Have you ever made a decision you felt really good about, until you told somebody else? You thought it through, considered your options, and felt clear about what you wanted. Then your mother, your partner, or your best friend questioned your choice, and suddenly you’re a mess. You’re anxious, defensive, second-guessing everything, and maybe even changing your mind. But here’s my question: What changed? Did you get important new information, or did someone else’s reaction make you anxious, and now you’re letting that anxious version of yourself overrule the grounded person who made the original decision?
Last week, we talked about why you might have stopped trusting yourself and two ways to start rebuilding that trust. Today, I’m giving you three more practical strategies to help you follow through on what matters, trust your judgment when someone disagrees, and handle things when they don’t go as planned. Because self-trust isn’t knowing you’ll always make the right choice. It’s knowing you can count on yourself to handle what happens even if you don’t.
17-minute read
Three Patterns That Keep You from Trusting Yourself
Last week I introduced my Self-Trust Blueprint: trusting your internal experience, trusting your judgment and actions, and trusting your ability to handle what happens. Today we’re moving from noticing where your self-trust gets shaky to what you can do when it’s tested.
See whether any of these three patterns sound familiar.
- You make promises to yourself but don’t follow through. You know what you’d like to change, but when the moment comes, you put it off, abandon the plan, or tell yourself you’ll start Monday.
- You stop trusting your judgment when anxiety takes over. You felt comfortable with your decision, but somebody questioned it. Now you’re anxious and assume you must have been wrong, even though you haven’t learned anything new.
- You turn mistakes into judgments about who you are. Instead of looking at what went wrong, you decide you can’t trust yourself at all.
If you’re seeing yourself in more than one of these, it’s time to use some different strategies to respond when these moments show up. So, I’m going to go through each one. But I also want you to know that the free download for this week is a Self-Trust Recovery Plan to help you work through a mistake or setback without turning it into proof that you can’t trust yourself. It’ll help you separate what happened from the story you’re telling yourself, decide what needs repairing, and identify your next step.
1. Follow Through on What Matters to You
If you keep making promises to yourself that you don’t follow through on, it’s time to look at what you’re committing to and what’s getting in your way.
Maybe every Sunday you promise yourself you’re going to eat healthier, and by Wednesday the diet has disappeared along with your good intentions. Maybe you’ve decided you’re finally going to exercise three times a week, but another week goes by without a single workout. Or maybe you keep saying you’re going to meditate every morning, but that meditation cushion is getting about as much use as the fancy china you registered for when you got married. By the time you make the promise again, there’s a voice in your head saying, “Yeah, we’ve heard this one before.”
It’s easy to decide this means you have no discipline or willpower. But I want you to ask a better question: Why didn’t you follow through? I’m going to bet that a reason you haven’t followed through is because the goal isn’t yours in the first place. You think you should run because your friends are runners, even though you hate running. Maybe you made a plan that was never realistic, like exercising at five in the morning when you’re already exhausted. Maybe you genuinely want to change, but the obstacle you keep running into is something you haven’t planned for. And sometimes there’s a hard conversation or uncomfortable feeling you’re avoiding, not a shortage of motivation.
There’s research showing that you’re more likely to put sustained effort into a goal when it reflects your own interests and values instead of something you feel pressured to want. That doesn’t mean meaningful goals are easy, but it does mean you need to begin with something that truly matters to you. If you’re trying to meditate only because every person on Instagram insists it’s the answer to everything, maybe the first commitment isn’t meditating. Maybe it’s figuring out what would help you feel more grounded in a way that fits your life.
And even when the goal is yours, enthusiasm isn’t a plan. Researchers have found that you’re more likely to reach a goal when you think through what might get in your way and decide in advance how you’ll respond. It sounds almost embarrassingly simple, but you know how this goes. “I’m going to exercise every morning” feels wonderfully convincing on Sunday night. Then Tuesday morning arrives, you slept terribly, and you have about as much interest in putting on workout clothes as you do in having a root canal. If you’ve already decided, “If I miss my morning workout, I’ll take a twenty-minute walk after dinner,” you have another way to keep your commitment instead of declaring the entire week a failure.
Make a Promise You Can Keep
Start with one commitment that matters to you and make it small enough to fit your life. Not “I’m going to eat perfectly from now on,” but “I’ll prepare something for lunch tomorrow instead of waiting until I’m starving and grabbing whatever’s closest.” Not “I’m going to become someone who meditates every day,” but “After I brush my teeth, I’ll sit quietly for three minutes.” Or you can do what I do, which is focus on each tooth while my electric toothbrush is going for those two minutes. I don’t daydream or look in the mirror. I close my eyes and focus on only brushing my teeth. That’s a meditation, and it’s helping me brush my teeth for as long as I’m supposed to (talk about your win/win)!
