What does self trust mean? What is a self trust mindset? And why is self trust important? If you’ve ever doubted yourself to handle the hard things in life, perhaps you could use a dose of self trust, and this episode will help you build it.
In This Episode of The Career Rx We’ll Discuss:
- What self trust is and why building a self trust mindset is important
- 6 easy ways to build your self trust mindset
- How to access your maximum mental, emotional, and spiritual strength
Today, I dive into six techniques you can implement right away to help build self trust. Having trust in yourself impacts all aspects of life – from the choices we make to the goals we set to how we feel about ourselves. If self trust mindset is lacking, personal and professional lives can be affected in a negative way.
By the end of this episode you will know what self trust is and why it’s important to practice, and you’ll know how to build a self trust mindset.
“Whatever life throws your way, I’m rooting for you, and you should be rooting for you and know that you can do it. ” – Marjorie Stiegler
In this Episode:
[0:45] What is self trust? What exactly is self trust mindset?
[1:50] You’re already resilient – let’s see those receipts!
[3:15] Noticing affirmation and praise
[4:50] Dealing with toxic relationships in your life
[5:40] Squashing negative self talk
[7:00] Find a gang that celebrates your wins!
[8:05] Stop comparative suffering and embrace self-empathy
[9:10] You don’t have to justify this (to anyone)
[11:00] My meditation practice and what I learned just from showing up
[12:30] Get big self trust results from little goals and micro challenges
[14:10] Practice your self trust mindset for these situations
**Encore of episode 18.
Links and Resources:
The Branding Rx 18 hours of CME, mastering digital strategies for advancing your career, building your business, and growing your professional brand
Online Meditation Courses and Restorative Programs For Busy Minds – with Dr. Jill Wener
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TRANSCRIPT: Episode 59 – Building a Self Trust Mindset
Hey there, I’m Marjorie Stiegler and you’re listening to The Career Rx Podcast, where we tackle the important things they don’t teach you in medical school. Like how to treat your career, like the business, it really is, with strategies to accelerate the kind of success that you want, because you deserve a career you love, and a career that loves you back. Are you ready?
Let’s get into it.
Okay, in this encore episode, today we’re talking about building self trust mindset. And specifically, I’m going to give you six tips to address and to strengthen your own self trust mindset. But before we can do that, of course, I’m going to define it for you and tell you why it’s important because this is a phrase I think, not that many people use.
What is self trust?
Self trust is is really a mindset, right. It’s a mindset that makes you confident in knowing that you can do difficult things, that no matter what sort of comes your way you can handle it. And having self trust is important because it’s really the basis for resilience and for success during challenging times. It’s the way that people continue to get through. And so how they are able to access and leverage that mental and physical and emotional and spiritual strength that they do have. Having that self trust mindset is how they’re able to access it without just sort of falling apart when, a when a significant challenge comes your way. So it’s important to build it, there are a lot of ways that you can do so in times that are challenging. Like right now, it’s a tough time with the Coronavirus going on challenging everybody. But you can also practice some of these things in your daily life, when you’re not having challenges to kind of flex and strengthen these muscles of building self trust. So I’m going to give you six ways, let’s get into those.
6 ways to build a self trust mindset
The first is perhaps not rocket science, make a list of times in the past, in what you did something difficult that you did manage to come through with some kind of success to the other side. So life threw a curveball and you handle it, something came your way. And you were okay. You managed it. So having a list of achievements and really tracking your wins is important. Some people will call this a brag book or an achievement file. There’s a lot of different words for this kind of thing. But that’s it’s very important to get, you know, right out there on paper in a concrete objective way a list of times, and things where you did something difficult and you came out with a successful outcome. The reason this is important is because of negativity bias, you know, sort of how this feels that you can get a whole lot of praise. And then just one criticism. And it may not even be that harsh criticism. And people will tend to focus on that one bad thing instead of all the good things. So if you can get very concrete and visible with all of the good things that you have, in this brag book, or achievement file list of the times when you did demonstrate resilience and strength, and that you were trusting in yourself now you know, you can trust yourself to do that again. So that’s the first one, create that list or that file.
