How to Trust Yourself to Make Decisions

Making a decision can sometimes feel far more complicated than the decision itself deserves.

We can go round and round in our minds, trying to work out what the “right” choice is. What if I make the wrong decision? What if I regret it? What if it doesn’t work out? What if someone judges me for it? What if I don’t know enough yet? And before we know it, something relatively simple has turned into a little scrambly path of overthinking, future anxiety and second-guessing.

I explored this recently in one of my Soul Healing workshops, How to Trust Yourself to Make Decisions, because the more I looked at trust, the more I realised that struggling to make decisions is rarely just about the decision in front of us. Underneath it can sit our confidence in ourselves, our past experiences, our fears, our relationship with our intuition, and even our belief in whether life will support us once we make the choice.

One of the biggest themes that came through in the workshop was that there are really two different kinds of trust at play: the trust we have within ourselves, and the trust we have in the world around us.

If you’d like to explore the subject in more depth, you can watch the full workshop below. Otherwise, I’ve pulled together some of the main ideas and teachings from the session in this article.

The difference between internal trust and external trust

Internal trust is essentially self-trust - do I trust myself to make a good decision? Do I trust my own feelings, judgment and intuition? Do I believe that I know enough? And perhaps most importantly, do I trust myself to handle whatever happens after I make the choice?

When internal trust is low, we might feel that we simply do not know enough to make a decision. It may be that someone else seems more intelligent, more educated, more experienced or more certain than we are, so we look outside ourselves for the answer.

Sometimes that is entirely sensible because there are obviously situations where we need information or professional advice. But there is a difference between gathering information and believing that someone else knows you better than you know yourself.

I always love to remind people that no one else has walked every second and every day in their shoes. So while other people can give us information, perspective and support, they cannot completely know our internal experience for us. We are the only authority for ourselves.

External trust is, however, slightly different. This is all to do with our relationship with life, with other people, with the universe, with Gos (or whatever we personally feel is greater than ourselves).

When external trust is low, the belief can sound more like: life lets me down, people let me down, things have gone wrong before, so they will probably go wrong again, or even that I have to make everything happen myself because I cannot trust that anything will support me.

And very often these two forms of trust feed into one another. If I do not trust myself, making a decision becomes frightening. But if I also do not trust life to meet me after I make that decision, suddenly the stakes feel enormous.

Why we can lose trust in ourselves

Trust does not usually disappear for no reason.

We may have had experiences where our trust was genuinely broken through betrayal, disappointment or being let down by another person, usually in childhood. Sometimes trust is like a broken bone that did not reset properly. We adapted around the injury, learned how to protect ourselves and carried on, but the original experience can continue influencing how safe it feels to trust.

We may also have been taught very early to keep the peace or put other people first. This can be especially confusing when we are naturally sensitive and empathetic because we can become overly aware of everybody else's needs and emotions.

We automatically tune into: What do they need? How are they feeling? Will they be upset if I do this? Is this going to cause conflict? And after a while it can become difficult to distinguish between what we need versus what everyone else needs from us.

We can also have our own unique experiences of suppression or invalidation. Perhaps we were told we were being silly, making something up, being too sensitive, or that what we were feeling was not important. Even something as apparently reassuring as “you're fine” can be invalidating when we clearly do not feel fine.

As a result, over time, we can learn not to trust our own experience.

Then there are the experiences that happen later in life. We might make a choice and regret it, or we trust someone and get hurt. Perhaps something goes badly wrong when we believed it would work out. As a result, we become more aware of everything that can happen, and the freedom or trust we once had becomes more guarded.

This is why I don’t think rebuilding trust is about trying to return to an earlier version of ourselves who was perhaps freer, more impulsive or less aware. It’s actually about building a newer relationship with trust that serves who we are now, at this point in our lives, with everything we have experienced and learned along the way.

When fear and desire pull us in opposite directions

What really came through on the workshop is how fear is such a big part of trust.

I often think of it as like a tug-of-war: desire pulls us forwards towards what we want, but at the same time fear is pulling us back. So, when those two forces have roughly the same amount of momentum, we simply get stuck in the middle where we know what we want, but we cannot move towards it.

This can look like indecision, constantly changing our minds, procrastination, overthinking or complete inaction. Sometimes we have actually made the decision internally, but we still cannot bring ourselves to act on it because acting on the decision means becoming visible, vulnerable or responsible for whatever happens next.

