Self trust is a business strategy.

If you work as a nondiet dietitian (or any helping professional) you are probably supporting the humans you work with to trust themselves and their bodies around food. That same self trust is important around you and your business.

How do you build it? How do you show up with trust in yourself? How exactly does it support your business? That's what we're chatting about today.

Let's dive in.

Episode Transcript

Laura Jean 0:14

Hello Hello and welcome back to the dietitian values podcast. I hope you're having a good day so far whenever you're listening to this episode. And in this episode today we are going to talk about trust, self trust. Often in business when trust comes up, it's thinking about building trust, you know, creating a space where the humans that you want to work with can trust you. Before that happens so, before that comes self trust. When you're building a business, self trust is essential, like it can feel so much easier to defer to things outside of ourselves right, to defer to external forces to look at what other people are doing to even defer to a business coach. However, when you can build self trust, you can build a space to really, you know, run your own race, run your own business, and to really lean into the values that you have for your business. So it's kind of similar to well, you know there's there's similarities or parallels with the work, if you're a non dietitian, that you probably do, or even just somebody else, A healing helping professional that works with other humans, it's the work you often probably do with those humans around helping them to trust themselves, not to look to the diet not to look to the scales, not talk to the influencer on IG around their food or around their body movement to actually look at themselves to trust, to build trust with themselves and build trust with their bodies. Because you know, the best success for those humans is to trust themselves, and to use that trust as a tool to build the life they want to live, to move towards the goals that are important to them to even set those goals. And just the same is true for you, you know, that happens for the humans, and I know that the best outcomes happen for you and your business when you learn to trust yourself, when you build that self trust, and when you embed that in your business and when when that is a driver for how you run your business and the decisions you make in your business.

So, self trust is such a powerful tool and self trust helps you to be clear in your messages that you have. self trust helps you to be clearer in bringing your values into your business. self trust helps you to be clearer in your boundaries, to be clear in your No, on what you have a no for in your business by trusting yourself versus looking at those things outside yourself or deferring to somebody else as the expert self trust is also about honouring you as a human and seeing you as a human. not that you don't see yourself as a human, but seeing your full humanity and honouring that in your business. When you make decisions that aren't based in trusting yourself but are based in somebody else being an expert in you, similarly to that non diet sort of space. When you make decisions based on somebody else being an expert in you. It's really undermining your expertise in yourself, your lived experience it's undermining you and your humanity.

You know, in the bigger picture scheme of things, so it sometimes feels easier, you know, there's all sorts of reasons. And again, if you think about how it relates to your work that you've probably done with clients over the years, you've probably had clients humans come and sit in a chair in your clinic room or a you know, on the other side of a zoom call and say, 'What should I do?' or' The doctor sent me, what do I need to do?' maybe you haven't had too many of those clients, I had those clients long time ago, where people are looking to you as the expert looking to you for the answers. And the same happens in your business or does the same happen for you in your business, are you looking at somebody else for the answers are you looking at somebody else to be the expert in your business, There's only one expert in you and your business, and that is you. And look, I'm a business coach, but I'm no expert in you and your business. I'm somebody who can be a support person, I'm somebody who can be a cheerleader I'm somebody who can maybe, you know, who can not maybe, who can provide you with strategies, who can provide you with tips, ideas, who can provide you with questions where you, you know, to create a space for you to build that self trust, but I'm not the expert and I'm not the expert in you - you are. And knowing that and building the trust around that is essential, essential for living, you know, a fulfilling values based life but also for building the business that you want to build, for building a business that moves you towards your version of success, not my version of success, not somebody else's version of success.