Following from that is my second tip, which is to create another file or collection of praise. So this is from other people, because we do get praise, right? We also get criticism, we get constructive feedback. But from time to time, you’ll get a little note in an email, it can be verbal, all the little tiny things that we tend to not really not embrace, not not soak in and not give really their due, and not allow them to be durable. But words of affirmation are really important. And for many people hearing that praise externally goes a very long way. But of course, it’s unlimited supply. I mean, we’ve not we’re not going to get compliments all the time, all day every day. That’s part of why. You know some people have such a hard time on social media, being very, very, almost addicted to getting likes and retweets and sort of the external affirmation, but it is important to have a collection of praise. So whether these are evaluations, whether these are letters of recommendation, or again, just simple notes that someone’s given you or that you have written down when someone said something to you keep that as well and maybe you can add these two files together. That way you can see that only times that you did achieve success during difficult times but also those words of affirmation.
And praise that come externally, so that we don’t let negativity bias sort of cloud our view of what we’re capable of.
And the third tip is you should detox your relationships. A lot of people have relationships with people who for, for whatever reason, shame or belittle them on a fairly regular basis, a lot of people will sort of jokingly refer to their frenemies, you do not need to be around people like this. If you have somebody in even if it is within, you know, your closer circle at work among friends, or even in your own family, if you have someone that is on a consistent basis, making you feel bad, then you can, you can and should eliminate that person from your life, stop putting yourself around those people. You know, though, that kind of negative talk coming from others only adds fuel to what almost all of us have inside our heads is some sort of amount of self limiting beliefs or negative self talk, right? The narratives that we say about ourselves, like I can’t do such and such, or I’m not good enough for blah, Dee blah, or, you know, people will react or judge me in a certain way. So you have these sort of pre existing negative beliefs that we use to hold ourselves back from things and talk ourselves out of things. And that is a big topic even for another day. But it’s so very powerful. And we do not need to feed it with other people reinforcing those negative beliefs. So take a look at your relationships. And be mindful about who you’re spending time with. And whether or not they’re helping you to foster that self trust mindset. And that knowing that you can do things and that you can learn new things, and that you are good enough that you are worthy, and that people may react to you in a way that you like or don’t like, but that either way you’ll be okay. Those are kind of the answers to some of those self limiting beliefs. And you want to be around people and have good relationships that fuel that supportive side. So you can support yourself and build that self trust mindset, not the side that fuels self limiting beliefs or negative narratives.
And in fact, you maybe want to spend some time finding a group that is so supportive, where you can not only have good relationships that help you, but where you can share the things in lists one and two, right, you can share your achievements. And people say, you know, they have a hard time sort of bragging about themselves, or people will look for an opportunity to do the humble brag, right where you just but it’s okay to celebrate wins. And it’s good to have a community or you can do so. So look for that, as you’re detoxing your relationships. And as you’re building your lists of achievements and your collections of praise. Look for people in relationships where you can share those, celebrate yourself and have other people celebrate that with you – really important.
Okay, number four, acknowledge your experience and your feelings. I think, you know, this is an idea that I learned about from podcast listening to Bernie brown talking about how empathy, people often think about empathy as being limited. And that if we spend any empathy on ourselves, and we don’t have any for other people, but she’s sort of suggested that, in fact, if you tend to your own emotions, then you have more empathy to go around to, you know, your family or friends, people who need you even to complete strangers. But she talked about this idea of comparative suffering, meaning that, you know, well, how can I complain, because, you know, could be much, much worse, other people have, you know, problems X, Y, and Z, which are just so much more than the problems I have, so I can’t complain. And she sort of challenged that and said, of course, you can write, it might be true, that other people have different problems, and they may be worse problems. But you are certainly having your own experience and you’re having your own feelings about it. That acknowledging those feelings, calling them out naming them and feeling uh, you know, accepting that you are having them, right and that that is how you are feeling. You don’t have to reach some kind of threshold of badness. In order to have some suffering. You don’t need to compare your situation to somebody else’s, in order to sort of justify whether or not you’re feeling good or feeling bad. So acknowledge your experience, acknowledge your feelings and know that it’s okay to have them. This I think builds a lot of self empathy which goes part and parcel there with building that self trust mindset, to know that it’s okay for you to acknowledge when you’re not feeling strong and when you are feeling some kind of suffering that is okay to have because if you bury that, then I think it really spills over into. That does not help you respond to challenge in the best, most effective way that you could.
