The Life you would have if you trusted yourself.

In this episode,  I explore the powerful difference between living from self-doubt and living from self-trust. So many of us spend years second-guessing our decisions, seeking approval from others, and waiting for certainty before taking action. But what if the life you’re dreaming of is on the other side of trusting your own instincts?

I talk about why self-trust is the foundation of confidence, how fear and overthinking keep us stuck, and the small daily choices that help us reconnect with our inner wisdom. You’ll discover that trusting yourself doesn’t mean having all the answers, it means believing you can handle whatever comes next.

If you’ve been holding back, questioning your path, or waiting for permission to pursue what you truly want, this episode is your reminder that you already have what you need within you.

The life you want isn’t created by knowing every step ahead. It’s created by trusting yourself enough to take the next one.

Tune in for an honest conversation about courage, confidence, and becoming the person you’ve always been capable of being.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome back to the reset series. Today's episode is called The Life You'd Have If You Trusted Yourself. And I think in reality we can all relate to this because it doesn't matter who you are or how confident you are, we all fall into the trap of asking other people opinions, asking other people if we feel like we should level up in our life, if we should buy a house, if we should go out on that date, if we should buy certain clothes. It's just unfortunately a trap that so many people fall into. But when you do that, you actually start to live other people's lives more than your own. And the truth is you actually already know more than you think. Put it like this have you ever had a goff feeling that you ignored? And later on down the line, it could be a few days later or a few weeks, you realised you're actually right and you should have listened to that goof feeling. And instead, you may have asked somebody else's opinion, you might have pushed your goff feeling down a little bit lower and ignored it, went with what they advised you to do, and lo and behold, it was wrong. I've done that myself so many times in my life, and what I found was in some of those situations was that the people that I was asking for advice or validation, they were actually advising me based on their own fear and their own worries, and in line with what they would do in that situation, but they weren't coming at it from where I was with the tools that I had or the confidence that I had, they were making their decision to me based on where they were at in their life, and I ignored my gut and I went with them, and lo and behold, I made the wrong choice, and I realized that later in life, and I know a lot of people listening to this are actually going to relate to this because it's something we all do. We're actually conditioned to seek external validation, and that can come from so many different people. It can be friends, it can be your manager, it can be your partner, it can be social media that's a big one right now. You know, we're all putting stuff up online, we're all looking at other people, and I say this so many times, and it's a really thing that people need to remember if you're gonna go on social media and you're gonna scroll, you need to be mindful that what somebody has shown you is what they've chosen to show you, you know. And like if you're looking for validation online and you want the likes, you want people to tell you you're doing a good job. Look, everybody wants that, but it shouldn't be your main focus because some people are gonna view your story and it's gonna trigger something inside them, and they're not gonna like your story, and that's not because they don't like your story, it's because they're jealous or they're insecure, and it's triggered something within them. So I wouldn't rely on external validation from people for anything in your life because ultimately, you know, well, who who are all these people to tell you what you should and you shouldn't be doing? That's up to ourselves. Your validation should always come from within, and like a lot of people overthink things. I'm a very big overthinker, I have to catch myself doing it a lot of the time, but overthinking it's not confusion, it's actually when you don't have the same confidence to trust your instinct. So, when we overthink things all the time, a lot of people think that they're actually confused and they can't make a decision, but it's not, it's actually that you lack the trust to believe in your first instinct, and when you start to practice that and realize that you're not listening to your instincts and you're starting to go further and further, well, that's when usually the bad mis bad decisions come along, you know. And this just could not be further from the truth, but like to get clarity that comes from acting, it does not come from thinking more. Like, action is everything. You can think about a situation as long as you want, you can think about having the perfect body, you can think about lifting heavy in the gym, you can think about having that nice car, you can think about confronting that friend who always makes you upset. But if you don't action that and you only think about it, well then you remain in the thinking phase and you never move into the action phase. And there's a