Steep Your Soul

Relaxed Woman: On Building Self Trust Ep 70

• Annabelle Matson

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Do you ever find yourself second-guessing, circling the same decisions, or waiting for perfect clarity before you move forward?

In this episode of Relaxed Woman, we’re exploring the practice of self-trust — the inner steadiness that allows you to feel clear and confident, even when you don’t have every answer.

We’ll talk about:

  • Why clarity comes from self-trust, not more planning or overthinking


  • How to strengthen self-trust through listening to your inner voice, keeping small promises, and honouring your boundaries


  • What happens when we stop abandoning ourselves in difficult moments and begin to treat ourselves with kindness


If you’ve been stuck in indecision, overthinking, or self-doubt, this episode will remind you that you don’t need to have it all figured out before taking the next step.

✨ Resources mentioned:

Private Coaching - book in for an Initial Breakthrough Session or work with me in a 3 or 6 month program

Reclaim Your Calm $20 workshop

Visit my website

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Submit a question for an upcoming episode.

Welcome back to Relaxed Women, a nourishing series here on the podcast. Steep Your Soul to help you slow down, soften your grip, and live from a place of deeper peace and trust. These episodes are here to remind you that you don't have to hold it altogether, that you can breathe, release the weight that you've been carrying, and find a different way of living. If you're tired from carrying it all, you are in the right place. Let's take a deep breath together and let it go, and let's begin. I meet a lot of women in my work who are sitting with big questions, should I go this way or that way? Or they can feel like there's something they really want to do, but the doubts are there. Can I really do do this? Is it actually possible for me? An indecision like this can feel very unsettling. And we often think that clarity will come from mapping out the perfect plan or doing another round of goal setting. But more often than not, the clarity that we are seeking is actually about self trust. Self trust, the ability to trust yourself. I see it as the inner scaffolding that helps you move through life, feeling grounded, calm, and steady. And it's also what gives you the confidence to make decisions and to step forward without needing to have every outcome guaranteed. It gives you a lot more confidence on the surface. I think it's easy to think, oh yeah, I trust myself. I think I'm fine in this area. And I used to think that as well until I realized how often I was doubting or second guessing what I felt inside and. Often not honoring the small commitments that I needed to be making to myself. So do you find yourself getting stuck in analysis paralysis? Do you have dreams that you quietly long for, but you are avoiding exploring them because you're not quite sure how they could happen? Are you circling in the same big life decisions, whether to leave a job or change a relationship or go back to work after having children or whether to have children at all? Without feeling any closer to the answer? Are you wondering how can I trust those nudges or insights that I'm getting? What sits underneath this is a need for self-trust. We look for clarity on the big things. But we are often overriding our intuition in the small things and how we do the small things is how we have the confidence to do the bigger things. When you start honoring the smaller decisions, like how you care for your body, the commitments that you keep to yourself, you strengthen that inner a trust, and that shift makes it much easier to believe in yourself and to move forward in the bigger areas of life. So if self-trust is really at the heart of having more clarity around some of these decisions that we're often sitting with, how do we actually build it? And that's what I wanna unpack with you next. Some simple everyday ways to strengthen that trust within yourself. So the first thing I wanna talk to you about is listening to your inner voice. Paying attention to the quiet nudges about what you may need to do or prioritize or say, or change. We often override our instincts. Sometimes it's about knowing that certain types of food are not good for us. You know, we eat something and we know that we feel like we need to fall asleep half an hour later. Or we eat something and we know that it like messes with our digestion. It could be that it's a group of people that we walk away feeling really drained from spending time with, and we know that they're actually no longer good for us. Perhaps it's like pushing our body to do a lot of really intense exercise, but underneath that we actually sense that our body is craving something slower and more restorative. So I think it's about creating intentional space to listen. If your tendency is to keep going, it's about gently guiding yourself into moments of rest so you can really hear what's going on in these moments. It's almost like parenting yourself. You might have to say to yourself, okay, I've been really busy today, but I'm gonna slow down even this if this feels uncomfortable. I wanna sense what my body and my inner voice are trying to tell me right now. So here's a question for you to ask yourself. What does my body know right now that my mind is trying to