S1:E25 Why Self Trust Matters For Women In Leadership
Self trust is such a key part of leading from a place of flow and lightness. Yet very few talk about how important this is, and even fewer know how to teach others how to develop it. If you're curious why self trust matters so much for your leadership growth, or wonder if you are needing to give more attention to this factor, be sure to listen in.
Warmly,
Linda
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Read below for full transcript.
Intro by Linda: Hi, I'm Linda, self-love coach and hypnotherapist who loves a good yoga class in my pajamas, listening to the belly laughs of my baby boys, and hunting down the best vegan donuts. This podcast is for ambitious and soulful women who want to feel fulfilled in all areas of their life and are ready to dive deep into the mysteries and wonders of the subconscious mind in order to achieve that. So if you are ready to be let loose from the shackles of self-sabotage and design a life of emotional freedom and everyday abundance, you are in the perfect place. Because life can get even better than you imagine, and the biggest shifts start inside of you. Welcome.
How do you develop greater ease in your leadership as a woman so that leading groups — whether big or small — leading companies, leading in your business, begins to feel more effortless and more authentic as opposed to feeling like a grind or a hustle? Let's talk about this.
[00:01:13]
When it comes to your leadership — your leadership style, your leadership presence as a woman — you're often going to find that the most essential pieces of what makes an effective leader come down to self-trust. Self-trust is that ability to make decisions and take responsibility for your choices and the way they affect both you and other parties without also layering on an excessive amount of over-responsibility or guilt or shame when things go awry, as they can at times.
When you have a strong sense of self-trust, it often comes across as being very confident, being very grounded, and not easily shaken by challenges that arise or mistakes that are made — whether by yourself or somebody else. When you have that kind of grounded presence because you trust yourself, it makes it easy for you to pivot, to make adjustments where needed, to see solutions as opposed to getting caught up in the problem itself. And that then also makes it a lot easier for those who are following underneath you or beside you. And when I say under you, I don't mean they are beneath you — they are underneath your leadership. But when you have those other folks alongside you or following in your leadership, they also benefit because they aren't getting narrowly focused on the problem and becoming absorbed with what went wrong. They're also easily able to shift into finding solutions for those issues.
That's the power of having that really stable and strong self-leadership when you are inhabiting that role as someone who is guiding others towards an identified goal. They get to benefit from it. It makes leading a lot easier on you, a lot lighter. And then you also feel more freed up to delegate and to assign responsibilities and tasks to other people because you don't have to have your hands in everything. You trust yourself and you trust the choices you've made with who you've decided to have on your team or on your project. And so you don't have to micromanage because you have an intuitive sense that things will work out and all the pieces will come together as they need to.
This kind of freedom is invaluable. There are so many things that we are responsible for and yet also so many things that we can't control — not just in our work, but also in our lives and society at large. Being able to be very clear about what we can control — our decision-making, the people that we select, how we go about communicating our vision and what we want to see — having clarity about the things that we can control makes us so much more powerful as opposed to feeling like we are just at the mercy of circumstances and whatever is happening around us.
[00:04:40]
A self-led leader who trusts themselves has the ability to make tremendous positive impact. I know that you have probably had many examples of bosses or coaches — if you played sports or if you trained with an instrument — you probably have had experiences where the person who was out in front leading you really wasn't the leader that you would have chosen. They weren't someone who was having a large positive impact on you. Perhaps they were having a really large negative impact.
I know friends of mine, colleagues of mine, who've gone through PhD programs and their advising professor was so derogatory, so disrespectful, so unkind and demanding that it made their experience of getting that higher degree an incredibly painful one. I know of friends who just didn't even finish after putting in all those years, all that time and effort, because they were so discouraged. They were so discouraged they just gave up on that goal and they gave up on that dream. That's the power of leadership. It can be used for good. It can be used for harm.
