In episode 94 of The Grit Show, host Shawna Rodrigues dives deep into the intertwined relationship between self-trust and decision-making. Shawna explores how unclear and wavering self-trust can cloud our judgment and make decisions feel overwhelmingly difficult. Through her personal experiences and reflective insights, she discusses the subtle and often unnoticed factors that can erode our self-confidence and clarity. Shawna's candid conversation aims to shine a light on the internal barriers that prevent us from trusting our own decisions. This episode promises to guide listeners through a journey of self-discovery, encouraging them to evaluate and enhance their self-trust to improve their decision-making processes. Tune in to unpack this crucial aspect of personal growth and resilience on The Grit Show.

Shawna Rodrigues left her award-winning career in the public sector in 2019 and after launching The Grit Show, soon learned the abysmal fact that women hosted only 27% of podcasts. This led to the founding of the Authentic Connections Podcast Network intent on raising that number by 10% in five years- 37 by 27. Because really, shouldn’t it be closer to 50%? She is the Director of Impact for the network, which offers full-service support for podcasting from mentoring to production. In September 2023 they are also launching the EPAC (Entrepreneurs and Podcasters Authentically Connected) community for those in early stages and wanting a place for weekly connection. She still finds a little time for her pursuits as a best-selling author and shares the hosting of Author Express, a podcast that features the voice behind the pages of your favorite book. Find her on Instagram- @ShawnaPodcasts and learn more about the network and other happenings at https://linktr.ee/37by27.

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We've talked about decision making a few times here on the grit show. It is something we all do multiple times today. We're going to talk about it from a new perspective, though. We're going to talk about what might be getting in the way. Perhaps it's something we haven't thought about before. I know for me it was something I hadn't thought about before. So stick around. We're going to get into self trust and how maybe decision making and self trust come together and how building that self trust muscle or seeing it in a new way might help you with decision making.

Welcome to the Grit show. Growth on purpose. I'm your host, Shawna Rodrigues, and I'm happy to be here with you as your guide for all of us growing together as seekers and thrivers. Looking at self trust, what do you think of when I say that term? Right? It might be one of those things that it just goes in, goes out, and you don't stop to contemplate or think about it. Or you might have an automatic definition. Automatic definition might be that it means you trust yourself to know the answers. You trust yourself that you've got it. You know everything, right? I think that's how I used to see it.

That self trust meant that I knew all the answers. And eventually I figured out, and maybe you figured out that self trust doesn't mean you have all the answers because you really can't have all the answers, right? And that thinking you're supposed to have all the answers is a big way to keep ripping yourself up and causing yourself more stress and having more challenges and making it hard to make decisions because you can't have all the information to be able to make all the decisions, right? But I really think that having self trust means having clarity and confidence, which if having self trust means having clarity and confidence, that when you're feeling overwhelmed and you're feeling like you can't make decisions, those are indicators that perhaps you're having a challenge with self trust, which is something I hadn't realized. I hadn't realized that perhaps that was a piece that was coming into play. I didn't recognize that when things were feeling a little bit murky and it was hard to see through which direction I was going and what I wanted and to make those clear decisions, that self trust was part of that. And I had a wonderful session with a coach. And in part of that conversation, it really dawned on me that that's part of what I was working with, the self trust and the part of what I hadn't worked through in previous experiences I had was that self trust piece. And so I may be quick to forgive others and to let go of things with other people, but with myself, I was still holding some things against myself and still really questioning decisions I'd made. And as much as I'd be flippant about different things, that I would say there was things, if I listened to myself, that I'd be bringing up and holding against myself and blaming myself for and not letting go of and not having that self trust piece.

So I think that it's a valuable thing for us to pause and look at love of clarity we have, the level of confidence we have, and how much that plays into decision making, because there are numerous times where we are overwhelmed, we're fatigued. We talked about some of that stuff with our episode with Zeke. Well, he didn't call it willpower, but we have so much energy to go around for things. I know we've talked about before, the amount of willpower we have to be doing stuff. So we need to stop relying on willpower to do all the things. And some decision making is related to that. And so when we're fatigued and burned out, we've been talking about that more than once. But sometimes we need to accurately diagnose what is happening and what is going on.