So how do you build self trust? How do you support the clients you work with to build trust in themselves - practice, practice, practice. Yeah. Maybe you have some other particular specific strategies that you use you can use those yourself, but a lot of it comes down to just practising trusting yourself just practising making decisions, and seeing the outcomes of those decisions. And I really think that values are a great tool for this because when you are moving towards your values, and you're making decisions based on that, it builds a cycle of trust because you are showing up for yourself, you're honouring your commitment to yourself and your values, and we build trust through that, you know. how do you build trusting relationships with other people? When people do what they say they're going to do. And when you are building your values based business and living your values based life, you are saying that you want to show up in your values, you are saying that the important thing for you is to centre your values in your life and your business. How do you build trust with yourself? by showing up in that way that you say that you're going to, by showing up in that way that you say is important to you. So you build self trust by practising, you build self trust by showing up how you have said, you want to show up. You build self trust by showing up in the values that you have said are important to you, that you have said are a priority to you, and getting clear on those values, and embedding them is so important, and taking action in those values is super important too because you build trust by taking action and practising. without practice something without doing it. Yeah, so taking action in your business and in your life in a way that supports you to show up in those values that you've said you're going to show up in, which builds a cycle of trust, builds a cycle of self trust, trust with yourself. So the same way that trust is built in relationships that you have with other people is the same way that trust is built with yourself in that relationship. And when you show up in your values and you show up and you take action, sometimes things don't go exactly to plan, and that's okay. It's just an opportunity to build more awareness to get clear on what's going on, but you're still showing up the way you said you were going to, even if it doesn't necessarily go to plan the trust is built not by the outcome, the trust is built by the process. the trust is built through the practice of you showing up for yourself in the way you said you were going to do, by taking action for yourself, to move towards the values that are important to you, and sometimes the outcome won't necessarily be what you planned. You know some people might call it a failure. I don't really believe in failures as such, I feel like there's always opportunities, not as in like there's a lesson in everything you know everything happens for a reason. Sorry, I don't mean to make fun of that if that is what you believe, if that's what you believe, that's fine. I don't believe everything happens for a reason. I believe that there's always an opportunity to build awareness if we want to we don't always have to but there's always an opportunity to build awareness and to use the information from those experiences. And so that can help us to build trust too.

the other really important thing about trust, and again thinking about relationships that you have with other people, is that trust takes time. So if you have not been used to trusting yourself. If you have not been used to, maybe you trust yourself, but maybe you don't always centre that trust or maybe override that trust with those external forces or experts. So if you're in the habit of doing that, it will take time to build that trust within yourself. It'll take time to build to move towards or to look towards yourself as the expert, as the expert in your own life. It will take time to be in the practice of living into your values, because we say, while we say you know I talk a lot about values around here and while we say, Yep, I've got these values and they're super important to me and I will live into them. You've got X number of years, I don't know about you, I've got 39 years of programming from my family of origin from the culture from social you know, social norms, I've got a good 18 years from our dietitian profession well actually an extra four if you think about my whole training as well so what's that - can count - 22 years of our professional kind of value so there's all of those, you know values coming at sorry got distracted by counting. So we've got that whole time of pressure to look towards other people, as the source of trust. So, it takes time to, to rearrange back into your values to practice that and to build that trust with yourself because as you've probably got a lot of years of being, you know, pushed to look to other people and other spaces to trust more than yourself. So, building trust takes time. But we get there by practising.

we get there by creating that feedback loop with our nervous system as well so sometimes acting in a way that is what we said we want to show up as or acting in a way that moves us towards our values can feel a bit scary. There can be fear involved. And the way that we tell our nervous system that it's safe is by taking that action and you know, not dying, or knowing that everything, that we are okay when we do that, and that builds trust as well, builds trust with ourselves builds trust with our bodies. and again similarly as in the non diet space when you work with your clients and you're helping them build trust, you help them build trust with their body or help them, help them create a space where their body can trust them, you know, classic example is for clients who maybe have not listened to their hunger cues for a while. And what often, you know, the way I kind of used to explain that to clients was that that trust is the body doesn't trust you anymore necessarily around you know to tell you that it's hungry so sometimes it doesn't say it anymore and the body doesn't doesn't trust that it's going to be fed so it takes matters into its own hands and it takes time to build that trust again. And that's the same for you. It takes time to build that trust when you've maybe overridden your trust, you've overridden that messaging that information from yourself, from your own, you know, living into your own values because you have looked for those looked at that, those that information or that expert, sort of, the information to make decisions outside of yourself so it takes time to build that and to build back that trust and to build that back, that connection with your body, connection with your nervous system, connection with your intuition and connection around making decisions around that stuff. That takes time, but it's so worth it. You are so worth it, and your business and the difference that you have to make in the world, that's worth it. And you can trust in that, and you can trust in you, and building self trust is, and I've talked about this, I believe building self trust it's a business strategy. It's a strategy that you can use to build a values based business to build a business that is human centred, because it centres you and it centres what you know about yourself and what you know about trust, trusting yourself.

