Self-Trust Therapy
Why self-trust matters in burnout recovery.
You’ve built a career that looks successful by every external measure. But internally, you’re managing a constant undercurrent of self-doubt. You’re wondering when someone will figure out you don’t actually know what you’re doing, agonizing over decisions that should feel routine, and treating every piece of feedback like a verdict on your competence rather than information you can use.
That’s not a confidence gap. It’s a self-trust problem. And it’s burning through your energy faster than your actual workload.
When you can’t rely on your own judgment, everything takes more effort. You over-prepare. You delay decisions, waiting for a consensus you don’t need but that will soothe that inner doubt. You replay conversations looking for evidence that you got it wrong. That invisible labor is one of the hidden drivers of the burnout patterns that keep recycling, no matter how many jobs you change or boundaries you set.
Would you like help building more self-trust? Go ahead and schedule an appointment now.
Signs you’re leading without self-trust.
You might not use the word “self-trust” to describe what’s going on. Most leaders don’t. But see if any of this sounds familiar:
- You’re responsible for decisions across functions you didn’t come up through, and the gap between your authority and your expertise feels like a vulnerability you have to hide
- You over-prepare for meetings because being caught without an answer feels dangerous
- You make a decision, then quietly check with two or three people to make sure it was the right one
- When someone on your team pushes back in an area they know better than you, it doesn’t feel like collaboration; it feels like exposure
- Feedback from a peer or board member can derail your entire week because it confirms what you already suspect about yourself
- You take on work that belongs to your team because you don’t trust it will get done right or because saying no feels too risky
- You know you’re qualified for the role, but some part of you is still waiting to be found out
If you’re nodding along, you’re probably also exhausted because managing this level of vigilance on top of your actual responsibilities is its own full-time job.
How can self-trust improve?
Self-trust doesn’t improve by earning new titles, getting raises, or collecting more proof that you belong. If that worked, your track record would have fixed this already.
The real work is understanding why your own judgment doesn’t feel like enough, even when it consistently is. That struggle usually traces back to coping strategies you developed long before you were in a leadership role. At some point, relying on external validation or over-preparing and staying hypervigilant was the smartest strategy available to you. The problem is that those strategies followed you into a career where they’re hurting more than they’re helping.
In our work together, we’ll identify which of those patterns are still running in the background and identify what’s keeping them active. From there, we’ll build your capacity to make decisions, absorb feedback, and lead across unfamiliar territory without the constant second layer of self-monitoring that’s draining your energy.
The goal isn’t blind confidence. It’s developing an internal authority you can trust, so you can lead your team, navigate ambiguity, and take in critical feedback without it leveling you. That’s also what prevents you from sliding back into the burnout patterns that brought you here in the first place.
FAQ
Is this the same as executive coaching?
No. Executive coaching tends to focus on leadership skills, performance optimization, and strategic development. That work has real value, but it assumes you already trust your own judgment and just need to sharpen how you apply it.
Self-trust therapy addresses what’s underneath. If you’re second-guessing yourself in ways that executive coaching hasn’t resolved, or if you’ve noticed that your self-doubt intensifies under specific conditions like a new role, a difficult board member, or leading outside your area of expertise, that usually points to something deeper than a skills gap.
We can work alongside an executive coach if you have one. The work is complementary, not competing.
How is this connected to burnout recovery?
Directly. When you don’t trust your own judgment, you compensate with over-preparing, seeking unnecessary consensus, replaying decisions, monitoring how you’re being perceived. That compensation is invisible to everyone around you, but it’s burning through your energy constantly.
Most of my clients don’t initially connect their exhaustion to self-trust. They assume they’re just tired from the workload. But when we start examining where they are expending energy, a significant portion is being spent on that internal monitoring system. Addressing self-trust is often what makes burnout recovery last long-term rather than cycling back.
How do I know if I need self-trust work or just a less toxic job?
Sometimes it’s both. A genuinely dysfunctional environment will erode anyone’s self-trust, and no amount of internal work will fix a workplace that’s actively undermining you.
Part of what we do is sort that out. We will work on distinguishing between self-doubt that your environment is creating and patterns that would follow you into any role. That distinction matters because leaving a job without addressing an internal pattern means you’ll likely rebuild the same dynamic somewhere else. And staying in a toxic environment while trying to “work on yourself” is just as unproductive.
We’ll figure out what’s driving the problem before deciding what needs to change.