EP 175 Trusting Myself

Do you ever wish you just knew?

Knew whether to keep your child home or send them to school. Knew whether to take the job or make the move. A lot of women tell me that's what self-trust is: if you really trusted yourself, you would just know.

I don't think that's true. And I learned it sitting alone in my car on a cold afternoon, trying to make a really big decision for our family.

Resources from the Episode:

• The Mission Driven Life: The 7 Laws of Life Mission and How to Live Them
• Episode 174: Why Am I Struggling?

AI-GENERATED TRANSCRIPT

Episode 175: Trusting Myself

What Is Self-Trust?

Audrey: Welcome back to the podcast. I'm Audrey Rindlisbacher, author of The Mission Driven Life and founder of The Mission Driven Mom.

You know what a lot of women will say self-trust is? "Well, if you trust yourself, then you just know. You know what you should do about your child. You know whether or not you should move. You know which job you should take. You know how to manage all the things. You just somehow magically, intuitively have good discernment and good judgment and good decision-making skills. You always know what you should do, and then you really trust yourself."

I want to tell you a story about when I was in a difficult situation and I had to make a pretty big decision.

A Decision About My Son

Audrey: I have six children, and a few years ago, at this point in our family's journey, we had two that had left home. The oldest at home was doing a modified homeschooling. He was going to the public school for a couple of classes, doing some stuff on his own, and really busy with work and music and all of his things. The next child was doing half-time school at a private school. So they were both busy with their friends. They were in their teenage years. They had educational structure around what they were doing.

And then there's a big gap, about a five-year gap, and then my son. The two at the end are about 18 months apart. They're really close. My youngest daughter had just been accepted onto a gymnastics team, and she was going to start getting up early in the morning and going to the gym and then doing some alternative school stuff later in the day.

Well, this left my number five, my boy.

And I had a decision to make. We weren't hardcore homeschoolers, in the sense that it wasn't everybody homeschooled every year, but we were definitely very much on the alternative path. There was some charter school, there was some private school, there was some public school, there was a lot of homeschool. Most of them were home most years, but there was any variety of that. I was just always trying to be open-minded and do what seemed like it would be best for them that school year.

So we have this new situation where basically the teenagers are doing their thing. I'm checking in with them. I'm around for them. But then I have this one child, and it was going to be just me and him.

Now, that could be a good thing. It depends on how you frame that.

And I needed to decide if I was going to send him to school or not, or if he and I were just going to be home doing our thing. There were a lot of factors that played into that decision. There were a lot of things to consider.

A Different Way of Deciding

Audrey: Now, of course, I did the traditional things. I talked to my husband, I talked to him, I talked to friends, I prayed, I thought about it. But what I have to tell you about this decision is that it was a turning point for me in my life. By the time I got to this decision, I was self-aware enough to know that I was going through a different decision-making process than I had in the past.

I now had enough of an education, an education for real life, an education that taught me to think in terms of truths and principles and fundamentals, that my decision-making around this situation was actually fundamentally different from the way I had made decisions previously. And it was recognizable to me, so it was like a turning point. I was like:

"Wow, I am going about this so differently than I used to go about making these kinds of decisions and judgments about myself and my family."

Can We Always Trust Our Feelings?

Audrey: Now, our culture says that you should follow your heart, that you have your own truth, that you need to trust yourself and go with your gut.

And I'm not saying there isn't something to be said for listening to your intuition, and definitely your conscience. But I want to push back on that narrative, because you and I both know that we can't always trust our feelings. We can't even always trust our thoughts. We don't always know what's right and what's best, and we don't always prove to ourselves that we do.

When we're trying to make decisions, sometimes we lack information. Sometimes we're afraid. Sometimes our feelings get in the way. Sometimes we're just relinquishing responsibility by letting the expert make the decision. We're pretending it's our decision, but we're actually leaning on some expert from a book, from a video, from the doctor's office, whatever it is, instead of really owning that decision for ourselves and doing the hard work of discernment and judgment and decision-making.

Because this whole concept of self-trust, of having confidence in ourselves and our ability to judge and discern, of being able to grow in trusting ourselves and our decisions, is not about making the best decision every time. It's not about doing this perfectly. It's about knowing how to judge and discern from fundamentals, and knowing how to think it through in a better, more productive way, and then trusting that even if you don't get the perfect result from the decision you make right now, you can take responsibility for that decision and you can learn from whatever the outcome is.

You can't always control the outcome, but you can control the decision.

