Speaker A
Hey guys, I'm Heidi Priebe. Welcome back to my channel or welcome if you're new here. Today on this channel, we're going to be talking about self-trust. And in particular, I want to talk about how I think a lot of us get the wrong idea of
Heidi Priebe explains that self-trust grows through small moments: negotiating between long-term goals and short-term needs, and admitting hard truths before knowing how to fix them.
Key Takeaways
- Self-trust is built through integration of long-term goals and short-term needs, not by overriding one for the other.
- Charitable inner negotiation and discernment make plans more sustainable and trustworthy.
- Admitting uncomfortable truths without immediately needing solutions strengthens self-trust.
- Self-repair focuses on understanding the state behind mistakes rather than punishing oneself.
- Regular practice in small moments of vulnerability and self-regulation builds lasting character.
What the video covers
- Self-trust is often misunderstood as overriding short-term needs to pursue future goals; sustainable self-trust instead comes from pursuing goals without self-abandonment.
- Opportunity one: when long-term goals conflict with short-term needs (e.g., burnout during a 3-month fitness or work goal), open a negotiation between both parts of yourself rather than choosing one.
- Ask the long-term self what the goal's core purpose is, and ask the short-term self what it needs to keep performing sustainably.
- Avoid self-bullying by labeling short-term needs as lazy or indulgent; they often carry important information about sustainable performance.
- Adjusting the approach (e.g., extending a timeline) can serve both needs and builds discernment and confidence in your plans.
- Opportunity two: admitting the truth to yourself before knowing the solution builds self-trust, because it signals you can handle reality.
- Self-repair means understanding the internal state that led to a mistake and designing conditions that make better behavior possible, rather than relying on shame.
- Practice tolerating vulnerability in low-stakes situations to build capacity for harder conversations, and use bottom-up nervous system regulation practices.
- Common avoidance patterns in vulnerable states are acting out or acting in; both erode trust in oneself.
- Character is built by repeatedly choosing not to abandon yourself, especially when life gets hard or disappointing.
Chapters
- 00:00Introduction: Rethinking What Self-Trust Means
- 01:24Opportunity One: Negotiating Long-Term and Short-Term Needs
- 04:45Sponsor Segment: Factor Meals
- 05:14Opportunity Two: Admitting the Truth Before Knowing the Solution
- 08:14Self-Repair and Understanding Past Mistakes
- 16:30Nervous System Regulation and Low-Stakes Practice
- 21:00Acting Out vs. Acting In Under Vulnerability
- 25:25Building Character by Not Abandoning Yourself
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
Speaker A
what self-trust means. So, I think that a lot of us tend to think of self-trust as this thing that we acquire through overriding our short-term needs and wants in favor of some sort of future objective or goal.
Speaker A
And absolutely, that can build a level of self-accountability. Right? But what I want to talk about today is how to build a sustainable and integrated sense of self-trust, which I believe only comes from proving to ourselves that we can pursue those
Speaker A
long-term goals without self-abandonment. So, in a way that actually takes the whole of who we are with us on route to the things that we're working towards.
Speaker A
And in order to actually do that, what we have to do is get to know ourselves well enough to understand how to make that possible.
Speaker A
So, today what we're going to be talking about is five moments where we have the opportunity to build a little bit more self-trust by noticing when life is offering us those opportunities for integration. So, these are any moments
Speaker A
where that old program that tells us self-trust gets built by overriding your instincts or your short-term needs comes online and we have the chance to do something differently.
Speaker A
So, without further ado, we're going to get into opportunity number one that we have to build a more integrative and sustainable sense of self-trust, which is essentially any moment where we find ourselves stuck in that conflict between a long-term goal and our short-term
Speaker A
needs. So, for example, let's say that you set a super ambitious work or fitness goal that was going to take you 3 months to complete. And maybe the first month felt awesome, but then by the end of the
Speaker A
second month, you noticed yourself really starting to drag your heels. So, you're feeling exhausted, you're feeling kind of spent and burnt out, and you're confronted with this decision as to whether you want to keep going, keep pushing past those limits, and do what
Speaker A
you said you would do. Or if you should listen to your body's burnout signals, give up on the goal, and allow yourself to rest and recover.