override? Maybe it's about how you eat. Maybe it's about the way that you're spending your evenings or weekends, or even the shows that you are watching. And here's the key. It's not just about hearing those nudges, it's about following through on them. And that's the next thing I wanna talk to you about. So once you start to sense what your inner voice is saying, now, it's about following through on that. So I want you to think about who are the people we trust most in life. They're the ones who are reliable, they're consistent. They do the things they say they're going to do. And it's the same with the relationship with yourself. To trust yourself with bigger decisions, you need to demonstrate trustworthiness by following through on the smaller commitments to yourself. So where are you needing to keep a promise to yourself? Where are you needing to honor one of those nudges that your inner voice is leading you to? Maybe it's about preparing food for the week ahead so you feel supported during the week. Maybe it's about committing to processing your feelings when stress or worry shows up instead of pushing those things down. That feels like a really solid commitment to be making to yourself. Maybe it's about turning your phone on do not disturb at eight 30 at night, so you can actually rest before bed. Maybe it's about giving yourself time in the morning without a screen. Or moving your body in a way that feels good, not as a form of punishment, but in a way that feels restorative and supportive. Each time you follow through on little nudges to rest or to set a boundary or to say no, or to care for your body. You strengthen self-trust. And I think it's worth mentioning here too, to be mindful of expectations on yourself. So don't set the bar, the bar so high with these things that it's unsustainable because breaking unrealistic commitments to ourself actually erodes self-trust. So just ask yourself, what can I realistically commit to in this area? And then it's simply about following through. If a friend came to you upset and you ignored them, it would most likely be that they wouldn't trust you again with something vulnerable. And it's the same in the relationship we have with ourselves. Self trust is tied to your ability to notice and process your own feelings. And it's hard to hear your inner voice when there's a lot of emotional static circulating through your body. And by that I mean like a lot of unprocessed stress and worries that we haven't been working through. So I think this part works in two ways, processing our emotions, clear space to hear your inner voice. And each time you choose to sit with what's really there, your feelings, you actually demonstrate kindness to yourself and therefore you deepen into trust towards yourself as a result. So let me ask you, what emotions have you been running from recently and what would it look like to just slow down and sit with those feelings in a kind and gentle way? And if you need help with this, you might like my Reclaim Your Calm Workshop. It's$20, and we'll give you the tools to help you do just that in a simple way. You'll find the link to that below. Self-trust is also about sitting with uncertainty. It's about letting yourself wait rather than rush. My own tendency is when I have partial clarity to try and artificially speed things up. Let me do everything I can to make this certain so that I can feel more safe. But forcing clarity doesn't actually make me feel safer, and it doesn't build self-trust. And I've done this on so many occasions where I found myself in a place that I wasn't meant to be because I didn't have the ability to trust myself to sit in the uncertainty without moving. I can think of a recent example where I did trust myself with this, and I think it illustrates this point. Recently, we decided to sell our house and we were selling. Via auction and we have in a process of building a house, so we were gonna need to find a rental to move into. Auction day was coming up and I was looking at a lot of rentals online, and there was a couple of really good ones that showed up. And so I went along to have a look at them and they wanted tenants to move in like right away. And we were still, you know, two or three weeks out from an auction. And there was a part of me that was feeling racy, like, okay, let me sign up to this, this rental so that, we'll, we can guarantee this and we'll have a place to live. But there was a deeper part of me that was saying, just wait. Like don't push this. Don't rush out of the uncertainty. Just wait. And then it was really interesting the day before our auction and like bearing in mind our settlement was like two weeks after our auction. So the day before our auction. I see this perfect house come up for us. It's in the exact area that I wanted the right price range. It was brand new, and I went along to the viewing and it was perfect. We had our auction the next day, we sold our house at auction, and then the following day we were accepted in into this new rental. And it was so much better than the other ones that I'd been looking at. And I think it just demonstrates how important it is to often sit in the pause and to sit in the weight. And in those moments where we choose to wait rather than rush ahead, we definitely strengthen self-trust because we feel that inkling and that knowing to do something or not to do something and we honor that and it creates a good