And you need to identify your predictable obstacle! If you know you’re likely to skip your walk when it rains, decide now what you’ll do instead. That’s not cheating. That’s having a plan that can survive when reality hits (which it always will).
I also want you to start noticing when you do follow through, because if you’ve spent years collecting evidence against yourself, you’re probably missing the evidence in your favor. At the end of the day, think of one thing you said you’d do and did. Maybe you went for the walk, told your friend you couldn’t make it, or stopped yourself before making a promise you couldn’t keep. No gold stars or elaborate journal required. You want to get better at recognizing that you already have moments when you’re someone you can count on.
And what if you don’t follow through? You don’t get to skip the investigation and go straight to “I can’t trust myself.” Instead, I want you to examine your behavior as non-judgmentally as possible. Was your commitment too big? Did something change? Were you avoiding an uncomfortable feeling? Do you need more support, a different time of day, or a goal that’s more meaningful to you? Then make one concrete adjustment. Rebuilding trust with yourself doesn’t mean swearing you’ll never miss another workout. It means taking your word seriously enough to understand what happened and make a workable next choice.
A last note here: Try to promise less. What I mean by that, is really (really) think about what you’re committing to before you say you’ll do it. Your word has to mean something to you. That’s the most important thing.
2. Trust the Grounded Person Who Made the Decision
If you trust your judgment until someone disagrees and anxiety takes over, it’s time to trust the grounded person who made the decision.
Here’s something I see all the time with my clients. We’ll sit together and talk through a decision they’ve been struggling with. We look at the facts, what matters to them, what they’re afraid of, and what they want. By the end of our conversation, they’re feeling calm, clear, and grounded. They feel like themselves again, and they’re trusting themselves in that moment. They’ve made a decision about something and feel confident about it (even if it’s something scary).
Then our session ends, and they take that decision into the real world. They tell their mother, partner, or best friend, and somebody pushes back. Suddenly they’re anxious, defensive, worried about disappointing someone, and maybe falling right back into people-pleasing. They abandon the decision or start taking another poll of everyone they know. And then they’re back with me saying, “Abby, how do I know which choice is right? I was so sure before, and now I’m not.”
Here’s what I always tell them: Never trust a decision made from fear. Trust the person you were when you were calm, clear, and grounded. That’s the rational, healthy decision made from your prefrontal cortex, the thinking part of your brain, not from your amygdala (the fear part of your brain).
I’m not telling you to completely ignore your fear. Fear can alert you to a real problem, especially when you’re in an unsafe situation. And being calm doesn’t guarantee you were right. What I’m saying is that if someone else’s reaction has thrown you into anxiety, don’t make a new decision just to get rid of that anxiety. Or, if you’ve just gotten to thinking more on your own and allowed your brain to run wild with “what ifs?” (also known as your anxiety coming to play), get yourself grounded again before you change course or question yourself.
Somebody Else’s Certainty Isn’t Proof That They’re Right
There’s some very cool research that just came out this past June that helps explain why someone else’s opinion can so easily throw you off course. Researchers asked participants to make judgments, decide how confident they felt, and then consider what somebody else thought. They found that when the participants weren’t very sure of their own answer, they were especially likely to move toward the other person’s answer if that person sounded confident! In other words, somebody else’s certainty can make you question yourself, even though confidence and accuracy aren’t the same thing! Your mother might be one hundred percent certain you’ll regret not coming for Thanksgiving. That tells you how convinced she is, not whether her prediction is true.
Here’s where it gets even more interesting. Other researchers found that participants with more anxiety- and depression-related symptoms tended to feel less confident about their judgments, even though their accuracy on the task wasn’t worse. So, how sure you feel and how accurate you are can be two different things. Your anxiety getting louder isn’t, by itself, proof that your original reasoning has gotten worse.
And your feelings can influence your preferences even when they have nothing to do with the choice itself. In yet another study, researchers briefly showed people emotional faces before asking them which of two landscape photographs they liked better. Participants were more likely to choose the landscapes paired with more positive emotional cues. Those faces hadn’t made the lakes or mountains any prettier. The feelings had influenced the choice. Now think about what happens when you feel awful after telling your family you’re not going on the trip. The trip hasn’t necessarily become a better idea. You may simply be responding to how uncomfortable their reaction feels.
