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Trust on Purpose
Are you intentional about building, maintaining or repairing trust with the people in your life? Most of us aren’t, and sometimes important relationships suffer as a result. So much of what is right or amiss in those relationships ties back to trust, whether we realize it or not. We are dedicated to helping you become intentional about cultivating strong trust with everyone important in your life: the people and teams you lead and work with, and your family, friends and community, as well. In the Trust on Purpose podcast, we dive into everything that makes up trust, what supports and damages it. We unpack situations we commonly see with leaders, teams, organizations, and others we work with to show how trust can be strengthened, sustained, and repaired when broken. Listen in for conversations between two pros who care deeply about you being an intentional and masterful trust-builder in your life so you and your relationships flourish. We share pragmatic and actionable takeaways you can use immediately and deepen with practice. If you have questions or situations related to trust that you’d like us to talk about in a future episode, please email charles@insightcoaching.com or ila@bigchangeinc.com.
We'd like to thank the team that continues to support us in producing, editing and sharing our work. Jonah Smith for the heartfelt intro music that you hear at the beginning of each podcast. We LOVE it. Hillary Rideout for writing descriptions, designing covers and helping us share our work on social media. Chad Penner for the superpower editing work that he does to take our recordings from bumpy and glitchy to the smooth and easy to listen to episodes you are all enjoying. From our hearts, we are so thankful for this team and the support they provide us.
Trust on Purpose
Can you trust yourself?
Send us a message - we'd love to hear from you
In a world that demands constant multitasking and perfection, it’s easy for self-trust to slip through the cracks. In this episode of Trust on Purpose, we dive into what it really means to trust yourself and how it shapes both your personal and professional life.
We share an honest conversation about how life’s changes can shake our confidence and why it’s okay (and even helpful) to let go of the pressure to remember everything and focus on what truly matters. You’ll hear practical ways to tell the difference between real concerns and fear-based doubts and about the power of being honest about your limits and how that honesty can build stronger trust with yourself and others. And when it comes to intuition, we explore how pairing your gut instincts with data and experience can lead to better, more grounded decisions.
This episode is packed with relatable insights and practical tips to help you strengthen your self-trust, lean into vulnerability, and create a more authentic life - at work and beyond.
We want to thank the team that continues to support us in producing, editing and sharing our work. Jonah Smith for the heartfelt intro music you hear at the beginning of each podcast. We LOVE it. Hillary Rideout for writing descriptions, designing covers and helping us share our work on social media. Chad Penner for his superpower editing work to take our recordings from bumpy and glitchy to smooth and easy to listen to episodes for you to enjoy. From our hearts, we are so thankful for this team and the support they provide us.
Hello.
Speaker 2:I'm Charles Feldman and my name is Ila Edgar, and we're here for another episode of Trust on Purpose.
Speaker 1:Yes, we're actually going to revisit a topic that we had an episode on did an episode on about maybe a year ago or more which is self-trust, and we're revisiting it in part because, at least for me, it's been a topic that's been up for me lately. At least for me it's been a topic that's been up for me lately. What areas of my life do I trust myself in and what areas are there places in my life where I don't trust myself so well, so strongly, and what's that about and what's important about that? So the obvious one in Elos and my conversation before this conversation started, one of the things that came up for me is trusting my memory, which seems to be not as clear and strong as it used to be. I forget things. People will say something like hey, do you remember what? No, I don't remember that. What, Tell me what happened? Not that I'm losing it as in you know, I need to go to a memory care unit but there seem to be more instances where my memory isn't as good as I remember it being. Oh, isn't that interesting? Oh, that's a good one, but kind of along those lines.
Speaker 1:One of the self-trust issues that comes up for me is how I deal with and how can I trust myself to deal with that effectively? Do I need to do something differently in order to say, yeah, I actually do trust myself around recovering when I, for example and we've all done this forget somebody's name that we know well, that we absolutely should know this person's name, but it's not coming to the tip of our tongue in the moment. And so how do we recover from that? Do I trust myself to recover from that? But also those moments when, literally, somebody describes an incident or a situation or an experience that I was part of, but I don't remember that much about it. I don't remember what the other person remembers about it.
