How to trust yourself again when you feel lost
[16 MIN LISTEN]
There was a time in my life when I stopped trusting myself completely.
It happened during my first pregnancy. I was navigating a brand new chapter of life and suddenly it felt like every decision carried enormous weight. Instead of listening inward, I turned outward. I searched the internet for answers constantly. I read every article I could find. I asked everyone around me what they thought.
At first it felt responsible. I told myself I was being informed.
But the more information I gathered, the further away I felt from my own inner voice.
If you have ever found yourself wondering how to trust yourself again, especially after a season of uncertainty or overwhelm, you are not alone. Many women reach moments in life where their intuition feels quiet or hard to access.
The truth is that your intuition has not disappeared. Sometimes it simply gets buried under noise.
When outside voices get louder than your own
Modern life makes it incredibly easy to disconnect from ourselves.
We have endless access to opinions, advice, articles, and commentary. There is always another expert telling us the “right” way to do something. For a while, I believed the solution to my uncertainty was simply more information.
So I kept searching.
But instead of clarity, I felt more confused. Every answer seemed to contradict another. Every opinion pulled me in a different direction.
That is when I realized something important.
I had slowly given my authority away.
Instead of asking myself what felt right, I was asking the world to decide for me.
And the more I did that, the quieter my own intuition became.
The moment I realized what was happening
There wasn’t one dramatic moment that changed everything. It was more of a slow realization that crept in over time.
I noticed how tense I felt whenever I had to make even small decisions. I noticed how often I reached for my phone to search something instead of pausing and listening inward.
That was the moment I understood something simple but powerful.
I had not lost my intuition.
I had just stopped listening to it.
Once I saw that clearly, everything began to shift.
Returning to yourself happens in small ways
Rebuilding self-trust did not happen overnight.
It started with small choices.
Instead of Googling every question, I began pausing for a moment and asking myself what I felt. Instead of assuming someone else knew better, I practiced noticing the quiet signals coming from my own body and mind.
At first those signals were subtle. Sometimes they were just a feeling of ease or discomfort. Sometimes they appeared as a quiet sense of knowing.
The more I listened, the stronger that inner voice became.
Learning how to trust yourself again is rarely about making one big decision. It is about rebuilding a relationship with yourself one moment at a time.
Why intuition feels hard to hear
Many women believe intuition is something mystical or rare. In reality, intuition is often much simpler than we think.
It is the combination of body awareness, emotional clarity, and lived experience. Your mind and body are constantly processing information beneath the surface.
When life becomes loud or overwhelming, those signals can become harder to hear.
This is why practices like slowing down, regulating your nervous system, and creating quiet space in your day can make such a difference. When your system feels safe, your inner voice becomes easier to recognize.
Your intuition never left
One of the most comforting realizations I have had in my personal growth journey is this: the connection to yourself never truly disappears.
It may become quiet during stressful seasons. It may get buried under expectations or outside opinions. But it is always still there.
Every time you pause instead of reacting, every time you check in with your body before making a decision, every time you allow yourself to move at your own pace, you strengthen that connection again.
And over time, that relationship becomes something you can rely on.
If you are in a season where you feel lost or unsure of yourself, please remember this.
You are not broken.
You are simply being invited back into a deeper relationship with yourself.
Learning how to trust yourself again is not about forcing certainty. It is about creating space to hear the wisdom that has always been there.
And sometimes the most powerful thing you can do is slow down long enough to listen.
Episode transcript:
This is an auto-generated, unedited episode transcript. Please excuse any tyops.
Welcome to The Life with Liz Podcast, the place to be if you wanna go from invisible to vibrant in your life and embrace the power you didn't know you had inside of you. I'm your host, Liz Fleming, business owner, mom, military spouse, entrepreneur, founder, CEO, and life coach, who is passionate about helping ambitious women like you step into their power and their purpose on purpose so they can experience as much joy, success, satisfaction, and abundance as humanly possible. Now without further ado, let's dive right into this episode.
Hey, friend, do you know that feeling when you suddenly realize you just don't really trust yourself anymore?
It's something that women often experience, but don't always have the words for.
And this can happen in a big, dramatic way, where you have this crazy realization that it's happening, but more often than not, it's a quiet, subtle way, where you start second-guessing everything.
Your decisions, your instincts and inner voice.
And if you've ever felt that way, I want you to know right off the bat, you are not alone.
I have absolutely been there.
In fact, one of the clearest times in my life when I completely lost trust in myself happened during my pregnancy, my first pregnancy.
And I want to share a bit of that story with you today, because it changed the way I understand intuition, self-trust, and what it really means to return back home to yourself.
Which is what my work is all about.
When I was pregnant with my first child, everything felt new and uncertain. It was shocking.