Speaker A
And it might feel like those are the only two options. Right? But what we actually have an opportunity to do anytime we arrive at this point where it feels like our long-term and short-term needs are in conflict is get them speaking to each
Speaker A
other. So simply open the floor for a negotiation between your long-term and short-term needs, where you're valuing both of them as parts of yourself that have incredibly important things to share.
Speaker A
So we can check in with our long-term needs and go, "What was so important to me about this goal?
Speaker A
Is it that I wanted the end result? So is it really that promotion that's the most important to me? Or was it that I wanted to get myself back in motion, and I wanted to start building momentum at
Speaker A
work? Right? So what was the most core thing that mattered to the part of myself that set the long-term goal?" And give it a little bit of room to answer.
Speaker A
And then also check in with short-term needs. And it's important here to not do that thing that a lot of us do where we start bullying ourselves and kind of calling our short-term wants and needs indulgent or unimportant. Almost all of the time,
Speaker A
they are holding incredibly important pieces of information about what it is going to take for us to be capable of continuing to perform at the level that we want to be performing at. Or to continue to give energy to the things in
Speaker A
life that we want to be giving energy to. Right? If we're neglecting short-term needs, what we often get is a lot of that self-sabotage behavior that makes us end up trusting ourselves less in the long term.
Speaker A
So short-term needs might go, "Hey, I love that plan that long-term needs is talking about, but I need more sleep, or I need to find a way to be seeing my friends more, or getting more co-regulation as I'm moving towards this
Speaker A
goal. Because maybe I was expecting the physical burnout, but I wasn't expecting the emotional burnout.
Speaker A
And then, we have the option to ask that part of ourselves, "What would make this easier for you?
Speaker A
Which types of processes could I implement that make me feel a lot better day-to-day while I'm moving towards this goal?" Or are there elements of it that I could adjust? Maybe it was too ambitious to expect that I could meet that goal in 3
Speaker A
months, but extending the timeline by an additional week is the thing that ends up getting us to that goal, because we're not ignoring what our body needs on route to it.
Speaker A
So, this is all about figuring out how we can get our long-term and short-term needs cooperating with each other by making more charitable assumptions about them. So, rather than assuming that our short-term selves are lazy and weak, can we go into these types of
Speaker A
inner negotiations with the assumption that all parts of us might still want those things that our long-term self wants, but we might have to make some accommodations to the approach in order to get there in a way that is
Speaker A
sustainable. This is how we develop discernment. And anytime we make a plan that we know a wise, discerning adult is overseeing the process of, most of us instantly become a lot more confident that that plan is going to reach
Speaker A
fruition. Right? So, by developing that part of ourselves that can be wise and discerning about how we're approaching our goals, we build a more sustainable sense of self-trust.
Speaker A
Second instance that tends to build self-trust is anytime we admit the truth to ourselves about something before we know what to do about it. Now, we're going to do a deep dive into this point, but before we do, I want to take a quick
Speaker A
minute to thank the sponsor of today's video Factor. So, one of the things about self-trust is that a lot of it gets built in these tiny moments where we're choosing to make life easier for our future selves.
Speaker A
And one of the areas where I've been trying to practice more of that lately is around food. So, especially around this time of year when the weather gets nice, I just want to be out doing things. I want to be going outside,
Speaker A
seeing my friends, filming, writing, pursuing my own passion projects, and I still want to eat well, which is why I've been enjoying Factor lately.
Speaker A
Factor delivers chef-crafted, dietitian-approved, ready-to-eat meals straight to your door so that you can eat well without spending all of your time in the kitchen.
Speaker A
There's no planning, no prep, and no cleanup with Factor. The meals are ready to eat in just a couple of minutes.
Speaker A
So, my current favorite things from Factor are the salads. They are awesome for a quick lunch or dinner during summer, and I love that I get to try out a whole bunch of different flavors without having to go buy 16 different
Speaker A
ingredients that I'll only use once or twice and then forget about in my fridge. I've also really been enjoying the flatbreads. They're oven-ready in about 10 minutes, which makes them a great option for the nights when I want
Speaker A
something a little more comforting, but I still don't feel like cooking. They've done something right with this crust.
Speaker A
Factor also has over 70 add-ons, including things like daily greens, juices, breakfasts. They have breakfast sandwiches now, which I love, and other grab-and-go options that make life feel a little bit easier when you're busy.
Speaker A
97% of people say that Factor helps them live a healthier life, while 92% say that it makes their life less stressful.
Speaker A
I use Factor, and you should, too. Head to factor75.com or click the link below and use the code prebfb50 to get 50% off your first Factor box, plus free breakfast for 1 year. That's prebfb50 at factor75.com to get 50% off plus free breakfast for a
Speaker A
year. This offer is only valid for new Factor customers with the code and qualifying auto-renewing subscription purchase. All right, back to that second point. We build self-trust in any moment where we tell ourselves the truth before we know what we are going to do about
Speaker A
it. Our bodies and our minds are very sophisticated self-denial machines and they are that way for a reason.
Speaker A
Because for a lot of us, it feels incredibly vulnerable to sit in that space between knowing that there's something we're not happy with or that there's some sort of truth we're holding on to and not yet knowing how to solve it or
Speaker A
what we can do to make the pain of it go away. And so for a lot of us, this is where the nervous system and the mind automatically start conspiring to tell us some sort of convenient lie like,
Speaker A
"Actually, I'm perfectly happy with this thing that is draining all of my energy." Or I'm perfectly happy without this thing that I secretly want.
Speaker A
The unfortunate part of this is that either resisting or denying what we actually want tends to take up a massive amount of mental and emotional energy.
Speaker A
So, I'll always kind of think back to this one period of time where I'd been working at this job that I was really happy at for a long time. But then there was kind of this slow drift where a
Speaker A
whole bunch of different factors started shifting in the workplace. Some of my favorite co-workers left, my work became less interesting to me, and I could not admit to myself that I wasn't loving my work anymore because there were so many
Speaker A
things that I still thought were objectively great about it. And then one day I was catching up with a good friend of mine who's someone that I just have a really hard time not being completely honest and transparent
Speaker A
around. And she asked me, "How's your work going?" And I noticed the first thing that came to my mind was the word bad.
Speaker A
And that was really surprising to me because I was still operating under the story that I had in my head that I was so lucky to have the job that I did, that I had such reasonable bosses, and
Speaker A
such a great schedule, and there was no way that there could be anything I didn't love about it. But, I decided to test it out and I just said, "Bad." And I noticed as soon as I said it,
Speaker A
there was all of this tension that I had not realized I was holding in my body that just got released.
Speaker A
And then I gave myself a little bit of space to talk it out. And I went, "You know, I used to really love these things about my work, but now actually those things aren't as much a part of my
Speaker A
day-to-day routine." And the more I spoke about it, the more I realized that there was actually a lot of things I hadn't been happy with for a while that I hadn't allowed myself to admit to myself.
Speaker A
And that gave me a little bit of a panic sensation because I knew I wasn't ready to leave my job yet.
Speaker A
But what was really cool was that I went home, I slept on it, and I woke up the next morning with two thoughts in my head.
Speaker A
One thought was, "What if I did leave my job? Which of these skills might actually be super transferable into other careers that I might like more?
Speaker A
Or if I don't want to do that, what might I be able to do to make myself like my job as it stands right now a little bit more?" And so very often this very action of just admitting to ourselves what we are
Speaker A
feeling starts opening up our minds to more possibilities for how we could solve a given problem.
Speaker A
Right? And in that space, we have to sit with the vulnerability of knowing that we're not quite where we want to be.
Speaker A
But, if we can do that, the cool part is that we have a much greater chance of getting to where we actually want to get to because we have opened up the part of ourselves that knows we want it and from
Speaker A
that point forward is going to be scanning for solutions. And this action of being able to tell ourselves the truth before we know what we're going to do about it builds massive self-trust.
Speaker A
Because it signals to ourselves, you are someone who I think can handle the truth.
Speaker A
Right? You don't have to waste all of this energy on denial and cognitive dissonance. I trust you to stay present with dissatisfaction without needing to immediately rush into fixing it with the closest possible solution that might not be that great of a fit because you're
Speaker A
incapable of sitting with a bit of ambiguity. Third instance where we have the opportunity to build a more integrated sense of self-trust is anytime we repair with ourselves after we have messed something up.
Speaker A
So for a lot of us, when we make a mistake, when we let ourselves down, when we hurt or let someone else down, we think that the solution to that problem is going to be to bully the parts of ourselves that made that choice
Speaker A
and kind of berate ourselves with shame and embarrassment. This usually sounds like some version of you messed this all up. I knew you were going to mess it up.
Speaker A
You did this again. Why do you keep making this mistake? We know all of the patterns around this. You just had to behave differently in that one moment.
Speaker A
And the problem is that this erodes our self-trust because we are always acting the way that we are acting for a reason.
Speaker A
And if we want to actually change our behavior, we have to account for the state that we were in when we made the mistake or when we did the behavior that we so desperately wish we did not do.
Speaker A
Right? So this might look like I told myself I wasn't going to shut down in the middle of conflict anymore.
Speaker A
And then I did. And we can absolutely take accountability for the fact that maybe we broke a promise to someone else or to ourselves.
Speaker A
But we can also look at what was it that was causing me to shut down in that moment?
Speaker A
And is there a way that I could resource myself better in conflict in the future that would actually make it easier for me to stay associated than it would for me to shut down?
Speaker A
This is kind of the difference between trying to get an employee to improve by yelling at them versus trying to get an employee to improve by putting them in a work environment where their strengths are brought out, where the things that
Speaker A
are most stressful for them are taken off their plate, and where they're actively incentivized to rise to the challenges that are set for them in a way that feels authentic.
Speaker A
Right? That employee is likely to do a lot better than the employee who is simply being yelled at and forced to continue to work under unfavorable conditions. Self-repair means understanding why we did something and finding ways to either design our
Speaker A
environments or resource ourselves better so that we don't default to that same behavior again in the future. So, this might look like asking ourselves questions like, "When is it really easy for me to not do this behavior?" So, when do I naturally not overeat? Or
Speaker A
when do I naturally not shut down during conflict? Or when do I naturally not procrastinate?
Speaker A
Which things tend to be present when I'm doing those opposite behaviors that feel like genuine resources?
Speaker A
And how can I try to access more of those contexts or more of those resources in the future so that it becomes genuinely easy and natural for me to make the change that I want to make. If I tend to emotionally eat when
Speaker A
I'm lonely at night, could I look at filling up my evenings every day this week with things that make me feel connected to other people so that I'm less likely to feel that loneliness?
Speaker A
If I tend to procrastinate when I feel like I don't know how to do a task, can I build the skill of asking for help earlier on in a work process so that I don't end up reaching that point where I
Speaker A
feel as overwhelmed as I have been feeling. If I normally shut down during conflicts where I feel like something huge is at stake, can I practice having conversations about my relationships or whatever it is in way, way lower stakes
Speaker A
environments? So, can I start addressing things at a two out of 10 rather than a 10 out of 10 so that I don't end up in these scenarios where my survival responses are kicking in because it feels like there is so much on the line.
Speaker A
Right? This builds massive self-trust because we are designing a future for the person that we actually are, not an idealized version of who we wish we were.
Speaker A
Fourth opportunity we have to start building a more integrated sense of self-trust is anytime that we choose to let go of a goal that our egos wanted because it would cost us too much in terms of nervous system regulation.
Speaker A
So, these are the moments where we prove to ourselves how it feels to be living my life inside of my body is more important than how my life looks.
Speaker A
And for a lot of us, we kind of hold this as like a virtue or a principle or something that sounds nice, right?
Speaker A
Caring more about how our lives feel than how they look, but it's also a skill to get to this place.
Speaker A
Okay? Because for a lot of us, if we've never been taught those kind of bottom-up skills for nervous system regulation, like finding habits and routines that nourish us and make us feel like ourselves and stay connected to our own authenticity and desires,
Speaker A
it's actually really hard to prioritize our nervous system health above the goals that we set from ourselves in a kind of top-down way because those top-down goals might be the only ways that we have figured out how to regulate
Speaker A
ourselves. Like if we wake up most mornings and feel pretty bad inside of our bodies because we've never really learned how to tune into ourselves, figure out what our needs are, design our lives in a way that feels good for us.
Speaker A
The best we might ever feel is when we are achieving some sort of external reward.
Speaker A
Right? Like getting acknowledgement for some goal that we achieved or getting the attention and admiration of someone who we think is really cool. Those might actually be the most regulating moments that we have available to us.
Speaker A
And when that is true, it makes total sense to design our lives around the attainment of those external rewards.
Speaker A
But the more we get to know ourselves and the more we learn about what we like to do day-to-day, who we feel really good in the presence of and we start building our lives around those things, it starts to feel a lot more attractive
Speaker A
when we get to a place where our nervous systems are totally overtaxed trying to pursue some particular goal to allow ourselves to let certain things go.
Speaker A
To go, you know what? Yeah, I really wanted to run that marathon this year, but I'm also recognizing that I'm pushing my body beyond its limits or my sleep is suffering or my work is suffering, whatever it is. So maybe this
Speaker A
year it's a half marathon that I train for instead. Or yeah, I really wanted to achieve that milestone at work within a 12-month span, but the pressure that it is putting me under is making me miserable day-to-day. It's making me prioritize in
Speaker A
a way that is having me miss out on friend and family time. It's eroding my health and my capacity to stay emotionally regulated and maybe it's just not worth it to try to meet that particular goal within that particular
Speaker A
time span because my inner quality of life matters too much to me. And I want to be clear here, what this is not about is valuing every passing whim or every moment where we feel a little bit tired or a little bit
Speaker A
uninspired over our long-term goals. What it's about is looking at that cost-benefit analysis realistically and being able to be honest with ourselves about when something is simply not giving us a big enough return on investment.
Speaker A
In every moment where we do learn to deeply and honestly trust the feedback that our bodies are giving us above the kind of disembodied ideals that we may have created from a very top-down place, every one of those moments tends to
Speaker A
build self-trust because we trust ourselves to notice what actually matters. What actually gives us a better quality of life and having that inner belief that we are tuned in to the right information when it comes to the decisions that we're making about our
Speaker A
own lives, that goes a massive way in trusting the choices that we're making for ourselves both short and long-term.
Speaker A
And then, fifth and final instance we're going to talk about today that builds self-trust is when we are able to care for ourselves in a meaningful way through disappointment.
Speaker A
So, disappointment is an emotion that we actually don't talk about that much relative to a lot of other emotions out there. But I think that how we react and how we care for ourselves when we are feeling disappointed is one of the
Speaker A
biggest barometers for how our emotional health is doing because disappointment is an incredibly vulnerable experience for almost all of us.
Speaker A
Right? To admit to ourselves that we wanted something and to pursue it and then to not get it leaves us in a very vulnerable and for a lot of us slightly shame-inducing state.
Speaker A
And how we respond to and care for ourselves through that state of vulnerability is often directly related to our level of emotional skill.
Speaker A
So, when we struggle to be in those states of vulnerability, what we often default to is either acting out or acting in.
Speaker A
So, either forming all of these stories about how everybody else should have behaved differently and then we wouldn't have to be feeling this way and it's everyone else's fault and we are mad and bitter at other people or the world.
Speaker A
Or we direct that energy inward and we go, "I was so stupid for wanting that thing or for pursuing it. I should have known better. I should never have trusted this person. What was I thinking?" But, the problem is that when we do
Speaker A
those things, when we immediately bypass the vulnerability by trying to find someone else or some part of ourselves to blame, what we miss is the reality.
Speaker A
Which is that it is kind of cool and courageous to want something. To step into the wanting of it, to decide on something, and to go for it.
Speaker A
And it is so sad to not get what we wanted sometimes. Right? There's just things that happen in life that are bad luck.
Speaker A
And if we can't acknowledge that, because it feels like it is too vulnerable to admit that that could happen again. There could be another instance where we want something, we give it our all, and we get hit with a
Speaker A
stroke of bad luck. If we can't acknowledge that, we have to find a way to regulate around disappointment using some form of an exaggeration or a lie.
Speaker A
But, when we lie to ourselves, our bodies clock that. If I'm telling myself, "Well, I never really wanted that thing anyway." There is a part of me that knows that's not true. And that part of me might still
Speaker A
want that thing. This is how we lose inner credibility. Right? We have reality and distortion at war with each other inside of us.
Speaker A
When we can sit with ourselves inside of vulnerable states, and just be honest about what's happening.
Speaker A
I wanted something and I didn't get it and now I'm really bummed. Or I'm working towards something and I have no idea if it's going to work out.
Speaker A
Or back to point number two, I feel something that is inconvenient and I don't know what to do about it.
Speaker A
As uncomfortable as all of these moments are, they also build our self-trust immensely if we can be honest with ourselves through them.
Speaker A
Because they are telling ourselves, "I'm not going to kick myself off my own team when life gets hard or when uncertainty arises or when something disappointing happens and I feel kind of vulnerable and embarrassed and exposed.
Speaker A
I'm going to practice dignity and I'm going to take all of those parts and collect them in my arms and figure out how to care for them." These moments build self-trust way more than any amount of denial, blame, or
Speaker A
shame ever can. Because again, they are direct and honest about the experience that we are having even when the experience that we're encountering is not one that we wanted or would choose for ourselves.
Speaker A
And so we are going to start wrapping this video up, but I just want to really be clear that if there's one thing you take away from it, I hope it's the understanding that self-trust does not get built through overriding certain
Speaker A
ourselves continuously in order to achieve our goals in a kind of top-down way. Okay, self-trust gets built in the moments where we choose to not abandon ourselves while pursuing what we want.
Speaker A
So every time a kind of discordant part of the self pops up and we're able to expand to include it rather than ostracize it, we become more integrated.
Speaker A
And that sense of integration is what allows us to set better and more realistic goals, to create processes for moving towards those goals that actually work, and to develop discernment about what it matters for us to move towards
Speaker A
in the first place. We build that type of character by repeatedly making the decision to not abandon ourselves.
Speaker A
And that's kind of the core of everything that we just talked about. So, we refuse to abandon ourselves when we reach our limits and we don't push past them.
Speaker A
Instead, we adapt and figure out how to move towards our goals more holistically. We don't abandon ourselves in the moments where we choose to tell ourselves the truth, even when the truth is not the most convenient. We refuse to
Speaker A
abandon ourselves by bullying the parts of ourselves that act in ways we don't like.
Speaker A
Rather, we try to understand and better resource those parts. We don't abandon ourselves by sacrificing our quality of life for some idealized image of who we wish we were, or maybe who we think we should be.
Speaker A
Right? We return the focus to what is it actually like to be me living this life?
Speaker A
And how do I work on steadily improving that state from the inside out? And we don't abandon ourselves in the moments when something doesn't work out the way that we would hope. And that disappointed inner child in us just
Speaker A
needs someone to sit with them and soothe them through it. Because the core of self-trust that is sustainable is developing that belief that whatever happens, we're going to stay on our own side as we figure it out.
Speaker A
All right, that's all I'm going to say on this topic for today, but as always, any thoughts, any questions, anything coming up for you as you've gone through this video, please leave in the comment section below. I love you guys. I hope
Speaker A
you're taking care of yourselves and each other, and I will see you back here again really soon.
Speaker A
[music]
Topics:self-trustself-accountabilitylong-term goalsshort-term needsnervous system regulationself-repairvulnerabilityself-compassionpersonal growthHeidi Priebe
