Self-Trust as a Leadership Skill Nobody Taught You
We’ve spent a lot of time on this podcast talking about the external stuff: the bio, the board seat, building external credibility, the reputation you’re actively constructing. I even did a whole episode on it because it matters. That part matters. But here’s what most leadership development content skips entirely: how to trust the voice that already knows.
Here’s what I’ve noticed about the women who come to me, who are in my community, who are doing the work and trying to get in the rooms where decisions get made. They don’t usually have a confidence problem. What they have is a self-trust erosion problem. And those two things are not the same. Confidence is loud. Self-trust is quiet. Confidence is what you perform for a room. Self-trust is what you’re doing before you ever walk in the door. You can have all the credentials in the world, the degrees, the experience, the title, and still freeze when it’s time to actually act on what you know. That’s the erosion. That’s what we’re talking about today.
How We Got Here: Why Women Stop Trusting Themselves
This is not an accident. The erosion of self-trust in women is not a personal failure or a quirk of individual psychology. It is socialized. We are trained from early on to defer, to seek consensus, to make sure everyone is comfortable before we take up space. “No” is apparently not a complete sentence, I literally told my advisor that once, and she looked at me like I had said something revolutionary. I said, “Did you know that’s a whole sentence? Just ‘no.’ Nothing else required.” The look on her face. That’s how deep it goes.
And it starts young. We call little girls “bossy” in a way we simply do not do with boys. A boy who organizes the other kids on the playground is showing leadership capabilities. A girl doing the exact same thing is bossy and needs to be managed. I think about this a lot because my best friend has a three-year-old, and my best friend is in luxury real estate; she’s doing fifteen-million-dollar deals, she does not have time to second-guess herself, she cannot afford to, and we are both hyperaware of the language being used around this little girl. We talk about it. We watch it. Because we do not want her growing up with a complex about having opinions and being not afraid to use them. The language we use about little girls becomes the internal monologue of grown women. It compounds.
Every time you override your instinct, every time you know something and then talk yourself out of it because someone in the room seemed more confident, because you didn’t want to be the difficult one, because you second-guessed whether you really knew what you thought you knew, you are banking a data point against yourself. You are building a dataset that says your thoughts aren’t worth sharing. Do that enough times, and you have created a whole system of internal evidence that your gut can’t be trusted. That’s the erosion.
And then there’s the AI thing, and I am going to do a whole episode on this because I have a lot of feelings. I cannot stand watching smart, capable women suddenly checking with ChatGPT before they trust themselves. Before they trust their own read on a situation. You wrote papers. You did readings. You sat through presentations and synthesized information and formed opinions, all before any of this technology existed. You were doing the critical thinking. And now we are outsourcing it.
I know this because I have colleagues in higher education, and the stories coming out of places like Georgia Southern right now, students leaving full ChatGPT prompts inside their submitted papers, just left in there, and the faculty are in ongoing debates about what to do. It is a genuine crisis of critical thinking. And when women in leadership positions do the same thing, when they use AI as a substitute for their own judgment instead of a tool to supplement it, they are eroding the very thing they need most. Stop outsourcing your intelligence to a machine.
And then there’s code-switching. When you are constantly translating yourself for every room you walk into, policing your tone, your vocabulary, the way you phrase things so that a particular audience receives it the way you need them to, you lose the signal of what you actually think underneath all that translation. You spend so much energy managing the output that you lose track of the input. I’m actually bringing a guest on this summer specifically to talk about this, because it deserves its own full conversation.
What Self-Trust Actually Looks Like in a Leadership Context
Self-trust is not arrogance. I want to be clear about that because I think a lot of women conflate the two, and that conflation is itself a product of the socialization we just talked about. Arrogance is certainty in the absence of information. Self-trust is being decided, knowing what you think before the room tries to change it.
Let me tell you about a board vote I was involved in not long ago. I walked into that meeting thinking I knew how I would vote. And then I sat through the discussion, I gathered more information, I heard things I hadn’t heard before, and I adjusted, not my values, but the amount. The specific number I was prepared to stand behind. I changed it. And I want you to understand what happened there, because there’s an important distinction: I was open to information. I was not open to having my values replaced by the room’s comfort level. That’s self-trust in practice. You hold your values steady while staying genuinely curious about the information. Those are not in conflict.