huge cost to be paid for not actually trusting your own good, and the cost of that is you like like you're staying in situations longer than you actually should be, and that could be anything from a job, an environment, a family situation, a habit, something that you do every day that actually makes you feel absolutely crap, but you're still doing it because you don't trust yourself enough to live. You're missing opportunities because you hesitate too long. Do you ever get invited to something and you're him and hawn and you say, I'll come back to you, you know, you might read the text but you don't respond. You're in a group and everyone is planning a night out, and you're a bit reluctant to say I will or I won't because of all the things that could go wrong. You hold off, and you know, two, three hours later, someone pops a message up in the group, all the tickets are gone. Well, you've missed the opportunity of going on the night out, you know, and who knows what could have happened on that night out, or you missed the opportunity of applying for the job. Who knows what that job could have opened up? And that happened in my life. I took an opportunity, I spoke about this before, to level up and go one grade up five years ago in my job, and I left a department that I'd known for over 20 years, I left everybody that I knew, and this was probably a point in my life where I wasn't confident, and I lacked a lot of confidence, you know, I wasn't the person that I am today, and I could have very easily told myself, you know, don't do it, the timing isn't right, you know. You have a young child, you know, all of these things that could go wrong, you know, don't do it, don't take that step. But I didn't listen to them, and I took the step, and from that step, I've progressed three grades higher from actually making that one step. But not only that, I've had so many different experiences with like confrontational people and toxic workplaces. I've grown so much as a person that had I never taken that first step and listened, you know, to what other people were telling me to do, well, then I never would have developed all these skills that I have now that have actually led me into the person that I am today. And another thing that people do all the time is they constantly second guess. Now, another thing, uh, I do that, that is another thing. So I'm a big overthinker and I constantly second guess decisions that I make. And look, that's probably something I'm always gonna do in my life, but I'm aware that I do it, so I action it as soon as I do it, I will replace that thinking. So if I've made a decision and it usually is with my gut instinct, I generally don't ask too many people's opinions. I might ask one or two valuable people in my life their opinion of a situation. If it's a big life change for me and it's gonna affect them, I might ask them, you know, or I might ask an expert in the field, what do they think about this, you know? But generally, I don't ask a lot of people, then I don't start second guessing things. Once I've made my decision and I feel the overthinking brain start to kick in and I start to second guess things, that's where I step up and I say to myself, you know, you've made the decision now, these are all the things that could go right, and yes, these are all the things that could go wrong, but if you actually put them both down on a piece of paper, you know what could go right and what could go wrong, they're usually like for like. So, why would you not take the risk for the chance that they could go wrong? What if they go right? And that's what's happened to me in the last few years. I've had so many adversities, so many different challenges in my own personal life, and so many opportunities where I could have actually said, I'm not stepping forward any further. My life is too hard, my life is way too challenging at the moment, and it's just easier to stay where I am. And I didn't, and that is why I've grown into the person that I am today, and I continue to grow because I continue to put myself in situations that are completely out of my comfort zone, they're in line with my gut instinct telling me that I need to do this, and this is who I was meant to be, this is what I was meant to do, but I also will not accept that I'm going to sit in the situation that I'm in for the rest of my life and never take a chance. Because if that's what you're going to do in your life, you have to be prepared for the fallout of that and the pay, and the payout of that will be you will be exactly where you are in a year's time, you'll just be a year older, and that's just a fact. And if you outsource your decisions to other people, well then you lose confidence. And this was a big thing I did a long time ago. When I met my partner, I drove everywhere. I bought a car. I spoke about this before when I was 19 when I had my daughter, and I bought a car because I was determined that I wanted to bring her to loads of different places in Ireland, and I didn't want to be relying on the bus or for one have to ask other people for a lift. None of my friends had a car, so that was the decision I made. And like I didn't know how to drive when I bought the car. Um, I just bought a car, got car insurance, and learned how to drive, and it was terrifying, and I'd sure it was terrifying for everybody else who was on the road because I wasn't the most confident driver, and but I did it and I pushed myself out of my comfort zone. But if