Is it a matter of I'm burnt out, I'm worn out, I have too many things on my plate. I'm overwhelmed. And that's why these decisions are harder. And that's the piece I need to look at, so I can take better care of myself, do more self care. I need to have better boundaries, take more of my plate, which all this stuff can come around and feed into things. Or is it possible that I lack clarity, I lack confidence in myself because I'm not trusting myself? That possibly when I'm frustrated with somebody else in my world, really, I'm pointing back at me, and I'm frustrated with me, and I'm not trusting myself to hold the boundaries for myself and to take care of myself and to follow through things for myself. And so my decision making gets clouded and my clarity is lacking and my confidence is lacking, because as much as it comes across as me being frustrated and angry and everything else, really at the heart of these things going on with me right now is my lack of self trust. And for me, that was a big aha.

Because if you'd have asked me before I had that conversation, if I trusted myself, I would have been like, yes, I trust myself. I couldn't run a business and move here and do this and do that and whatever else. If I didn't trust myself, of course I trust myself. And apparently I wasn't being honest with myself and not even realizing I wasn't being honest with myself. And maybe it's just me. It's quite possible I have my own unique experiences. We each do, right? And this may not resonate with you, and that's fabulous. I so appreciate you being here and listening and seeing if perhaps this is an episode that you could pass on to somebody else for them to listen to and see if it resonates with them.

Not an expert on this. I'm just an individual experiencing this and opening myself to this thought and way of looking at things and recognizing that there were things that I hadn't forgiven myself for, that there were still little pieces that I was holding onto from past decisions I made that I was like, yeah, I'm fine, I'm fine with where I'm at. I'm fine with what I did. I'm fine with where things are. I'm fine, I'm fine. And it was, you got the intonation right? I'm fine. But really, there was part of me that was disappointed in myself and disappointed in the decisions I made and feeling like I could have headed things off sooner if I'd made different decisions, I could have done things differently instead of really having, like, this radical self compassion with myself and maybe not even self compassion with myself at that point of really just knowing that I made the best decisions I had, with the information I had at the time I had. And I love my life.

I'm very happy with the people I have, my life, the place I am, my life, what I get to do with my life. So happy with where I am. And yet, because I went through a lot of things that were not fun to go through, there were still little pieces of me. You guys know I hate it when I get well, I should be here. I go see, getting upset that I'm getting emotional, but there were still pieces of me that I thought I could have done better and I should have done better and I couldn't have. I didn't know how things were going to happen. And I was so busy trying not to play a victim, right? Not to be the victim of circumstances that I wasn't ready to say I did do the best I could in those circumstances. I was so busy telling everyone else and fighting the world that, yes, I did the best I could, and yes, I was not to blame for what happened.

And then really, secretly, I was blaming myself a little bit. Clearly, I was blaming myself a little bit for those things. And it was eroding my self trust, and it was eroding my ability to trust the decisions I made after that. And so it was so valuable for me to peel back those layers and realize that if there was a point after which it was harder to make decisions, it was because I was having a hard time trusting myself. And then there was these little ways that I was making it harder for me because I wasn't honoring myself, and I was doing my best to honor everyone else and timelines and deadlines and things I told other people I would get done. But the things I needed to do for myself, I wasn't as good at getting done, and I wasn't following through for myself and being reliable for myself and being there for myself the way that I needed to be there for myself as much as I was for other people. And that, again, erodes away at the self trust on this lower level that you're not even registering all the time. Right.

And so it's something that awareness is a big first step, right. Lifting it to that level of awareness. And it is something that we've talked about before. My hard time with the term regret, right. Because we had, I guess, at one point in time that talked about regret. And I think that regret can be a good motivator, but I worry about it as something that can kind of undermine your trust. If you sit and regret that, it makes it harder to trust yourself when you have that regret, instead of accepting things, what they are and got you to where they are. And we don't want this toxic positivity where we pretend everything is okay because it's not okay.

The things that I've been through, the people I love have been through, they're not okay. But it is what it is, right? It's there, and it's part of life, and it is what it is. And so to be able to still trust yourself and trust that you did the best you could in those circumstances, and to know that if one of my friends came to me and they gone through the exact same thing and made the same decisions I made, I would still trust them. And I would say to them that they did the absolute best thing they could in those circumstances. Absolutely, 100%. So why on earth do I not give myself that same level of support and grace, right? And part of that is to be able to connect with that inner critic. And I think you guys might remember the IFS internal family systems episode that we had with will help. And I think it's number 32, I want to say.

So it's been a while since we had that episode, but it's something you can go back and listen to. And that's one of the things about internal family systems is that it is honoring all of the parts. So there is an inner critic that's serving a purpose, that's there for a purpose. But it's not the only voice, not the most important voice. It doesn't define who I am. It's there for a reason. It's playing a part. And to be able to accept that peace and see its purpose in part and not have it be the loudest voice or make it harder to trust yourself because of that voice and recognizing that self trust piece.