I was never one of those people that was having a 5-year plan and could picture myself being a mom. I was just very interested in starting a family.
But I was never hardcore, let's go, gonna be a mom, mom, mom, mom, right?
So my transformation was a little different.
There were just so many decisions to make, so many opinions coming from every direction, and because I wanted to do everything right, I started doing what a lot of people do in that situation.
I started googling everything. Everything.
I researched everything, every symptom, question, every little tiny thing that came up.
I can't imagine if we had AI back then. What would have happened to me? Yikes.
And I put all of my faith, all of my trust, everything into my doctors, which we had a great team, but slowly, something interesting started happening.
The more information I consumed, the more distant I became from myself.
I could feel that.
The more confused I became.
One article would say one thing, another would say the complete opposite. One expert would recommend something, another warned against it, and instead of feeling more confident, I felt more and more disconnected from myself.
It was like the noise of the outside world had become so loud that I couldn't hear my own inner voice anymore.
And that realization hit me one day in a way that I will never forget.
And if you've read my book, you know.
There was a literal hit, punched a wall.
It was my breakdown moment, my rock bottom moment.
And it woke me up.
So, if you haven't read the book yet, I'm not gonna rehash that whole story, but what I'm getting at here is that I just remember, in the moments following that, the weeks following that, I just remember catching myself.
And I was fully in my awareness of, oh, here I go reaching for my phone again to search for something, and I just paused.
I had this moment where I thought, when did I stop trusting myself?
When did I start putting all of my faith into everyone else but me?
When did I start believing that everyone else knew my body, my life, and my intuition better than I did?
Because that's really what happened.
Without realizing it, I had completely outsourced my inner authority.
I had slowly handed it over to the internet, to the experts, to strangers, to everyone, except myself.
And the more I did that, the quieter my own intuition became.
And the louder my inner emotions from trying to process all of that became, i.e. fist wall punch.
And I could go on a whole rant about what it means to suppress your emotions and how they can be projected in those moments, but what I'm getting at here is that I had completely lost my inner voice, my intuition, to all those feelings, because I outsourced everything.
And I want to pause here, because this doesn't just happen during pregnancy.
This is just my prime example of when it was most clear for me.
But this happens to women all the time.
It can happen when you enter motherhood, it can happen during a major life transition, it can happen when you're burned out or overwhelmed, it can happen when you're surrounded by a million opinions about how your life should look.
At some point, many women reach a moment where they realize they've stopped listening to themselves.
I actually was on a plane the other day, and I was having this fantastic conversation.
Shout out, Lizzie. Yes, we have the same name, it was bananas.
And we were talking about this, which is where this idea for this episode came from.
But we were talking about how we like what we like now. Is it truly authentic to us, or do we still like what we like now because someone told us to like it in high school, or it was the cool thing to do in college, or in our 20s, right?
And we used 90s rap as the example.
I'm like, don't get me wrong, I love my Wu-Tang Clan, and all that jazz, but would I really have liked Beyonce if so-and-so didn't sing her praises in the ninth grade?
And the answer is probably yes, don't get me wrong, don't come at me, I'm definitely a B.
But yeah, so this is just one of those food-for-thought questions.
It's like, do you really like what you like because it's authentic to you?
Because your intuition felt called to it and felt excited by it?
Or was it an outside influence?
So anyway, that was my little side rant, but I just feel like at some point, we reach a point in our lives as women where we realize that we've stopped listening to ourselves, and we've just constantly taken advice from others.
And when that happens, life can start to feel really confusing.
Because suddenly you're looking outside yourself for every answer, for every interest, for everything.
You start asking everyone else what they think.
You start overthinking decisions that used to feel simple, you become a people pleaser, and the more you search for certainty outside of yourself, the more disconnected you feel, at heart, within.
That was exactly where I was.
But the turning point, it didn't come from finding the ideal answer online.
It came from a simple realization.
I hadn't lost my intuition. I just stopped listening to it.
I truly could not hear it, because I wasn't listening for it.
And once I understood that, something shifted inside of me, because if the problem wasn't that my intuition disappeared, it meant I could reconnect with it.
And that's exactly what I started doing.
Not through big, dramatic changes, but through small moments.
So instead of, for example, immediately googling every question and googling myself out of my intuition, I started pausing first, and getting to know my natural breath, and asking myself, what does my body think about this?
What feels calm?
What feels aligned for me?
And you know when you ask yourself these questions, your body will have a physical tell.
For me, it's a full-body yes or a no.
So, if something really lights me up, it's like, yes. Oh, that feels good. That feels aligned. That makes me feel relief.
And you also know when you're presented with options, and you're just like, my gut says no to this. I do not know why, but I am gonna trust it.
And at first, the answers, they're not always loud or obvious.