you outsource your decisions to other people, well then you lose confidence. And what happened to me with that was I met my partner, then my husband, a good few years later, and he started like driving, he liked driving, so he drove everywhere we went. But ultimately, what happened was then I was never on the motorway and for years. Like I never I never drove on the motorway, and then when it came up where I had to drive on the motorway, I couldn't do it, I had no confidence to do it. But years prior, I'd driven everywhere on my own, all before Google Maps, like there was no Google Maps, it was basically that you just drove yourself and you um like looked at a a route planner on a piece of paper, and I got myself from here to four hours away in Ireland somewhere. But because I had stopped doing it and I'd outsourced my decision to let him drive, I'd lost the confidence to do that, and that was a big thing for me. I realized that like I'm not gonna do that anymore, you know, because if you don't use it, you lose it, and that is very, very true in life. And the cycle exists that is doubt, delay, regret, less self-trust, and that's just the way it goes. And if you are in that cycle now, it's very hard to change the cycle if you don't actually step out of it and try to do something different. And the where the self-trust gets broken is your past mistakes. So if you keep looking at your past mistakes and you keep telling yourself, Well, I can't trust myself to get it right, you're never gonna get it right, you're just not because you are setting yourself up for failure immediately if you think that. So, like I've had situations in my life where you know I have made mistakes. Who hasn't? Who has not made a mistake in their life? Like, show me a person, there is not one person, I'm definitely gonna make future mistakes. That doesn't mean that I don't trust myself. I trust myself more than anybody in the world because this is my life and this is how I want to live it. And if I don't know what's right for me, how can I expect other people to know what's right for me? They just can't, and that doesn't matter if it's your partner, your parent, your child, they do not know what's best for you. You know what's best for you. So if you are constantly telling yourself that you can't trust yourself to get it right because you've made a past mistake, they're going to just keep being mistakes. You have to flip your mindset on that. You cannot keep speaking to yourself like that, and this is a huge one fear of judgment. What will people think if I get it wrong? Who cares what they think? Who cares? I have gotten so many things wrong in my life. I was judged so much when I became a parent at 18. I was judged by so many people because not everybody was doing it. I was the first person out of all my friends to have a baby, you know. Everybody had this presumption of how my life was going to pan out, and it didn't, it panned out completely different, and that wasn't like you know, pure luck. My life panned out completely differently because I I chose for my life's life to pan out like that, and I did care what people think thought of me. I cared way too much what people thought of me for so much of my life, whereas now I do not care what people think of me, I'm fully aware that there is people that will listen to my podcasts, that there's people that will see me and you know say something negative about me. That's on them. They're doing that because that is a reflection of who they are. If somebody is spending their valuable time on this earth judging what someone else is doing, well, they're doing nothing in their life, they are doing nothing that is worthwhile in their life because they are giving all their time and energy to judge other people. So if you could do one thing today, stop giving a shit what people think about you because this is not their life, and this is your life, and that dash that is between the year you're born and the year you die, that's your life. Why would you give over your precious time to anybody else and care what they think? Like, I just wouldn't care. People get rewarded when they follow the rules, they don't think for themselves, so they follow all the structure and then they might get a little payout, you know? They do what everyone expects them to do and they get a payout, but they don't think independently. What if you thought independently? Followed your gut, listen to your own body telling you what to do. What if the payout was bigger than just the bog standard payout? What if you were gonna live a life that was so much more enriched than the one that you're you're you're living now? In life, so many people compare their decisions to others. Everybody does this. There is nobody in the world that doesn't do this. They compare their life to other people or they compare their decisions. Parents do this all the time, especially when their parent in a struggling situation, they might look at another parent and think, Oh, they didn't do this. What you have to remember is that person on the surface may look like they are dealing with the exact same scenario that you are, but they're not, they are dealing with it in a different home, different parents, different parents' upbringing, different family backgrounds. There's so many different things that can lead into why somebody is making a decision that looks similar to yours, but that it isn't, and you know, I see this a lot with friends if they're in relationships