you'll get through it. Trust widens perception, it calms the nervous system down. And because it fear, when you're scared, when you're in that survival mode, it narrows, your perception narrows. When you trust and you relax, your perception opens. And when perception widens, new behavior can become available, and it doesn't need force, it just needs to be seen and allowed. So it becomes natural, it's not performed, it's not dramatic, it's natural. So there's a lot here to listen over and over and unpack, stop, pause, journal. The big question is what can you do today? And nobody, and I really and truly would say do not try and overhaul your whole life. Sometimes people avoid things so much that they in a point of crisis, and in that case, you have to overhaul. But for most people, you don't need to overhaul your whole life, you don't need to reinvent yourself. Just do this, notice one behavior, just one. You don't need to fix it. I can tell you now you don't need to fix anything. You're not broken. Observe it, notice the mechanics, ask yourself what am I scared would happen if I didn't do this? The second is completing that sentence of this means X because why? And be honest with yourself so that you can be very clear. Because that because is where the real drivers live. What comes after the because is where you're going to see all the programs that are so unconscious that you don't see them, but they drive you. The third is to experiment with trust and ask yourself: if I trusted myself today, I would be okay. What would I do differently here if I could now just bring that trust in? A slightly different response or a slightly different choice is how your identity can soften and how behavior shifts. Because now you're not working through force, you're working through awareness. So the way you speak to yourself becomes your personality. And personality, as I've said, shapes perception. Perception shapes the actions that you take, and actions shape results. Results reinforce identity, and the cycle continues. So if you want to change your reality, you don't fight behavior. Fighting never creates change. You become aware, aware of yourself, aware of the actions, aware of the meanings, and then aware of the tone and the language that you use internally. Because that is the world you live in. So I want to leave you with the whole idea that awareness precedes choice. If you can see the thought before it becomes an emotion, if you can hear the tone before it becomes an identity, you don't need pressure, you need clarity that this is the work. Not becoming someone new, but remembering who you are beneath that noise. So if this episode gave you something, a reflection, a pause, a new question, then please share this with someone that you know because there's always somebody that needs to listen to what you've just listened to. Send it to somebody who might need it. And if you haven't already, take a moment to follow the podcast, subscribe to it, leave a rating that helps, leave a review. Not for the ego, but because this helps the message reach people who are ready for it. And I would be very, very grateful and appreciate it. And if you want to go deeper, the links to work with me are in the show notes. And if you have anything specific that you want me to speak about, then send me a message and I will. For the rest, I've got a beautiful membership where people get together and we do beautiful work together every month or one to ones. So until next time, here's to your success, and I invite you to rise up and live a life of your choice. Thank you for listening.