It's a muscle, you have to work it.
And sometimes it's just a small sense of ease, sometimes it's a quiet feeling that something doesn't sit right.
But the more I paid attention to those signals, the stronger they became.
And that is the key to rebuilding a relationship with yourself.
That's really what self-trust is, it's a relationship.
And the more that you listen to your personal tells, physical, mental, emotional, the easier they are to hear, the louder they become in the moment, because you're able to recognize them.
Oh, it's such a fun game to play with the universe.
And I want to make this really clear, too.
One of the biggest misconceptions people have about intuition is that it's something mystical, or rare. Like, only certain people have access to it.
But in reality, intuition is something every human being has.
It's your body processing information.
It's your lived experience speaking quietly beneath the surface.
It's the subtle signs and signals that your nervous system sends when something feels unsafe or safe.
The challenge is that modern life is so very noisy.
There's constant stimulation.
There's constant input, all the time. Advice, frequencies and input from the outside world.
And when the outside world gets loud enough, it becomes harder to hear yourself.
Which, my friends, is why practices like slowing down, setting boundaries, regulating your nervous system, and giving yourself quiet space are all so powerful.
And these are the topics that I've covered for the last couple of years, because they are so, so powerful, and they are not practiced enough.
Everyone is trying to click a button, take a pill, use a serum to solve their problems.
Again, external stimuli, instead of going within.
The answers you seek are already within you.
You're turning the volume down on everything else so that your own voice can come through again.
That is the key.
Over time, as I started listening inward more often, I noticed something really beautiful.
My confidence started coming back.
Not because I suddenly knew everything or had every answer, but because I simply trusted myself to figure things out.
And I didn't realize the load that I was carrying in not trusting myself, and the weight that was lifted when I did start trusting myself was incredible.
And that's the real power of self-trust.
It's not always about certainty, it's about knowing you can navigate life without abandoning yourself in the process.
That even if you make mistakes, you can listen, you can adjust, and move forward.
You are completely capable of guiding your own life.
If you're listening to this right now and thinking, yeah, I don't really trust myself the way I used to, or something feels off, I want you to hear this.
Clearly.
Your intuition has not left you.
It has never left you.
It may have gotten quieter during stressful seasons, it may have gotten a bit buried under expectations or pressure, but it's still there.
And the way you reconnect with it is not through more, more, more, more, more information.
It's through presence.
It's through small moments of listening.
It's through giving yourself permission to move at your own pace again.
And every time you choose to check in with yourself, instead of immediately searching outside yourself for answers, you strengthen that connection.
So, if today's episode resonated with you, I want to invite you to reflect on one simple question.
Where in your life are you looking outside of yourself for answers that might already live inside of you?
And just sit with that.
You don't have to solve it today.
Sometimes the awareness alone is enough to start changing the way we move through the world.
And y'all know I love talking about self-awareness.
There's so much power in simply being aware of your thoughts, your emotions, and your actions without needing to change them in the moment.
And, my friends, if this is the kind of work that speaks to you, reconnecting with yourself, rebuilding self-trust, learning to regulate your nervous system and live in alignment with who you really are, I have a completely upgraded free training that walks you through some of the deeper patterns that tend to pull us away from ourself in the first place.
And you can go check that out at elizabethfleming.com slash free dash workshop, and that link is in the show notes.
It's a nice, chill place to start if you're ready to feel more like yourself again, without all the industry terms and having to invest in the premium programs.
It's just something I wanted to create for my peeps as a place for them to begin.
If they listened to a podcast episode, or they read my book, or they saw a blog post, or an Instagram post, and they just felt like they were ready for that next step, this is that natural next step.
So, thank you so much for being here with me today.
If this episode lit something up in you, I want you to share it with a friend who might need to hear it too.
And, until next time, remember this.
Your inner voice is still there. She is there.
Own your power, baby.
And sometimes all that power needs, all that voice needs, is a little space to be heard again.
Did that go by too fast? No worries. You can always find me over at elisabethfleming.com for more information about my programs, events, and how you can take your learning further with me. If you loved this episode, leave a review. It helps more than you know.
Thank you so much for tuning in. I'll catch you next time.
Connect with Liz:
Watch Liz's FREE Workshop, Step Into Your Power:
Discover the 3 hidden patterns draining your energy and learn how to start feeling like yourself again. Watch now at elisabethfleming.com/free-workshop
Read Liz's Book:
Discover Liz’s bestselling book, Powerhouse: 3 Steps to Thrive as the Incredible Woman You Already Are — A Framework for Self-Love and Expansion: elisabethfleming.com/book
Resources:
Website: elisabethfleming.com/welcome
Instagram: @mslizfleming
Podcast: The Life with Liz Podcast
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