Right. Instead of just saying, oh, yeah, I trust myself, I trust myself instead of getting to that deeper conversation and that deeper peace and looking at it deeper. And that is that self reflection. Right. Journaling, talking out loud, like we recently had with our episode. Right. Was that episode 91 where we had the larger conversation around talking through things out loud and experiencing those emotions and using the tapping to help you work through those. I really like that technique.

Obviously, I keep mentioning it, right? And so what else? Like, how else are you possibly not trusting yourself? And trust is protecting yourself, right? It's not letting yourself take risks again, because you are so busy setting precedent based on past experiences that you're not letting them be a one time experience. And there are lessons, right? There's lessons and things that have happened to us, but I don't know if we should even label them as mistakes. Right? Not necessarily mistakes. They're just things that happen. And sometimes you could do the exact same thing again, and it's not going to happen again. Recently, the love of my life was golfing and step back. And at a certain tee box, when he was golfing, stepped back and there was like a little old divot in the grass and tweaked his ankle in a way that caused some damage to his ankle, right? So is he never going to go golfing again because that was that lesson, right? Or is it just that he needs to be aware at that hole, at that golf course to not be careful in that box or be more aware of where the edge of the box is or take a better look before you step into things. But I mean, you could use that lesson to be careful where you walk all the time and be more attention to where you walk.

Right? But becoming hyper vigilant about everywhere he steps because he might hurt his ankle again isn't going to get him very far. Right. There's this work with our life lessons that it seems at some point there was so much information to be learned from each experience we had that every experience had lessons in it, right? And that continues to some extent. But we need to be careful that we don't take one experience and turn it into more than it is. Right. That just because something happened once a certain way is one data point. We need to find trends. We need to have multiple data points to find trends.

And even then, things can get completely skewed at some point in time, right. As much as we can learn from the things that happen to us, part of self trust is knowing we'll learn and knowing we can't always keep ourselves safe. But we can do our best kind of moving through life and moving through things ahead of us. And that sometimes things happen, right. And that's a really hard, really hard lesson. If we let it erode our self trust, that's a really big cost. So what do we do? We talked about like the inner critic and how we can step back from a little bit, right? To help us if we feel like our self trust has been eroded to some extent. So what else can we do? I think being honest with ourselves, like I said, me realizing I wasn't being honest with myself.

I think of myself as somebody who strives to be very honest with myself and others. It's kind of surprising that I wasn't being honest with myself on that. I didn't even register. I wasn't. And then to be able to actually journal or contemplate or have some reflective practice, to be able to realize and to find those things when they come up, right. That I wasn't being honest with myself, that I hadn't resolved some of those pieces, that there was a lack of trust I had with myself. And to be aware of what the symptoms are, to be able to go back to our episode on the road noise, right. To go back to episode 90 about when something's not clicking, sounding right.

If we are having a hard time with decision making, if we are having a hard time with overwhelm and things, we're lacking clarity, that maybe there's some self trust that we're lacking. And maybe it is less big things that we're blaming ourselves erroneously for and on. And maybe it's smaller things. Maybe it's that we aren't following through on the exercise that we say we're going to start doing and so we aren't trusting ourselves to follow the wrong things. And maybe that's because we take on projects that are too big and we make too big of promises and we have too big of expectations on ourselves. And that really for something like that, that we need to start small and start realistic and start with. I'm going to get up and stretch in the morning every day for the next two weeks or the next month. And when I get up every morning and I stretch, that's what we start with.

And then we build on that. And then we understand that these habits and these small things are how we build changes and how we change things, instead of thinking that, like, starting tomorrow, I'm going to run for 30 minutes every single day, every day, period, right. We want to start building trust. We start small, so we start building trust with ourselves. And we need to give ourselves permission to say no to things, right? So that we are putting ourselves first and recognizing that when we say yes to other things, we're saying no to ourselves. And we need to start saying yes to ourselves more and taking better care of ourselves. And that's the way that we're not able to trust ourselves because we aren't taking care of ourselves in the ways we need to. And maybe there is something we haven't forgiven ourselves for.

Right? That's what I came down to realizing, is that I did still view things as mistakes instead of as what they were. Like. I would say that I stayed in relationships longer than I should have. No, I did not stay in relationships longer than I should have. I stayed in those relationships as long as I needed to, to learn the relationship. The lessons. I stayed in those relationships as long as I needed to, to learn what I needed to learn from those relationships, to gain what I needed to gain and to be in the place to move on from them. And I am now in the most amazing relationship that has the right timing for that amazing relationship that needed that timing.