Speaker 1:So that's kind of brought me into this question of self-trust, and do I trust myself to be able to manage, to be competent to manage in those situations? There are other instances also where I think my assessment is that I have not shown up in a way that I'd like to show up. So I'm wondering about, I'm questioning, how well I trust my competence to, for example, I trust my competence to, for example, have a conversation with a prospective client to the point where I actually land the client, as opposed to having them go look for someone else. Again, self-trust shows up there. Has this been happening more?
Speaker 2:I don't know.
Speaker 1:I haven't actually kind of looked at the data of the number of conversations I've had that have ended in work, versus conversations that ended in either no, I'm going to continue looking for someone else or just be ghosted. So anyway, what comes up for you, Mila.
Speaker 2:Like there's a whole bunch of stuff here and, transparently, I had to take some notes so that I could remember all of the things.
Speaker 1:Oh, good, good.
Speaker 2:Just saying, my little notebook is right here. So this is a really interesting perspective that you're opening and sharing today and the conversation before the conversation, as we were talking about. You know memory as one thing yes, ma'am, you know memory as one thing and the amount of information, data, input that we navigate today versus 10 years ago versus 20 years ago. So while, yes, you and I are both aging in number, we think about what all of us are consuming every single day. There's no possible way that we could remember everything. There's no way, and so part of it for me is we think about memory in particular. So one of the things that I do to turn my brain off is I will find and full disclosure here. I'm full disclosure here.
Speaker 2:I love Netflix shows that talk about serial killers most deranged, not like gore, but I love the psychology behind the human behavior behind. So I hopped on the sofa last night to watch an episode. I thought I was watching the last episode of the Jeffrey Dahmer series. I didn't put seven minutes into it and realized I've already watched it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, oh yes, oh yes.
Speaker 2:Been there and that this is not the first time that's happened. So I say that also, that I give myself permission that there are things I don't need to remember. So whatever happened in a Netflix episode or in a fiction book that I'm reading, I don't have to remember it. But how do I take care of the things that are important for me to remember? And so then have some systems or processes in place.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And note-taking is one of them, and the plus also that I would add is I'm also learning more and more that the things that I need to remember I will, and that's like I say that out loud and I can feel like I'm holding my breath. So if I have a few clients that I work with right now, we're in sizable projects. There's some big thinking required and the pressure could be that I have to remember every single detail of every single conversation in order to keep all the dots connected and then part of me just goes bullshit. No, you don't, because that expectation we put on ourselves, that's staggering and I think, oh, this is. What comes up for me is and I'm thinking of one client in particular that actually both of them that we're in a co-design and so for me to take the body, the thinking, the ownership of I have to know it all or keep track of everything. How does that impact how I show up as we co-design?
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And what's the unintended consequence to my clients if that's how I show up? Ooh, I didn't know where that came from.
Speaker 1:Very interesting though, and I get it because I've been there too. It's all my responsibility. And I get it because I've been there too, it's all my responsibility. And when I am living out that assessment, two things happen. One is that I do still forget stuff, right, but then I get really upset at myself for forgetting stuff, because I'm supposed to remember all that, just like you said. So I lose connection with the person I'm talking with because I have an interior conversation going on about how I'm failing to do what I need to be doing.
Speaker 1:So one of the ways that I manage that, or handle that, is to have a conversation with the client before beginning any kind of work like that and say Before beginning any kind of work like that, let's talk about who's responsible for what pieces of this. And then also, as we get into it and find out that there's pieces that, gee, am I responsible? Is that I don't know? Question, then again having that conversation and saying, wait a minute, I'm sure we are with this piece and I don't know who's supposed to be responsible. What do you think? Let's talk about that, that's great.