Okay, number five is to spend time with yourself. Now that may sound a little silly, but people do always talk about me time, right quote unquote, me time. And it is important to spend some time with your own thoughts with your own sort of self and to tune into your own needs. This helps you to build self trust mindset by knowing that you will take care of yourself, not just everybody else, but also yourself. And if you do that, by building those habits and demonstrating that you do spend time with yourself, tuning into your emotions, or acknowledging those experiences, paying attention to the relationships, that you’re in, paying attention to the praise, paying attention to your wins, and doing all those things we’ve already listed. And then also doing things that are just good for you or that you enjoy hobbies, exercise, other kinds of practices. For me, one of the most important parts of my you know, spending time with myself is a meditation practice that I learned from a dear colleague, medical school friend, who’s now a business partner of mine, who has some amazing meditation and stress reduction resources on her own websites, I’m going to put that in the show notes, come on over and check it out. Some, most of them I think, are free. Some, of course, she has paid programs, right? This is how she earns her living, because she is an expert. And in meditation, she’s also an internist. She and I went to medical school together, but taught me a really, really powerful meditation technique that I use to this day, and it has really, really helped me to respond more effectively to other stresses and basically be able to self regulate.
And, and, you know, not necessarily be a victim to my own sort of emotions or, or, or sort of knee jerk responses to things. And in times of stress, we all know that, that that is how we tend to react, right, people kind of snap in there, they’re much quicker to judge others more quick to judge themselves and not, not really thinking as clearly or making the best decision. So this meditation practice has really helped me to be able to do that, of course, it doesn’t make everything perfect. But it makes a lot of things a whole lot better. And this is one of the ways in which I really try to spend time with myself in that meditation practice, as well as with exercise and with hobbies and things like that.
And then the sixth tip is just again, not rocket science, but to practice doing hard things. incremental, measurable little goals, that seem, you know, doable, right, but that are difficult. One thing I did this month that I actually had my very last day today was a squat challenge. So this is a physical fitness challenge, building up to 250 squats in a single set. Now, for some of you who might be much more fit, you may think that’s no big deal. Some of you probably think the way I thought when I started the challenge, which was there’s no way I can do that, like, no way, what could I make it to 250. But of course, it starts off incrementally with a manageable number and moves up incrementally with a manageable number. So that by the end of the month, when today, I did indeed do it, yay, me, finished my goal, then that continues to build that self trust mindset to say I looked at something that from the outset seemed like it would not be achievable. But I practiced and put in sort of the discipline to do that work now has that dramatically changed my body or done anything else, not really, it’s really more of an exercise sort of in self discipline. And in self trust, I trust myself that if I start if I do the process, that I can do something. And in this case, it’s a physical something, but it could be mental, it could be emotional, it could be spiritual, any kind of challenge or incremental goal that you want to set for yourself, that I can do things that are difficult. And obviously a squat challenge is difficult on a much different level than a national pandemic, divorce being fired from a job or any number of some of the major types of things. But again, in the same way, we don’t have to have comparative suffering. We don’t need to have sort of comparative practice, you can practice your self trust. And you can practice that on things that are relatively low stakes, right, like my 30 day squat challenge.
And so there you go. There are six ways to cultivate self trust, which is the backbone of your resilience, your ability to make it through tough times, to have that mental, physical, emotional and spiritual fortitude to respond effectively make good decisions and not fall apart when that’s it maybe exactly what you might feel like wanting to do. And with with practice, and with some of these habits of keeping your, you know, tracking your wins, tracking her achievements, tracking and collecting the praise of others, detoxing relationships and finding those good support of relationships, acknowledging your own experience and your own feelings, spending time with yourself, and doing simple practice that helps you achieve measurable goals so that you can demonstrate that you can trust yourself to do it. This is what’s going to increase your resilience make you better able to respond effectively in tough situations, whether it’s personal, professional, or both, no matter what life throws your way, and it will throw some things your way it will now and it will continue to forever, you will know that you can handle it.
So now you know what self trust is, you know why it’s important. You’ve got six tips to increase and practice cultivating your own self trust mindset and know that I’m rooting for you. Whatever life throws your way, you should be rooting for you and know that you can do it.
Thanks for joining me on this episode of The Career Rx. Be sure to leave me a review on Apple podcasts or whatever podcast player you’re using to listen today. And definitely send me those questions so I can answer them and give you a shout out on a future episode. Bye for now.