Blaine and His First Teacher

Audrey: If you listened to the podcast last week, you heard the story of my husband Blaine learning to play the viola. One of the things I didn't go into a lot of detail about when I told that story was the first [teacher he found?] a couple of years ago, here in the DFW area. She's a super duper nice lady, a very hard worker, a very great violist, and probably, to many of her students, a good teacher.

But she was brought up in Poland, and she used to tell Blaine these stories all the time about how she was taught to play viola in Poland: how they would smack her hands with a ruler and tell her she was a loser and kind of just shame her, all of these really hard things that happened to her as she was being taught. And she started at a really young age. I mean, it's been her whole life. She's a professional violist. She's a professional teacher. She's really, really good. And she's had all this teaching and instruction all of her life.

And so Blaine had every reason to just completely trust her judgment, to lean into "what she said goes." And he did that for a long time. She says this is what I need. She's put me on this piece of music. She says this is what I should practice this week. I mean, he even paid her extra to practice with him every day for a few months, and they would get on Zoom calls and try to practice together. He went way above and beyond, and it was hard not to think:

"I must be the problem. I really must be a lost cause. There must be no way for me to ever get good at the viola."

And he had those thoughts and he had those moments. But luckily, he came back to viola at a much older age, much more mature. And he's had a wonderful education and all of these experiences. And so he looked at this situation and was able to reason and think it through.

It took him a while to get to the point where he started asking questions like, "Have I really actually been given the fundamentals?" But he was definitely looking at the fruits of this experience with her. And the fruits were that he constantly felt frustrated, overwhelmed, and unsuccessful, that she just kept telling him to do more of the same, and that he had tried that for well over a year.

And so he had the wisdom and the life experience to ask himself better questions as he tried to make the decision about what he was going to do. Because he could have just given up again, and it was maybe tempting for a moment to do that. He could have just said, "I'm the common denominator here. I've had another professional teacher. I just can't figure this out."

But instead he started asking himself better questions, like, "How could we do this differently? What other teachers are out there? What would other teachers do? Maybe I should compare her teaching to some other teachers."

And because he took the time to do that, and, like I said last time, called all these viola [teachers?] and hired two new teachers and tried them all out, he was able to trust his judgment when it finally came to, "I now have the right teacher." The lack of fruits with one teacher and the fruits with the other teacher were a huge indication that this was the right teacher for him, this was the right education, and that, just from a principled and true standpoint, she was teaching him fundamentals, and that was making all the difference for him.

Not What to Think, but How to Think

Audrey: This is the way in which we learn not what to think but how to think. This is so important to our ability to grow in our capacity to trust our judgments and decisions, and to make the best decision that we can, and then let go of the outcomes and not just constantly judge ourselves.

I mean, one of the things that we do is say, "Well, if I had a good outcome, then I made the right decision. If it has a bad outcome, I made the wrong decision." We can't live our lives that way. It's miserable. We have to gain the capacity to trust ourselves, and to trust, like we talked about last time, that when we slow down and think and we find a truth that we know, we can then start to build plans and decisions and our way forward around our capacity to make good decisions.

A Three-Step Process

Audrey: So I want to encourage you to try a three-step process this week.

The first thing that I want you to do is think about this area where you feel frustrated or overwhelmed or you want a different outcome, just like Blaine was feeling with his viola. Maybe this is some expert you're working with and you're just not experiencing the fruits that they're promising you. Maybe it's something that you have tried to fix for a long time. I don't know what it is, but I want you to sit with yourself and get really honest about reality.

This is something that Blaine and I both had to do. I'm looking at the situation with my son. Should I homeschool him this year? What's the best thing to do moving forward? And I needed to assess reality. What's my capacity? What's his capacity? Who am I? Who is he? What are the circumstances in our home? What are the opportunities outside our home that are available for him? And what do I know about our experiences in the past? What does that help me project upon the future? Really getting down to what's reality.

Same with Blaine. What's the reality?

"I'm not thriving. I have tried practicing three hours by myself. I have tried practicing like crazy with a professor. I have tried practicing like crazy with this viola professional. And in every case, I am not really progressing."

So what's my reality? What are the fruits that I have? How can I be honest with myself about what's actually going on?

And then the next thing I want you to do is try to identify the fundamentals. This goes a little bit back to last week, in terms of asking yourself, "What do I know to be true in this situation?" in order to stop just spinning your wheels with useless effort.

The fundamentals can be truths. They can be principles. They can be other kind of hard-ish facts. And I'll give you a quick example in just a minute. I'll help you understand a little bit what I'm talking about on this point when I tell you the rest of the story about my son and homeschooling him. But you need to get at the fundamentals. You know what the reality is. What are the fundamentals that govern this thing? What are some things that you know to be true and real outside of just the moment that you're in? What could play into the decision?