Procrastination is so misunderstood in this way because it’s not about laziness at all, it’s actually all to do with fear. Fear of getting it wrong, fear that it will not be perfect, fear that what we create will not be good enough, or fear of being judged once something leaves the safety of our own mind and becomes real.

This is where our thoughts can start creating entire future calamities that have not actually happened, and the mind is very talented at this! What if it all falls apart? What if I make the wrong decision? What if I cannot handle what happens afterwards? And so on and so on.

Our mind asks not our enemy - we absolutely need logic and rationality, and we need our minds to process information and help us navigate life. But the mind is also trying very hard to protect us, and sometimes its idea of protection is to keep us exactly where we are.

Fear, emotion and intuition are not always the same thing

One of the reasons decision-making can become so confusing is that there can be a lot happening inside us at once.

There’s what we’re thinking, what we’re afraid of, past experiences, and underneath it all there’s the quieter voice of our intuition. And if we are very used to living in the mind, it can become difficult to tell the difference.

For me, fear tends to sit much more strongly in the mind. It is often noisy, repetitive and very concerned with future outcomes. It’s always seeking to analyse, predict, control and make sure nothing bad can happen.

But intuition feels different. It sits much more in the body and in the soul - the inner knowing that can sometimes simply drop in without needing a long explanation. The difficulty is that many of us have spent years disconnecting from that part of ourselves.

If feeling things deeply has been painful or overwhelming, particularly for sensitive and empathetic people, we may have learned to turn the volume down. We move upwards into the mind because thinking can feel safer than feeling, so we analyse ourselves instead of actually being inside ourselves.

This is where understanding ourselves becomes so important. When we know our fears, insecurities and patterns, we have a better chance of seeing them when they appear. So, instead of immediately reacting from the fear, I can say: okay, I know what this is. I know why this is here.

And one of the best ways we can see the hidden emotional patterns operating under the surface, is through knowing the energies in our Soul Contract, and what they might be telling us.

While we cannot control life, the more deeply we understand ourselves - our patterns, our fears, our insecurities and our inner knowing - the more able we become to stay in command of ourselves while life moves around us.

Rebuilding a relationship with trust

For me, rebuilding trust ultimately comes back to deeper self-awareness through understanding what our fears actually are, instead of allowing them to operate invisibly, and healing some of the experiences that broke our trust in the first place.

I don’t think trust is something we suddenly understand intellectually and then have forever, because understanding something is not the same as embodying it. We can know perfectly well that we should trust ourselves, but when the next difficult decision arrives, every old fear can still come rushing back.

Trust is much more like a muscle, and if that muscle has become weak because of our experiences, we rebuild it slowly through repetition, through using it, through taking small steps and noticing what happens. It’s not something that’s instant, instead, it’s something that grows.

When we have travelled the “life isn’t safe” road hundreds of times, it becomes like a motorway. It is embedded and incredibly easy for the mind to get onto it. The trust road can feel more like a tiny dark back road with no lights. It is unfamiliar, bendy and uncomfortable, and because we have not travelled it as often, it does not yet feel natural.

So perhaps we need to put little lights along that road by using reminders of the times we listened to ourselves and it worked out, the times life supported us, and the times the outcome was completely different from what we expected but turned out to be okay anyway.

So while we are giving ourselves new experiences to build from, we are slowly growing that trust muscle through remembering the times we’ve trusted and it’s worked out for us.

Trust also grows each time we make a choice and discover that we can handle what comes next. Perhaps that is the real shift: instead of asking, ‘how do I know this is the right decision?’ we begin asking, ‘can I trust myself to make the best choice I can with what I know now?’ And ‘can I trust myself to handle whatever comes afterwards?’

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Further Support & Resources

If you’re navigating emotional challenges or feeling weighed down by old patterns, here are a few gentle ways to support yourself:

• Join the next Soul Healing Workshop
  Come and explore the deeper emotional patterns, hidden in the Soul Contract, driving your behaviours.

• Discover your Soul Contract
  Gain insight into the hidden patterns shaping your reality, and understand why certain emotional themes keep repeating in your life.

• Join the next Healing Programme
  Experience a shared, guided space for emotional release and support, and connect with others on a similar path.

• Stay connected
  Join my newsletter for monthly updates alongside the latest insights from the blog.

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Carry on exploring