Trusting yourself isn’t spiritual bypassing. It’s the intelligence we’ve forgotten how to use.
Explore how we unlearned trusting ourselves and what real self-trust actually feels like.
Yesterday, a wave of pride, satisfaction and gratitude washed over me. Juul sharing she’s going back to school, choosing a new career path, and, ultimately, herself. Robert finding the peace to let go of clients that kept him stuck, breaking up with outdated pleasing patterns. Marta feeling ready to launch her architecture business, having found the self-belief, clarity, focus, and systems to carry on alone. Iain letting go of rigid health routines, founding the coffee café his previous lifestyle would never have allowed him space to even explore.
None of these choices started as big decisions. They started with coming back to their own inner intelligence. Learning to trust again what felt good inside, before it could be rationally explained. And all of it gave me goosebumps. Because watching these people trust themselves, choose themselves, untrap themselves by making choices that made sense to them, it makes me see it’s truly possible to return to our own intelligence.
How We Unlearned Trusting Ourselves
We don’t ignore feeling entirely. We’ve just lost touch with trusting it on its own.
Inner wisdom. Inner knowing. Intuition. Rationally, we understand what it means. The hard part isn’t listening to those feelings. It’s feeling it at all.
Some of us unlearned to feel entirely. We may describe ourselves as pragmatic, rational, or unemotional. We make decisions with our heads, collecting data, calculating risks, making detailed plans. For others, it’s so quiet, we feel it for a second, then find it hard to locate again. We were taught thinking mattered more than feeling. That you’d be a fool to follow your feelings alone. Again others still feel it clearly, a visceral sense of how the body speaks. But because society labelled intuition as dreamy, or crazy, we learned to override it anyway, reaching for proof and reason instead.
The Evolution of Mistrusting Ourselves
As technology evolves, the way we outsource our own intelligence evolves with it. What started as turning to others now slowly turns us to AI.
AI is famous for making us wiser, faster, more effective. Yet, at the same time, it’s feeding the same belief that keeps us mistrusting ourselves. We turn to it to evaluate our options, our opinions, shape our ideas, even find the right words, because we’d already learned to believe the external is more trustworthy than we are ourselves.
Every time we hand our thinking over, we feed the insecurity that was already there. The belief that we’re not wise enough, not capable enough, to trust our own ideas, our own quirks, our own personality. It’s just a new way of outsourcing, to an artificial intelligence this time. One that deepens the same lost connection with our inner trust. Our own intelligence. Our intuition. And, our sense of self.
Stop Letting AI Be Your Second Brain
I see this in my own practice constantly. People who’ve lost touch with who they are and what they want. Who have difficulty describing what their business does, or can’t explain their own offers, because it was all developed by AI.
It’s not wrong to use AI as a strategic partner. The pitfall is letting it become your so-called second brain. Because the moment you let it think, write, decide, do all for you, it takes over your first.
I’m done feeding the belief that we’re not as capable, as wise, as trustworthy as we think. Done choosing safety over deeper longing. Because it keeps us stuck. Stuck in scarcity, in feeling misaligned, in relationships that drain us, in a safety that secretly feels like a cage.
It’s time we stop outsourcing our intelligence and turn back to ourselves. Because outsourcing your knowing to proof, to permission, to someone else’s framework, or to AI keeps you stuck in a life that was never fully yours to begin with.
So How Do You Recognise Trusting Yourself Again?
We tend to imagine “trusting yourself” as dramatic. A grand leap. A public announcement. But real trust in yourself isn’t provocative. It doesn’t ask for attention. It’s deeply felt.
Trusting yourself rarely feels like a decision. It feels like a shift you can no longer unfeel. A change in perception. A revelation. A feeling you can’t quite pin down. Or simply realising: not this anymore. As if something clicks. Something that had been waiting, finally arrives. Something you missed without being able to name it, like the Portuguese word saudade.
That particular feeling arrives with real alignment. Not rational thinking, logic, or a list of pros and cons. An instant knowing. A full-body yes. This is me. This is right. Like a wave of calm, peace, satisfaction, excitement washes over you. And the challenges that come with it don’t feel like obstacles. They feel like part of the life you’re meant to live.
That’s unpatterning. The moment an old pattern makes room for you to be you again. And once it’s felt in your body, it becomes impossible to ignore.
Recognise yourself stuck in outsourcing your trust to others and AI?
📝 Sit with these prompts:
If you could fully trust yourself, what would you lose?
Is that true loss at all?
What if it wasn’t? Who would you be on the other side?
What would suddenly become possible if you chose what’s right for you, without permission or a list of facts that justify it before jumping in?
This is what Identity Project Guided Journal Series is built on. Starting with Untrap Yourself. A guided journal to trace back how you were shaped and realise what was never really you to begin with. To untrap yourself from patterns you no longer want and rebuild your life and business with full trust in yourself.
Next on our blog, I’ll share the practice of rebuilding trust in yourself again. Follow the Identity Project on Instagram or LinkedIn for insights, introspection, and education on becoming yourself again.