This is where I come back to something I taught a while ago about following your gut. I talk there about your Inner Being or Higher Self, which, to me, is that place where you feel connected to yourself rather than driven primarily by fear. I think there’s a spiritual component in learning to trust that connection. Not because your inner voice is some all-knowing oracle, but because you can feel the difference between thinking through a choice and frantically trying to make someone else’s disapproval stop (or your own anxiety stop). One is an effort to understand and decide. The other is often an effort to find immediate relief.
For myself, I always find that my anxiety asks way too many fearful questions: What if they get mad? What if they don’t like me? What if I’m embarrassed? But my Higher Self makes statements like, It’ll all work out and everything is figureoutable. My Inner Being knows in a healthy way, while my fearful, anxious self questions and doubts.
The Grounded Decision Check
When you make a decision that matters, especially one other people might challenge, take two minutes to write down your reasoning while you’re feeling clear. What did you decide? Why did it make sense to you? What facts and values did you consider? What were you still uncertain about? And what new information would make you reconsider? This isn’t a promise that you’ll never change your mind. Instead, it’s a way to remember how you arrived at your choice when your emotions start rewriting the story.
Then, if someone pushes back, you can ask, “Did I just learn something important, or am I reacting to how this person feels about my decision?” If you learned that a family member needs help for a medical reason you didn’t know about, that’s new information and worth considering. If your mother is upset because she wanted a different answer, you can acknowledge that without handing over your judgment: “I know you’re disappointed, and I understand why you wanted us there. I’ve thought this through, and I’m staying with our plan.” You can care about someone’s feelings without making those feelings the deciding vote. I want you to care about what others think, but I don’t want you to worry about what other people think. There’s a big difference there.
If you’re flooded with fear, take some time before reopening the decision. Remember the person you were when you made it, look at what you knew then, and consider whatever you know now. You might end up changing your mind, and that’s fine. Self-trust isn’t stubbornness. It’s trusting yourself to reconsider for a valid reason, not just because somebody else’s reaction made you temporarily lose your footing.
3. Trust Yourself to Recover When You Get Something Wrong
If you turn every mistake into proof that you can’t trust yourself, it’s time to learn how to recover, repair, and move forward without beating yourself up.
Eventually, something won’t go the way you wanted. You’ll say something hurtful, misjudge a situation, overlook an important detail, or trust someone who lets you down. If you think self-trust means preventing every bad outcome, you’re setting a standard for yourself that you’ll never meet. And the harder you try to guarantee you’ll never be wrong, the harder it can become to make a decision at all.
First, I want you to separate a disappointing outcome from a bad decision. You can make a thoughtful choice using the best information you have and still have things turn out badly. You can also make a lousy choice that works out through sheer luck. And sometimes you make a genuine mistake that you need to own. If you treat all three as proof that your judgment can’t be trusted, you’re missing the very information that could help you grow.
Imagine you decide to trust someone you’re dating. You paid attention, asked questions, and saw a pattern of behavior that gave you reasons to trust them. Six months later, you learn they’ve been dishonest. That hurts, but it doesn’t automatically mean you were foolish to trust them! Maybe you missed some warning signs, and there’s something to learn. Maybe they hid things you couldn’t reasonably have known. Those possibilities matter, because the lesson isn’t necessarily “Never trust yourself again.” You want to understand what happened, including what was and wasn’t within your control.
Be Accountable Without Attacking Yourself
Here’s another way you can lose your own trust: You make a mistake, and instead of taking responsibility for the behavior, you turn it into an indictment of your entire character. You don’t say, “I handled that conversation badly.” You say, “I ruin everything. I can never get this right.” It sounds like accountability, but it’s not. It’s a verdict, and a verdict doesn’t tell you what to do differently tomorrow.
I love the research on self-compassion because it challenges the idea that being hard on yourself is the only way you’ll improve. Researchers consistently find that when you treat yourself with compassion after a mistake or failure, you’re more motivated to make amends or improve, not less. There was one experiment where students who responded more compassionately after a test setback spent more time preparing for the next test. So, it’s not about pretending you didn’t mess up. It’s about making a mistake something you can respond to instead of something you hide from.
There’s even research showing that self-compassion helps you respond well to negative feedback. Basically, if you respond with self-compassion or examine your own performance before receiving negative feedback, you’ll be more accepting of any negative feedback you might get. Self-compassion and accountability aren’t competing ideas. You need both.