with people and they might say, you know, such a body um well, like she accepted that, so I should accept that. You have to remember that person is accepting that and that relationship because that's her standards, that's how she sees herself, and that's what's in line with her. That does not mean that's what you have to accept. So you should never compare your decisions to other people. Again, you're handing over your life to someone else to make the decision. They're not going to live your life though, you're going to live your life. People spend so much time thinking that perfectionism in every decision is what's high. That's where we need to be. Every decision has to be the highest decision that you can make. That's just not true. I've made decisions in my life, and some of them have been great, and they've been the best decisions for me. And some of the decisions in my life haven't been so great, but I took a learning from every single one of them. And if I'm really honest, the biggest learnings I took were from the decisions that were the wrong decisions in my life because they were the ones that brought me on the journey in situations that were hurtful, that were harming, that were challenging, that were draining, you know, that I was pushed to my absolute limits in situations that I wish I hadn't been in at the time, but on reflection, I wouldn't change them. There is not one decision in my life that I would change, and that's from every part of my life, right back to my childhood, I would not change anything that happened to me because every single one of them has enabled me to become the person that I am today, and I've owned every single one of them. Because in all of our all of the decisions we make, that's where the growth comes, because that's where you learn, but you have to be open to learn, you have to be open and to trust yourself and know that you are actually making the right choices for yourself, and even if you do get it wrong, you're going to take something away from that. That when you come across a similar situation again, you'll be able to use that and you will have grown as a person. Every single person, when they're feeling really low, has to work on rebuilding their self-trust. You have to start really small, and you have to start with simple promises to yourself daily, and that's where the reset and rise comes into, and that's why this is called the reset series because every single person has the ability every single minute of the day to change your life. You can reset your life at any point, you do not need to stay stuck where you are. This is not your full stop. This is just a point in time in your life, and you can change it if you're not happy with it. Even if you made a big decision an hour ago, that doesn't have to be where you go for the rest of your life, but you have to start small and you have to keep the promises to yourself daily, whatever that might look like for you. So that might look like you know, I'm gonna drink water every day and I'm gonna go for a 20-minute walk. The second one might be I'm not gonna let people speak to me like that because it doesn't make me feel good. I'm gonna prioritize my sleep over cleaning the house, I'm gonna remove myself from that friend group because they don't make me feel good. I'm stopped gonna speak negative to myself. That was one thing I used to do every morning. I looked in the mirror, and the first thing I said to myself when I got dressed was, um, oh my god, like you look fat, you look ugly, you look this, you look that like so so so negative. And like a long time ago, I used to get changed four, five, six times before I'd leave the house. Like it was exhausting, it was actually exhausting when I think back of that person. But because I decided one day that I was going to change that, I couldn't just change it overnight, like it's just impossible to flip that narrative. But what I did do was every time I woke up in the morning, I said to myself, You're a wonderful person, and you're really kind because I couldn't bring myself at that moment to say you're beautiful or you're lovely or everybody likes you because that's not how I felt, so it would have felt too fake. But what I did say was, you know, you're a kind person, you know, you're you're a loving person. I tried to find something nice about me that didn't really look at my my looks, and over time, the more I did that, the more I started to feel kind to myself, and the narrative actually changed, and I can't remember. I honestly can't remember the last time I got changed out of an outfit that I put on. I was just happy with it, and I wore it, and that's because I like who I am. I really like who I am, but I kept those promises to myself. You need to, when you make a decision, you need to make them quickly and independently of yourself. Do not ask other people, like, don't over-explain your choices to others. That's something a lot of people do. I see my friends doing it, I see other people doing it. You know, if they buy a new car, they feel like they have to explain why they bought the new car. I only bought that car because the other car was starting to be on its way out, and you know, I didn't want to be left with it. You feel like you need to justify your spend, it's your money, it's your car. What's it got to do with anybody? Why do you need to explain yourself? You know, you go on your third holiday of the year, you're over-explaining to people why you need a