So everything worked out the way it needed to work out. And all those decisions were the right decisions to get me to right where I am. And it's interesting because I have some very, very strong, positive, self trust building things I've done right, like my partner and I have talked through about how it's a good thing we didn't get together and stay together when we were young because we would have destroyed each other, even though we do have that beautiful imaginary place where we got to have this different life. Right? We both know we wouldn't have avoided some of the bumpers in life that we hit just because we had each other, and we're very grateful to have each other now. So there's many ways I have this great trust, right? And many things I do trust in decisions I've made. And it's interesting how there's other ways that it's eroded and underlying where I don't. So sometimes you gotta get in there with the tweezers and pull out the places where you aren't trusting yourself and where you haven't forgiven yourself. And if you listen to the things you say, it'll make it easier to find.

It was for me. I didn't realize the language I was using and the things I was holding against myself. So it might take a little bit more of that, of the ways you were judging yourself and the things you're holding against yourself that you don't realize the relationships you haven't freed yourself of and recognized that you did the best you could with the information you had. And those were all the right choices. It was all the right things. And you're right where you need to be and put yourself as the friend that would be over there listening to all those things and say the things the friend would say to yourself. You might need a little more of that. You just need to forgive yourself for those things.

You all seem to do more of celebrating your wins and more of that reflecting. Like I said, when it comes to self trust, there's some things that, again, I have banners over, right, that, yay, I totally trust these things. I did that did this and got me here. As much as I'm holding these things against myself, there's things over here I trust myself with very much. But proof is in the pudding that there's more that I was holding against myself and they were starting to outweigh. I was very much lacking clarity and confidence in some things, so I need to get those things worked. The removed aside as we kind of try to wrap this together. Hopefully this has given you some opportunity to kind of reflect on those pieces.

Right. I hope it wasn't too convoluted that you were able to do some reflections on what language you're using that might be indicating there's things you haven't forgiven yourself for. Things you are holding against yourself. They're giving too much of a voice to the inner critic instead of letting it be one of the voices and giving it its proper place and proper role. If you're being honest with yourself, and if you're using self reflection, being gentle with how you're judging yourself, and how you're accepting yourself and maybe looking at if you're being reasonable with your goals and celebrating those wins and what you might be doing to really trust yourself. And if you really are trusting yourself and having that clarity and confidence and decision making as a potential indicator, you might need to look a little bit deeper at self trust. I know I did, and I'm glad that I did, and I still have some work to do on it. So for your grit wit this week, that's what we're going to do, is we're going to dive in a little bit to look at if we have challenges with clarity, confidence and decision making to see if self trust might be part of that and get reflective and curious because you love to get curious about what that might be.

And we have a couple of other episodes that focus on decision making. If you think it might be a different thing, we'll put those in the show notes. You have a couple of other episodes to look at around decision making. Maybe go back to that conversation around internal family systems if that inner critic voice may be something you want to learn more about. But just start looking at that and reflect on that a little bit. And our self maintenance minute is that reflection pace because I have been doing more of that reflected pace and journaling a little bit. I hadn't journaled for some time, so that was a new thing that I've kind of been integrating a little bit more to reflect back on that. I hope this has been a useful conversation around self trust.

Thank you for being here and for being part of this community.

Thank you so much for being a listener. It means the world to me that you take the time to tune in and listen to these episodes. I am excited about what a great community we have here and your guys reviews and your emails to me, they mean so much and I had to read one of them that has really stuck out to me because it might have brought tears to my eyes. It was very meaningful. A lot of you have heard my episode around bucket lists and a little bit of my story. And one of our listeners, who we're going to call Goofy because she is a big Disney fan, sent me an email that says I'm sitting in a hotel in San Francisco and visited the city as I have always wanted, in part because of the show. When you spoke of your health scare and to just get out and do what you've always wanted to experience, it hit home. There is always a reason why I cannot do so many things.

I have now seen the Golden Gate Bridge stood on the side of a cable car, been to Pier 39, Alcatraz and so much more. All the typical tours and things but that was for the quick trip and I'll be back to see more. It gives me goosebumps even reading it now. I am so thrilled that even in a small part this show had anything to do with someone getting rid of the bucket list and just seizing the moment and experiencing the things they've always wanted to do. So thank you so much goofy for letting us know about that experience. I really appreciate the notes. It means a lot to hear from you guys. Thank you for that and if you haven't gotten it yet, stop on by the website thegritshow.com and get signed up for those coloring pages.

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Mailing list and I look forward to connecting with you again next week. Until then, take care of you. You're the only one of you that this world has got and that means something.