Respond, Repair, Learn
Here’s the three-part approach I want you to use when something goes wrong.
I. Respond to what happened, not the story you’re telling yourself about who you are. Let’s say you lose your temper with your partner. You were frustrated, raised your voice, and said something hurtful. That’s what you need to examine. “I’m a horrible partner and I always ruin everything” adds nothing useful, and it certainly doesn’t make your partner feel better. Be specific about what you did and what you could control. You don’t have to accept responsibility for everything that happened in the argument to accept responsibility for your part.
II. Repair what you can. If you’ve hurt someone, acknowledge the impact, apologize when appropriate, and explain what you intend to do differently moving forward. Not “I’m sorry, but you made me so angry,” and not “I’m sorry you feel that way.” Try, “I was frustrated, and I spoke to you in a hurtful way. That wasn’t okay, and I’m sorry. Next time I’m getting overwhelmed, I’m going to take a break before we keep talking.” The other person might still be upset, of course, since you don’t get to control how quickly they feel better. But repair is key nonetheless because it means taking responsibility for your behavior, not getting guaranteed forgiveness on your preferred schedule.
But don’t forget that you also need to repair trust with yourself. Maybe your mistake was breaking a commitment, choosing a plan that didn’t work, or staying quiet when you meant to speak up. You can acknowledge that without making another grand promise you’re unlikely to keep. Go back to the obstacle, adjust your plan, and do the next manageable thing. If you missed a week of workouts, the repair might be scheduling one realistic workout and showing up for it. You don’t rebuild trust by delivering yourself a beautiful speech about how everything will be different on Monday. You rebuild it with your next choice.
III. Learn without making the mistake your identity. You know what I always say: “You can carry the story, or you can carry the lesson, but not both.” If you lost your temper because you kept arguing after you were overwhelmed, the lesson might be to recognize when you need a pause. If you agreed to something without checking your schedule, the lesson might be to stop answering requests immediately. “I need to stop being such an idiot” isn’t a lesson. It’s just another way of beating yourself up while leaving the original problem untouched.
And some lessons take more than one try. You might know what you need to change and still fall into an old pattern again. That doesn’t mean you should ignore the pattern or give yourself endless excuses. It means you look more carefully at what’s getting in the way, make a better plan, and get support if you need it. You can acknowledge that something went wrong without deciding that you, as a person, are wrong.
There’s a deeper kind of faith in all this, and I don’t mean faith that everything will turn out exactly the way you want. I mean faith that you can stay connected to yourself when life doesn’t cooperate. You can tell yourself the truth, ask for help, adjust, and keep going. You don’t have to know what’s around every corner to trust yourself to deal with the next one.
You don’t need faith that every choice will work out. You need faith that when it doesn’t, you can tell yourself the truth and find your way forward.
Therapy-to-Go Bundle
- The Self-Trust Recovery Plan
- The Follow-Through Autopsy: Why didn’t you do what you said you’d do?
- The Grounded Decision Check: When someone challenges a decision you felt good about, use this to decide whether you learned something important or just became anxious.
- The Self-Trust Repair Worksheet
- Journaling Prompts for Rebuilding Self-Trust
- Guided Imagery for Rebuilding Self-Trust
Research References
- Sheldon, K. M., & Elliot, A. J. (1999). Goal striving, need satisfaction, and longitudinal well-being: The self-concordance model. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 76(3), 482–497.
- Wang, G., Wang, Y., & Gai, X. (2021). A meta-analysis of the effects of mental contrasting with implementation intentions on goal attainment. Frontiers in Psychology, 12, 565202.
- Gradassi, A., van den Bos, W., & Molleman, L. (2026). Own and others’ confidence in social information use. iScience, 29(6), 115968.
- Mohr, G., Ince, R. A. A., & Benwell, C. S. Y. (2024). Information search under uncertainty across transdiagnostic psychopathology and healthy ageing. Translational Psychiatry, 14, 353.
- Kochanowska, E., Reutskaja, E., & Wormwood, J. (2024). Incidental affect influences choice preference among competing alternatives in a modified Affect Misattribution Procedure. Scientific Reports, 14, 32129.
- Breines, J. G., & Chen, S. (2012). Self-compassion increases self-improvement motivation. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 38(9), 1133–1143.
- Laudel, H., & Narciss, S. (2023). The effects of internal feedback and self-compassion on the perception of negative feedback and post-feedback learning behavior. Studies in Educational Evaluation, 77, 101237.