And then I want you to make the best decision that you can and let go of the outcome, and recognize that no matter what happens, you can learn from the outcome to make a better decision next time. You have done your due diligence on this, and you're going to trust yourself that this is the best decision that you can make, and you're going to let go of what happens next. And then, when faced with the new decision, you're going to do your best again. You're going to grow in your capacity to trust yourself.

Homeschooling Is Not a Principle

Audrey: So, going back to my experience with homeschooling this child. I assessed reality, like I explained with our circumstances. And then I looked at the fundamentals. What did I know?

I actually sat with myself and I wrote down some core principles of education. What I didn't used to know, but what I knew by this point, was that homeschooling is not a true principle. It is an application. And because I knew that, I was able to recognize that because it was an application, I could choose it or not choose it, and it wasn't right or wrong. It was just a decision, and that helped me let go.

I knew other educational principles. And of course, what I knew was the fundamental first principle was that I am responsible for the education of my child. So, starting at that first principle, I was able to write down some educational principles: classics, original writings, group discussion, great mentors, things like that that I knew that I wanted for my children. I wanted them for my son.

And so I got clear on: what are the fundamental principles that govern this area? What are the principles of our relationship? Good, open communication, trust, honesty. What are some of those principles that govern our ability to work together and to kind of navigate whether or not we were going to homeschool? This decision in general was going to affect him profoundly.

And then I also looked at things like values, which are not principles, but which are very important to the individual. Values are things like liberty or patience or loyalty or trust. And good values are just good values, but not everyone has the same values. And I knew enough about myself to know what my values were: that education was a top value, that the relationship was a top value, and hard work, whatever those were. So I was able to actually write down some key values that I wanted to honor in this decision. So now I have some principles I want to honor and some values I want to honor.

And then I also got to the fundamentals of what I knew about him and me. I had done the work on some self-assessments and some different personality things. And they're not hard and fast. We are [masterpieces in the works?]. We are growing and becoming. And so I know that it's not always hard and fast, but I knew some things.

One of the things that I knew is that he's extremely extroverted, probably the most extroverted of all my children. In fact, later on, when he was a little bit older, he did end up taking a couple of additional tests about extroversion from a couple of other sources, and he claimed he was 99% extroverted. I knew that about him. I knew what commitments I had made to other projects and other things that I had going on. I knew the commitment that I needed to make for the one daughter to continue to do her private schooling, and to be a support and an asset to the other kids at home, et cetera, et cetera.

The Decision in the Car

Audrey: So I had a lot of fundamentals to weigh, and they empowered me immensely. I remember sitting in the car. I went on a drive. I was going to go to the park, but it ended up being too cold, so I ended up sitting in the car. I knew I needed some time alone to really think it through and make some final decisions.

And my decision-making process was so concretely different. This was a really big decision for me. It was really at the heart of my core values and some key principles I cared deeply about. And him, and the relationship, and his progress, and his education were all super important to me.

And then I was able to make the decision that could honor who we were as people. I could honor the relationship. I could honor the educational principles, and I could honor our values, by choosing very specifically the charter school that could honor the educational principles that I believed in. So I handpicked a charter school, and I inconvenienced myself to get him there, because it wasn't close to home.

But that was the decision that I was able to come to, and I felt so much peace about it. And everything didn't go perfectly when he went to the charter school. He had some really good experiences and he had some hard experiences, and he grew as a person, and I grew, and our relationship was solid. And I was at peace with it and he was at peace with it, because we knew why we were making that decision.

So look at reality, consider the fundamentals, and then make your decision and learn from it. Maybe the next year, hypothetically, after a year at the charter school, I decide not to do the charter school anymore. Who knows? But that's the decision I made then. I've always been very at peace with it, and grateful that that's what we decided, and empowered by the way that the decision was made.

Coming Up Next

Audrey: So that's my homework for you this week. I hope you will spend some time doing that in some area of your life.

I know that as you do that, it still may be hard to let go of the outcomes. And we're going to talk next week about how you can follow this process and make judgments and decisions that you feel peaceful about, and what to do when you try really hard, and you try to make the right decisions, and it doesn't look like everything turns out right. What do you do about that? We'll talk about that next week.

Thank you so much for joining me. Please share your insights in the comments below, all of your takeaways from this three-step process and how it worked out for you. Thanks for being here. I'll see you next time.