Speaker 1:And then I still find myself sometimes in that space of the assessment and the emotions that go with that and the body that goes with that, where I'm supposed to be doing everything. Interestingly, if I'm in front of the room with a bunch of people and somebody, I don't think about, for example, saying, hey, you know, if I'm the only person in the front of the room with a team or not front of the room, but in working with a team and there's something to be put on a flip chart, I don't think about saying, hey, can I get a volunteer to come up and write some stuff down on a flip chart while I continue this conversation or lead this conversation, and so I put that on myself, that I should be doing everything, and again, I can't do it all, so I end up not being as available as a facilitator as I would like to be, as I intend to be. So do I trust myself to remember to do that and to actually take responsibility for what's mine and not take responsibility for what someone else's and make requests?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'm looking at and you've seen this heart because it sits on my desk. Literally this is my purple and pink and orange knitted little heart that's stuffed, and this is on my desk every day as a reminder that we are humans in a human experience and, as I, I probably don't remember this every day, but it is a regular reminder that none of us know everything about everything and we're not supposed to. That really, where the impact of our work, our relationships, the things that matter to us come from our willingness to be human, to be vulnerable, to admit not knowing, especially I'm giggling a little bit when we're supposed to be the experts in the room that actually that's probably even more vulnerable to be standing working with a group to say I actually don't know or I've never thought of it from that perspective. I really love that you brought that into our conversation, really appreciate the courage for you to bring that and what happens when we do that. And so is that self-trust. Yeah, what do?
Speaker 1:that, and so is that self-trust. Yeah, what is that that's? It is self-trust. I think it's trusting that, being honest, authentically who I am and declaring that to other people is okay. You know, interestingly, part of that, I think for me, part of that journey to being able to do that and feeling okay, trusting myself, that I'm going to be okay doing that and so is my client, is that if there are people, individuals that I do that with, and they are not comfortable with me being transparent, with me saying I don't know that or that's something that I've never thought about, that's great, I love it, or whatever it is, I need to think about this for a little bit. This is a new idea for me. If they're not comfortable with it, that's not my fault. It's not my problem to take care of their discomfort. In the face of that, I can offer them something. Actually, this is really interesting. I'm thinking about this because I listened to my statement. It's not my job to take care of them and it is also so negotiating that one.
Speaker 1:how do I care about and demonstrate that I care about someone who's distressed about my acknowledgement that I don't know something that they maybe think that I should know? What is my responsibility there and can I trust myself to step into that?
Speaker 2:This is so fascinating. I had a recent conversation with Dan Newby, author of the Field Guide to Emotions, and many others. He talked about an event in New Mexico a couple weeks ago and he was talking about how he wanted to be able to create opportunities for people to feel different emotions. And so if you're sitting in one of these sessions and you're feeling the emotion of boredom, that there's nothing here for me, great, like his intention wasn't to create this, like oh my God, everything was fantastic. The intention was rather, what can I invite you to feel or experience that might be different than what you normally experience?
Speaker 2:And so, thinking about that perspective, from how do you share or how do you show care for someone who may be in distress about your lack of knowledge or your inability to answer a particular question or whatever that might be, what is actually allowing them to feel that distress was part of their experience, part of their learning? So we're not washing our hands oh gosh, well off, you go, take care of that or pushing the box of tissue across the table because, you know, clean up your tears. We don't want to see that. Not that at all, but rather how can I be with you so that you can feel whatever it is that you're feeling and not be alone. So I think that would be a huge part of care. And the part of self-care, self-trust, is that this isn't mine to shoulder for you, but I can walk alongside with you.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I love that last little bit of that. I can walk alongside with you, even through the depths. I will be there with you, alongside you. So another thing that comes up for me around self-trust is doubt. Self-doubt in the sense that when I doubt my capacity to do something, so that in a sense I'm saying if I doubt myself, my capacity to do something, I'm saying I don't really fully trust my capacity to do something, whatever that might be. So there's one side of that is oh well, I just blow it off and say, okay, look, I'm just going to go for it and see what happens. The other side of that is to kind of pull back and not gauge, not put myself into the situation because my self-doubt is showing up or my lack of trust in my capacity to do it, whatever that is competence, or maybe my inability to demonstrate care in a way that the other person might perceive it for what it is, or however that might be showing up. This is another area of self-trust that again has. Like I said at the beginning, self-trust is up for me and this is another one of those areas. How do I deal with that those times when I doubt or I distrust my ability to do something.
