The importance of trusting yourself

Without clarity in our lives we tend to drift around like rudderless ships. One of the keys to finding clarity in our life is listening to our intuition and if we don’t, we will be buffeted around by the winds of others wills and desires. At best we will end up feeling somewhat dissatisfied, at worst deeply resentful. In truth, it is your right to look inside yourself for answers. We’re defining intuition here as a potent form of inner wisdom, not mediated by the intellect or logical conscious mind. Intuition is accessible to us all and it’s a still, small voice inside. I think of intuition as an unflinching truth-teller committed to our well-being.

So if we all have it, why do some of us struggle so incessantly with trusting ourselves?

Put simply, it is because we are not taught to. We are often taught by our caregivers to trust others above ourselves and this reinforced by others around us as children, such as teachers or other figures of authority in regular proximity. If the subconscious mind, which simply doesn’t understand time, has learnt this at an early age then it continues playing out the unhelpful belief system that ‘others know best’. This combined with fear, external pressure or low self-esteem can seriously get in the way and prevent you from listening to and most importantly acting upon, your gut feelings.

The truth is self-trust is like a muscle, the more you use it the stronger it becomes. It’s the best friend you will ever have and I encourage you strongly to develop it. If you’re struggling, reach back in your experience, see if you can remember a time when you really listened to what seemed invisible but felt really true. Perhaps it was an inner call to change direction or make a decision that felt ‘out of the blue’.

This indisputable sense of ‘rightness’ is what I’m talking about, when you ‘just know' without knowing why you know. The good news is that you can have this experience more and more, this wonderful certainty about your decisions. Like everything, it gets better with practice. By this I mean not only practising listening to, but acting upon that information. If it feels challenging straight off, start with smaller decisions and then work outwards from there. Build the self-trust muscle like you would your abs!

Our intuition is like our internal satellite navigation system, albeit with a quieter voice, but if we continue to listen to it, it will never let us down. This is where hypnotherapy can help. A hypnotherapist will work with you to build this ability to self-trust and listen to your intuition without worry. The other good news? The more ferociously faithful you are to your own truth, the more energised and happier you’ll be. What are you waiting for?