Posted on February 7, 2011 by Deah Curry PhD, CPC

What are the power tools that help you reach your goals?  When you think about this, do you include your personal strengths, such as your ability to have confidence in your decisions?

Although many power tools are discussed and developed when involved with a life coach, what all coaching approaches have in common is the intent to support you in breaking old mental, emotional, or behavioral patterns, and help you establish new ones.

Many women especially work with a life coach to gain more confidence, and deeper trust in ourselves.  We start out seeming to have a lot of doubt that we can have the life we truly want. We live in such a cautionary environment and have such little support for learning how to deeply trust ourselves, that doubt gets infused into us from a very early age.

So one power tool I often refer to that of  Trust. A deep sense of trust in one’s ability to ultimately be okay is perhaps THE essential ingredient for living large — that is, for having shining confidence needed to take the risks necessary to succeed at our goals.

To really succeed at anything in life, we must be willing to trust our own instincts, judgments, perceptions, knowledge, training, and skills. And perhaps more importantly, we must be able to trust our ability to recover well from choices made with incomplete information, bad timing, or even too much trust in others’ opinions and persuasion that lead to undesired outcomes.

In part, trust is developed by taking small risks and having small successes. And, trust grows by reflecting on the track record one accumulates in having recovered from less than optimal choices.

And also, trust is an exercise in faith — a belief in something unknown, unseen, or unprovable at the moment of making a trusting decision.

Trust fuels personal empowerment. The more trust you have in yourself and your ability to make things turn out better than just okay no matter what, the more empowered you truly are.

Because trust in oneself is an inside job, we can’t gain it by seeking others’ opinions.  Just like no one can tell you when you feel hungry because they can’t feel what you feel, no one can really give you trust in yourself.  We must grow that “muscle” ourselves.

So here are a couple coaching questions for you right now:  How will you exercise your trust in yourself today? What thoughts and beliefs will you feed yourself that will stimulate the growth of your inner sense of trust?