Self-Doubt Hurts You But Self-Trust Exposes Your Brilliance

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Trust helps us establish and maintain good health, life satisfaction, and longevity1. Women trust more than men2, and older adults trust more than young adults3. Trusting others and trusting yourself both affect your self-esteem throughout your life4. The more you believe in yourself, the less burnout you will have in your job (and vice versa)5, and the higher your health-related quality of life will be6.

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If you’re feeling self-doubt, you are more likely to underestimate how much someone loves you7, more likely to feel less competent and more negative emotions8, and more likely to feel a lot of social pressure9. Self-doubt is a source of stress10, but believing in yourself and your skills leads to improving how you see your well-being11.

Trusting in yourself, though, is difficult because the person who is trusting and the person who is being trusted are the same person12. To help you, here are some tips on how to start trusting yourself:

1. Forgive Yourself: When you’ve broken your self-trust, you’ve betrayed yourself12. Because of this betrayal, you’ve created a need within yourself for a moral identity. Addressing this need and acknowledging the shame will lead to forgiving yourself for the transgression, which will lead to trusting yourself more13. Check out my post on anger and forgiveness for tips on how to walk through the forgiveness process.

2. Process Emotions with Art: If you seem unable to trust yourself, engaging in art therapy can help. An art therapist whom you trust can help you access your emotions and build trust in yourself through the artwork14.

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3. Dance: Dancing can help you improve not only self-trust but your belief in yourself, self-expression, self-confidence, and body awareness15. Even just dancing for 75 minutes weekly helped girls trust themselves more and approach life with a sense of freedom and openness16. Dancing works to improve self-trust by learning to use the body as a resource and to use the body in different ways, which allows you to see things differently17.

4. Talk to Someone: Talking about a problem you are having to someone you perceive as warm and empathic will improve your self-trust18.

Overall, self-trust allows you to stay the course — to be patient until others can see your genius19. By trusting yourself, you accept the fact that betrayal is possible, while also believing in your abilities and moral capacity, which means you can rely on yourself to live up to your own moral standard12.

1. Van Lange (2015); 2. Feingold (1994); 3. Bailey & Leon (2019); 4. Amagai (1997); 5. Shoji, Cieslak, Smoktunowicz, Rogala, Benight, & Luszczynska (2016); 6. Banik, Schwarzer, Knoll, Czekierda, & Luszczynska (2018); 7. Murray, Holmes, Griffin, Bellavia, & Rose (2001); 8. Oleson, Poehlmann, Yost, Lynch, & Arkin (2001); 9. Tesser, Campbell, & Mickler (1983); 10. Hannigan, Edwards, & Burnard (2004); 11. Abramson, Alloy, Metalsky (1989); 12. Georing (2009); 13. Woodyatt & Wenzel (2014); 14. Springham & Huet (2020); 15. Schwender, Spengler, Oedl, & Mess (2018); 16. Duberg, Moller, & Sunvisson (2016); 17. Anderzen-Carlsson, Persson Lundholm, Kohn, & Westerdahl (2014); 18. Bohart, Gealey, Clark, Gifford, Hoyle, & McBride (1977); 19. Dumler-Winckler (2018).