outcome for us. It strengthens self-trust within us. The next thing I wanna talk to you about is turning towards yourself. When we face criticism, or setbacks or disappointments, many of us subconsciously turn on ourselves. And I know I've done this a lot play, what will kind of happen is, this is a a, a really common pattern that I'll see is that we might face, yeah, some kind of negative criticism or feedback from someone or there is a disappointment of some kind that happens and then we internalize that and we end up placing a lot of pressure on ourselves. We might blame ourselves or kinda like pressure ourselves to go out and do more. That's what it looks like to turn away from ourselves. But these are the very moments where we need to turn towards ourselves instead. So if I think of my daughter, Eloise, if she came home one day and she was really upset about missing out on a sports team or receiving negative feedback about a project that she'd worked on, how would I respond to her in those moments? Well, I'd hope I would respond with presence and love and softness and support, but the same is true for us. We need to offer ourselves those same things when we experience criticism or setbacks or disappointments. When we choose to turn towards ourselves, it's such a loving thing that we can do. We are showing ourselves a lot of compassion, but it also builds trust because when there is love, there is trust. So I really wanna encourage you to think about the next time you face something like that. You get an email, you receive feedback. There's a setback or disappointment somewhere. Don't rush. Don't run away. Don't put more pressure on yourself. Pause, sit in that, turn towards yourself and sit with those feelings. Encourage yourself in those moments. Support yourself in those moments, and know that as you do that, you are building trust. The next thing I wanna talk to you about is boundaries. As women, we often unknowingly self abandon, and this is especially true if you lean towards. People pleasing tendencies, which I totally get because that's been a big part of my life as well. So think about it as being like a line on the ground. And when you are applying yourself to something at work, or you are supporting someone, as you walk up to that line, you are living out your values, you're showing up, you're doing a good job, you're caring for others. But when you cross. Over that line. That's when you move into proving and pleasing, and you'll know you've crossed it because of how you feel in your body. When you cross the line, you'll start to feel anxious and racy and on edge and similar feelings like that. And when you are in that proving place. It's hard to trust yourself, so it's just about paying attention to that line. Notice when you're tempted to step over that line and gently guide yourself back, and each time you hold that line and you say, no, I'm not gonna step over that line. I've done enough. It's okay to put this down. It's okay to disappoint someone. It's okay to make the decision that's right for me here. When you choose to do that, you build self trust. And I work with a lot of women in the space, and I think there's definitely a connection between feeling lost or questioning ourselves or our lives or wondering what to do. And it almost always is because we are engaging in a lot of patterns of self abandonment, where we abandon our own needs to please other people. And it's difficult to get a sense of what's right and where we need to be going and what we need to do when we're in the space. So if that's you, I really want to challenge you to think about that line and being mindful of the line, noticing that as you start to approach it, feeling that tendency and that almost that impulse to want to step over the line and choosing to guide yourself back from it. So here's what I want you to remember. Every time you follow through on a small commitment to yourself, every time you honor that quiet inner nudge, it's not just about that small step. It's about building the confidence within yourself to make bigger decisions in life. And when you've practiced trusting yourself and the little things, it becomes much easier to take those bigger steps of faith. So thank you for being here for this episode of Relaxed Women. There are more episodes waiting for you in the series, so make sure you go and check those out. And there are more coming all designed to support you with practices and encouragement to live from a deeper place of peace and trust. If this feels like something you need, make sure you hit follow or subscribe to this podcast so you don't miss what's ahead. And if a friend comes to mind, who would love. This episode or this series, please do share it with them. And if you enjoyed this, you would love the Reclaim Your Calm Workshop. It's just$20 and it gives you simple, practical ways to calm your mind. Feel more grounded. And bring more peace into your everyday life. And when you feel peaceful and grounded, it's much easier to hear your inner voice and to trust you know what it is that you need to do next. So you'll find the link for that workshop in the description below. And if you're curious about going deeper and you'd like to learn more about working with me one-on-one in a private coaching program, you can find all the details about that and the description below. So I'm looking forward to being with you again soon. And take care Until then.