Speaker 1:And the question is is it fear that's talking, or is there really some good reason for me to distrust my ability to do this? And where do I go with this? In that moment or over time, when fear shows up, it's strong, it's pervasive, it keeps popping back up. So part of it for me, part of self-trust, I think is making friends with that fear, kind of acknowledging it first of all. Kind of acknowledging it first of all and acknowledging it for what it is. Where does it come from? What's its roots? Taking the time and effort to really inquire into that fear and see where it's coming from, so that I recognize whether that self-doubt is valid. I should, in fact doubt myself here and then go from there. What do I do about it? Or whether that self-doubt is simply a product of my being afraid of something. I'm curious what your thought on that is.
Speaker 2:Oh, there's a lot here. So I also regularly pay attention to my itty bitty, shitty committee. Yes, and so I know, and I love Shirzad Shamin's book, positive Intelligence and the Research Behind it. But number one of those saboteurs for all of us is judge. We judge self, we judge others, we judge situations, and I think even Brene Brown talks about this in some of her research about in the absence of data, we make up story, right, that itty bitty committee goes wild attention to what that inner dialogue is. Number two looking for the data. So is there something to be fearful about? And if there is great, let's pay attention to that. Or maybe there is something, but I can mitigate it or I can ask for help or I can a myriad of different options that can happen.
Speaker 2:I think the other thing and this definitely shows up for me lately again with a couple of clients that I'm working with and these are not I want to just preface this is not one-on-one coaching and this actually isn't even group coaching. It's a little bit different scope. So one of them, I actually said to the CEO like I'm terrified that I'm going to let you down. What you're asking me to do is outside of my scope and my area of expertise. And so I like, I don't want to let you down. And he was so gracious and so he said but Ila, what we do have is years of working with you and we trust you. And so he says it's okay that this isn't your area of expertise or where you do your, you know most of your work. The trust that we have in you is what's going to carry us forward. And the other client, like we've never done work this way together in what we're trying to accomplish. There is no rule book, there is no guidebook, there is no like seven-step program. We're flying the airplane while we're building it. And so there is, there absolutely is room.
Speaker 2:Maybe it's not fear, maybe it's not fear. And this is, I think, where emotional literacy is really important to be able to identify. And oh shoot, I think it was Susan David Emotional Agility who talked about being able to name it for ourselves. So just because we feel those butterflies in our stomach doesn't mean that's automatically nervousness or fear. And so what is it that we're feeling? Automatically nervousness or fear? And so what is it that we're feeling? And in both these situations that I've just shared, I don't know that it's fear. I think part of it is uncertainty. There's a dose of excitement, because I really love shiny and new, I love trying things that I've never tried before. And the third one there's like what's the third one, charles? Look inside my brain, actually, no, look in my body. Anticipation, maybe, like how could this turn out, what could be possible, and if we don't try, we don't know. Okay, I'm just going to pause there because I need to breathe for a minute.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:What has that got you thinking about?
Speaker 1:Oh, in terms of self-trust, one of the things listening to you, one of the things that speaks to me, is this notion of trusting. So, oh, I don't have this book right here, darn it, it's in the other room Again Adam Grant's book Think Again, where he talks about the sort of the less sometimes people know about something, or the less competent they are, the more confident they are in their ability to do it, and so they tend to come off as very confident when in fact they don't really have the skills, expertise, knowledge. But what I'm hearing in you and what you're saying is you know what I don't know. This is not my wheelhouse, and with the support and trust of my client, I'm willing to try something different. I trust myself to go into this with my eyes open.
Speaker 1:That I don't know, this is not something that I'm really strong in, and I've shared that with my client, and there's clear expectations around what I can and what I can do, and there's a what's possible here.
