Cultivating Confidence

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True self-trust combines honesty with yourself and consistent self-kindness.

Self-examination with compassion makes it safer to face personal truths and shadows.

Allowing curiosity and “unknowing” fosters deeper self-understanding and openness to others.

We don’t talk much about trusting ourselves. And when we do, it’s not easy to understand what we’re talking about. Discussions about trust are typically about what happens between two or more people. We seem to approach the idea of trusting ourselves when we speak of someone being confident. Coincidentally, the Latin root of the word confidence means “with trust.” However, the common description of someone as confident suggests the person acts boldly with audacity. Such an understanding loses the depth of what it means to truly trust ourselves.

During the Human Potential movement, there was growing interest in what it meant to trust someone. The experiments involving trust used the following operational definition: I trust you if I hold two beliefs about you: that you will tell me the truth and that you will be kind to me. I’ve applied this definition of trust both in my personal and professional........

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