Self-trust for women in leadership looks like voting your values on a board even when the room is going a different direction. It looks like sending the email you’ve been drafting and redrafting for two weeks. It looks like saying yes to the opportunity before you feel ready, because here is the truth: you are never going to feel ready. It is never going to happen. Stop waiting for the magical moment when it all clicks into place and you feel certain. That moment is not coming. The women who get the rooms get them because they moved before the feeling caught up.
When I’m in a decision-making moment, I ask myself three things. Does this align with my values? Do I have enough information? What does my track record actually tell me? And that third one is the one people skip. Your track record is data. It is real evidence about how you perform, what you know, what your judgment is worth. Use it.
One more thing, and this one is underrated: self-trust also means knowing when you genuinely don’t know something and saying so. “I don’t know, let me look that up” is not weakness. It is accuracy. I am not on Jeopardy. I do not need to perform certainty I don’t have. When you pretend to know something you don’t, you’re actually eroding your own self-trust because some part of you knows you performed instead of told the truth. Say the honest thing.
Three Practices to Rebuild It
1. The Small Decision Practice
This one is about building the muscle, not the strategy. Pick a low-stakes decision, something where the consequences are genuinely small, and make it in under two minutes. Then do not revisit it. Do not check in with yourself about it. Do not wonder if you made the right call. Just make it and move.
My best friend has basically done this with her wardrobe. She wears athleisure every single day. Every day. Her mom calls it the uniform at this point. And it started because she had too many actual decisions to make in a day to spend any mental energy deciding what to wear. She eliminated that decision entirely. That is self-trust in the smallest possible form, deciding that you trust yourself enough to opt out of the decision loop for things that don’t require your full attention.
The other end of this is what happened a few weeks ago when Glenn and I ordered pizza instead of cooking. We were tired, we ordered, it arrived, and it was genuinely terrible. Not fine. Trash. We both looked at each other and just said, “Wow, we really made the wrong decision.” And then we laughed, because here’s the thing, that’s a data point, not a character failure. Next time: different pizza place, or just cook. It ends there. Bad decisions are information. They are not evidence that you cannot be trusted to make decisions.
2. The Evidence Journal
Your brain will find evidence for whatever you believe about yourself. If you believe your gut can’t be trusted, your brain will helpfully surface every time your instinct was wrong and smooth over every time it was right. You have to counterprogram that. Actively.
The evidence journal is simple. Every time your instinct was right, every time you knew something before you could explain why you knew it, every time a decision you made turned out to be the right one, write it down. It does not have to be a big moment. My left knee has an old cheerleading injury, and it predicts rain with more accuracy than my weather app. I write it down. A dollar store journal works. The notes app on your phone works. The format does not matter. The library of proof matters. You are giving your brain evidence that your gut is a reliable source.
3. The Pre-Mortem Check
Before a big decision, I want you to ask yourself one question: “If I knew I couldn’t fail and I didn’t need anyone’s approval, what would I do?”
Don’t ask AI. I’m serious. Don’t type this into a chatbot and let it generate a thoughtful-sounding answer that has nothing to do with your specific life, your specific values, your specific track record. Ask yourself. You have years of experience. You have training. You have a body of evidence and if you’ve been keeping the evidence journal, you have it literally in writing — about what you know and how you think and what your judgment is worth. That answer, the one that comes up before you start managing how it looks or what other people will think? That is usually the right one.
The Foundation Beneath the House
Here is the thing about the women who are already in the rooms where decisions are made, on the boards, in the civic seats, at the tables that matter. They are not more certain than you. They are not smarter than you. They are not operating from some special knowledge you don’t have access to. What they are is more practiced at trusting their own reading. They have put in the reps. They have made the small decisions so many times that the bigger ones feel navigable.
Building external credibility is real work and it matters. The bio and the board seat and the reputation, all of it matters. But external credibility without internal self-trust is a house with no foundation. You have done the work to build the house. You have the credentials and the experience and the receipts. Now trust the person who’s been living in it this whole time. She knows more than you’re giving her credit for.
This week, one assignment. Make one decision you have been sitting on. One thing that’s been living in a tab in your brain, waiting for the right moment, waiting for more information, waiting to feel ready. Make the decision. Don’t revisit it. That’s the whole practice. Just decide.
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Ready to go further? Apply for the Civic & Board Fellowship — I’m giving away one free seat for the summer cohort. Go apply.
Next week, Nicole Meihofer joins me to talk about the financial side of all of this and I’ll be announcing the fellowship giveaway winner. You’re going to want to come back for that one.