Speaker 1:There's something potentially really powerful and really positive in the possible column. So I trust that I can at least move in that direction and something of value will come out of it which is different than the kind of hubris that can come with overconfidence, as Adam Grant talks about in his book and others have as well. In fact, that particular relationship between overconfidence and under competence is something that other people have done a lot of research on Trusting yourself to bring what you have, everything that you have, to the table and that in doing so, something of value will happen, and that it's not, especially since you've been very clear with your client that your role is not to be the total expert in this. In fact, your role is not to be the expert at all, but really more of the convener, the person asking, really exploring, the lead explorer that, whatever shows up, you'll be able to help your client and work with your client to create.
Speaker 2:And there are also clients and or situations that I would decline. So I think, really being clear, I did some soul other again in the conversation before the conversation. The connectedness doesn't only come from our logical thinking and our prefrontal cortex, and we did that episode recently about listening to our intuition. How does that help support building a stronger sense of self-trust with ourselves?
Speaker 1:A great question, and I think it's my first reaction, or my first response is that it's a big part of building self-trust is listening to, being able to listen to our intuition and really checking it out. I mean not assuming our intuition is 100, because there's been a lot of research that shows that people's intuitions, whatever those might be, are not always reliable. So how do you check that out? And taking the time and care to check out, is this intuition really something I should listen to? Is it telling me something important about myself, about the situation, about other people in the situation, and so should I really listen and take it into account?
Speaker 1:Or is this intuition really and we talked about this a little bit again is this intuition kind of going back to the idea of fear? Is it really just fear showing up in the guise of intuition, in the guise of some information that I really should pay attention to? Self-trust is to check it out, to not just A assume it's accurate, 100% accurate. B not assume that it's just not worth paying attention to and move on without it. That, in trust, intuition is an important part of trusting ourselves, or listening to our intuition and checking our intuitions out, kind of grounding them, as we say, in whatever data information experience we can.
Speaker 2:I really feel that building that muscle of checking it out, listening to our intuition, looking for data points, pausing and having some time for self-reflection, truly deeply listening.
Speaker 2:And I was with a group of emerging leaders with a particular client this week and we were talking about receiving feedback and how difficult that can be, which is true, and, as we're talking about this, it was really interesting because a number of the participants and how they were sharing, they're committed to being right, that they've already got this all figured out, this whole receiving feedback thing, that they've already got this all figured out, this whole receiving feedback thing. Here's how I do it and here's what happens. And so I really encourage, not just in receiving feedback but in this topic of self-trust, the rigor, the discipline to check ourselves, to check in, to look for the data. What is actually going on here? Where can I trust, Especially when we're so committed to being right or maybe wrong? Is there a space for us to consider something different? Is there a space for us to consider something different, whether we act on it or not, developing that rigor and that consistency about checking in. Is there something else here?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I really appreciate that you added the committed to being wrong, because that can be just as debilitating or damaging as commitment to being right. Oh, I'm wrong, yeah, and you fall down into a pit of despair.
Speaker 1:But I think the important part here you just said just leave it there, because you said it very well, and I think maybe this is a good place to wrap this conversation, because we've talked about trusting our memory and how really part of the data there is that we've got way too much stuff to try and remember and if we fail to do so now and then you know, particularly through the process of saying look, I don't think I can do this, but I want to have the conversation with my client or with my friend or with my family member, whatever it is, and become clear about what the expectations are around that, so that both or all parties are working with the same set of expectations, and then finally really interrogating or inquiring into our intuition, listening to it, not rejecting it, not ignoring it on the one hand, but also not taking it as the only source of information and data as we move forward in life. All three of those are powerful for building that sense of self-trust. Thank you, this has been a good conversation, yeah.
Speaker 2:Thank you, too, on behalf of both Charles and myself. We want to say a big thank you to our producer and sound editor, chad Penner. Hilary Rideout of Inside Out Branding, who does our promotion, our amazing graphics and marketing for us, and our theme music was composed by Jonas Smith. If you have any questions or comments for us about the podcast, if you have a trust-related situation that you'd like us to take up in one of our episodes, we'd love to hear from you at trust at trustonpurposeorg.
Speaker 1:And we'd also like to thank you, our listeners. Take care and keep building trust on purpose Until next time.
Speaker 2:Until next time.