And I know that if you're watching this and you're interested in exploring the idea of what self-trust looks like in my leadership and how it would make things easier on me — that you do care about leading in a positive way and having a positive impact. Because you're not trying to harm people. You want to reach a goal and you want to make sure that everyone gets to celebrate it and benefit from it and be excited about it just as much as you are. Self-leadership really can be one of those missing keys that can make this journey a lot easier for you to achieve. And that's something that's not often talked about when we're being trained up into these different roles, higher-level roles, senior positions. We're not necessarily taught how to do this.
[00:07:00]
So I want you to consider: what is your relationship with self-trust in your leadership? You can ask yourself a couple of questions to get a better picture of this.
You can explore: how much do you need to have your decisions vetted and approved by somebody else before you're able to move forward with those decisions? Because sometimes we get caught in this dance where we're willing to accept input — which is another really powerful tool for leaders — but it's not just that we're willing to accept the input, it's that we feel like we desperately need it. That we can't make a choice without it. That unless this mentor or this figure that we look up to gives the green light, we can't just intuitively assess if something is the right fit or not, that we can't make that decision on our own. If you find that you struggle with moving forward with decisions without having everything vetted and approved by somebody else or some other group of people, that may be a sign that you can stand to develop further in your self-trust. And that's not a bad thing, because it's very doable.
You can also ask yourself if you have struggles with just accepting your own authority. A lot of women who have a natural leadership ability, a natural leadership talent, when they were coming up, when they were growing up, were described as bossy or kind of sassy, overly opinionated, a little too much. And that can really steal your joy when it comes to leadership. It can really make you feel a lot more insecure about how you come across. And you can spend a lot of time trying to police yourself and the way you present yourself as opposed to just actually leading. That can really get in the way of having that strong sense of self-trust.
Because now that critical voice — those critical voices of people who looked at you and basically felt threatened by you, which is odd, right? To be threatened by a little girl who knows herself. Like, why are you threatened by that? That's a beautiful, amazing thing. But now the voices of those people who were threatened by that or saw it as a problem or thought it was unfeminine or whatever ideas they held in their head — that's not our problem. But whatever ideas they had, now the critical voice has developed into one of your parts, one of your inner parts that becomes sort of a lifelong companion that just mimics that critical voice over and over again. And that can really sap at your self-trust. Even if generally you do make decisions and you can make them independently of other people's overt approval, you might still seem confident on the outside and yet really struggle internally because you feel like it's not good enough or that you are failing in some way. That's also a great sign that you would highly benefit and feel so relieved by working on growth in your self-trust.
Those are a couple of examples that can help you to reflect and get a better sense of if that's a need for you or not. I can tell you that I am always continuing to work on that for myself for a variety of reasons, including the ones that I mentioned. But where I am now is very different from where I started. And you can begin to feel much more confident about how you lead and without all the extra baggage that you were never meant to carry.
[00:10:53]
Feel free to comment below and let me know if you think self-trust is an area that you would like to work on and grow in. I would love to hear from you. And if you have any other questions about that — what does that look like? — feel free to leave them in the comments or send me an email and I would be happy to get back and talk a little bit more about that and answer any questions. I hope that blesses you and I'll talk with you soon.
You hung with me to the end, my shero. If you benefited from this episode, please say thanks by leaving a wonderful review. It helps me know what's helping you the most and allows more like-minded women to find and learn from this podcast. We don't want to keep all the good stuff for ourselves. See you next time.
[Editing Note: The Love Yourself Liberated! group program is not currently available. If you are interested in this content and guidance, it is now exclusively provided through my concierge psychotherapy practice, Satya Counseling & Yoga.]
Meet Your Host!
Linda Sanderville, LCSW, RYT-200 is the founder of Satya Counseling & Yoga LLC. She specializes in concierge therapy for female founders and public figures, helping high-profile women navigate public scandal, executive burnout, and the values that will define the second half of life. Based in Albuquerque and serving clients virtually in DC, Maryland, Virginia, and beyond, Linda combines clinical expertise with somatic wisdom to help leaders reclaim their truth.
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