holiday. Well, you don't drink, you don't smoke, so you use holidays. What's it got to do with them? Why do we do that? Why do we over-explain our choices to other people? So stop doing that, don't do that. And like this is this is this was key for me. Like, treat mistakes as data, not personal failure. So see them as something that you're gonna learn from. So, like, we do this in work all the time. I do this in work all the time, like lessons learned documents, where I take all the lessons that are wrong, all the lessons that we've learned, and we put them into a document and we use them going forward for any future work that might be similar. And when the work starts, that's similar. We reflect back on the lessons learned document, and then we make sure that these are implemented so it doesn't happen again. Why can't we do that with our life? Like, treat your mistakes as data, see them as something in a document. If you can't like write them down, I do write mine down actually, but if you can't write them down, put them somewhere that you can reflect back on them in your head that like you're gonna use them again, you're not gonna just treat them as a personal failure, beat yourself up about it, move on, and then the same thing is gonna happen again because that is what's gonna happen, and like build evidence for yourself, like do something that an action you can follow through on, and that will prove to you that you can trust yourself. Nobody knows you better than you. That's just a fact. Nobody knows you better than you. So stop asking other people what is best for your life. How the hell do they know what's best for your life if you don't know what's best for your life? And I'll tell you what, what changes when you trust yourself? Well, everything changes, and that's I can speak like from experience with that. Every single thing will change. Your decision making will be faster, it will be cleaner, it will be quicker, it will be more in line with who you are as a person. There won't be as much mental noise, you will not second guess all that. Overthinking all that second guessing that will all be gone and you'll have a stronger sense of direction, even if you have no plan, even if you don't have a one-year plan, a two-year plan, a five-year plan, you will just feel so much more confident in who you are as a person and your sense of direction because now you're starting to listen to your goal. Now you're listening to who you are, and you will become more aligned and more authentic as a person. I promise you, if you do this, this is what's going to happen for you. Confidence happens from action, it is not something that you chase, it happens there and then. It is a byproduct of what you do. You know, you can't wish for it, but it just happens when you put the work in. If you stop saying to people, is this right? and ask yourself, Does this feel right for me? Well, look at how different that is. Is this right for me? And that's what I say now in life. I don't ask a lot of other people's opinions. As I said before, if I'm gonna embark on a new journey, I might ask someone who's a professional in the field, or if it's going to affect my family life, I might ask people who are close to me. Other than that, I don't ask the people's opinion, and that's not because I don't value my friends' opinions. I do, but this isn't their life, this is my life. I have not asked anybody if they think I should be doing what I'm doing because I don't I don't need them to tell me that. I believe in myself and I believe that this is where I should be, and I believed that years ago. All the steps that I've taken to get to where I am now, I stopped asking, is this right? and I started asking, Does this feel right for me? And if something isn't right for me and it's not aligned with who I am, goodbye, it's gone out of my life. I don't give it a second thought because this is my life, and life is too short, and you should feel the same way. You need to be precious with your time, and you need to be so hard on those things that are not right for you because this is your life, don't be giving your time to other people, you know. Like, you don't need more opinions, you need more self-belief in your own voice. This is your life, this is your voice. You need like to trust yourself. Self-trust is not built by thinking, it is literally built by backing yourself. And if you cannot back yourself, well, then like who else are you expecting to back you? If you can't back who you are as a person or who you want to be as a person, well, how can you expect other people to back you? I really hope that you've taken something from this today. I sincerely want to thank you for listening to the reset series. And if any of this has resonated with you, please sit and think today. Am I overthinking? Am I asking people's opinions all the time? And what am I getting out of that? Am I still living a life that I'm not happy with? Well, maybe you should stop asking their opinions, and maybe today you should just decide I'm gonna start listening to my own body because remember, you came here on your own, and a lot of the journeys you've gone through, you've gone through on your own. I've gone through so many of my most painful times in my life alone. So, how would anyone else know me better than I do? They don't. So, deep down you know what's right for you. You just haven't been listening to your voice. I hope you've enjoyed this and thanks for listening to the reset series.