And again similarly to how you work with clients around supporting them to trust themselves because you know that is the way they're going to have the best outcomes. the way you're going to have the best outcomes in your business and in your life is by building your own self trust. So how does that kind of land for you or what do you think about that? Where would you say you are like, I think there's important, I suppose to keep in mind too is that there's a lot of cultural and social messages that might actively undermine that trust and that isn't a reason, isn't like isn't an excuse to kind of go well 'oh well, you know, there's not much we can do about it', it's kind of like, now what? there's all these messages that have supported you, in fact pushed you, and in fact, potentially even one could say brainwashed you, programmed you, and me, into overriding our trust in ourselves into actually doubting our trust in ourselves, there's definitely, you know, situations and experiences where other people benefit from that. Now what? now that we know that or now that we see that now what? like, it's not that, that means that there's nothing we can do, by having that awareness building that awareness, then there's the opportunity for us to do things differently, to take action differently to live into the values that we say, and like, you know, going back to that how is trust built trust is built by doing what you say you're going to do in a relationship. So trust is built with other humans by, you know, you learn to trust other people when they do what they say they're going to do, and you learn to trust yourself in the exact same way. And like I said values is an important way because when you say these values are important and you want to show up in those in your business, in your life, then when you show up in those then you start building trust, and you keep doing, and you keep practising and you keep taking action. And even when things don't go as planned, you use that information use that awareness if you want to. And you keep taking action and you adjust and you keep practising and keep practising and keep taking action until you and your nervous system and your intuition and all parts of you have built that trust, have built trust in yourself again and have confidence in that trust in yourself and where you can actually look to yourself and look to your lived experience and look to you as the expert in you, versus people, culture, forces outside of you.

So I hope that that supports you, I hope that that feels a like an opportunity to move into trusting yourself. And, like I said, you know, there's, there's so many parallels I feel like within the non diet space around how we support clients to trust themselves again maybe after years of dieting after years of disconnecting to our body, and that their bodies, and even yourself if you've had. If you've, you know as a dietitian, I know there's many dietitians who have had their own experiences around food and their body. And so if that's you, you know, how have you worked towards that self trust around your body and eating - the same tools the same strategies, the same time, is going to be helpful in moving towards self trust in your business. And if you want support, which might sound a bit like an oxymoron, but if you want support to learn how to trust yourself. It's not really learning if you want support to create systems and strategies and ways of doing business that actually are embedded in self trust that are embedded in you as the expert in your business - that's the kind of coaching that I do in my work, and so that's always there if you need it. Of course, we talk about this sort of stuff over at dietitianvalues on IG so if you've got some comments around this, I would love to hear your thoughts around this on whether you feel like you are at a place where you have self trust or whether you feel like you're in that action practice action cycle at the moment. But yeah, just an opportunity and invitation to think about what are the strategies that you use with the clients you work with around helping them to build self trust, and where could you use those strategies and where could you use that practice, and that action taking to support you, to sharpen your values to show up as you said you're going to, and build that trust in yourself, and use that self trust in your business, because knowing who you are, knowing your values and showing up in those consistently builds trust in yourself and build a values based business. And actually, by default, builds a space of trust for the humans that you want to work with. And that's just kind of like the cherry on top versus the actual kind of goal of it, the goal is to just trust yourself, but the cherry on top or the, you know, bonus byproduct is that it creates a space, an opportunity, for the humans that you want to work with, to trust you too. So, let me know your thoughts. If, as I said if you want support around this then I'm always here to help DMs are always open or reach out for more, you know, formal support if you want to work together. And head over to @dietitianvalues and let me know your comments, questions or concerns, and until next time, Bye for now. Have a good one.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai