90. Why Self-Trust Matters More Than Confidence
For most women leaders, it’s not a lack of confidence holding them back. It’s trusting themselves to make the call, even when the outcome is unknown.
After coaching hundreds of women over the past five years, I’ve seen that the ability to act despite uncertainty is what separates capable leaders from confident ones. In this episode, I show you why self-trust is the foundation of leadership and how to build it even when you’re scared, uncertain, or hearing no.
I share examples from my coaching sessions inside Leadership Edge and from my own journey as a leader navigating rejection, uncertainty, and high stakes decisions. We dive into why powerful women don’t just trust outcomes — they trust themselves. You’ll hear how overthinking, overexplaining, and seeking constant external validation can quietly erode your authority, and how practicing self-trust moment by moment strengthens leadership presence, decision-making, and influence.
Interested in working with me? Book a free 1:1 consultation here!
What You’ll Learn from this Episode:
Why self-trust matters more than confidence for leadership.
How to stop outsourcing your authority to others and reclaim your power.
Practical ways to act decisively and build trust in yourself, even in uncertainty.
How to navigate fear, rejection, and resistance without abandoning yourself.
How small, intentional practices can strengthen your leadership presence and influence.
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Episodes Related to Why Self-Trust Matters More Than Confidence:
39. Being Brilliant Isn’t Enough: How Women Leaders Finally Get Heard
76. How to Handle Rejection at Work Without Losing Confidence
Full Episode Transcript:
Most women think they need more confidence. After coaching hundreds of women in the last five years, I know that's not true. What I'm actually seeing is that you're missing the ability to trust yourself when life doesn't go according to plan. In this episode, I'm going to show you why self-trust is the foundation of leadership and how to build it even when you're scared, uncertain, or hearing no.
Welcome to The Balanced Leader, hosted by Yann Dang, a Leadership and Life Coach with over 20 years of corporate experience. Drawing from her journey as a former global finance leader and second-generation immigrant, Yann understands the unique challenges women face in male-dominated workplaces.
Each episode offers insights on balancing masculine and feminine energies, mastering soft skills and building emotional intelligence. Join us to transform frustration into empowerment and unlock your authentic leadership potential.
Hey, podcast listeners, welcome to today's episode. We are going to talk about a subject that I feel so strongly about. It's actually a pillar of my coaching philosophy, which is learning how to trust yourself. And I'm going to tell you about some coaching that I've done recently, actually inside the Leadership Edge.
One woman came because the big question I was asking women in the Leadership Edge, which was a active live coaching, I invited a lot of people to, and if you're interested in it, we're gonna do another one on June 30th. So please join me, it's totally complimentary. It's a place where you can get coaching and hear other women get coaching. So the question I was posing to women is, what happens when you stop holding back? And I was coaching this woman who was like, oh my gosh, I want to go for it. I'm excited for the next level of my career. And I asked her, what is the thought that you're having that holds you back from going after things. And she was like, I am extremely scared of hearing no.
And I think this is a big one because most women think the problem is rejection. The problem is what they think rejection means, right? And what I do with the women that I coach is that I share that the no is just the very beginning, right? The no is just data, but you have to watch what you make it mean. Because oftentimes, people make rejection mean, or resistance, I like to call resistance or rejection, they make it mean something about themselves, right? Deeply about themselves. And what I like to coach women on is the self-trust gap. Knowing what you want, not trusting yourself enough to pursue it. This is the self-trust gap.
Because the truth is, when you go after what you want, you're inviting uncertainty, you're inviting fear, you're inviting the rejection, the resistance, the hearing no. And if you don't trust yourself to have your own back in those moments, that is the self-trust gap. Not knowing, am I gonna have my own back? Am I going to be able to support myself through the no? Am I going to be able to see that this is just a no and I'm still worthy and I'm still valuable, period, end of story.
So I want you to notice that it is not so much this fear of hearing the no, it's this fear of trusting yourself to have your own back, to take care of yourself. Because what happens to so many smart women is that smart women don't lack the answer, they lack trust, right? They lack trust in themselves to stand by their answer. And so what happens is that a lot of times women overthink, over-explain, begin researching, seeking advice from other people, polling everyone, asking everyone. Maybe you're asking people online, what do you think? They start waiting, waiting for certainty to happen, right?
The work isn't finding the right answer though. If you're looking for the right answer, then you're probably spinning and you're not actually moving yourself forward. The work is trusting yourself enough to follow through on the answer you already know, right? Because you want to notice for yourself, if you are treating yourself as the authority, if you believe that you have great thoughts, you have great ideas, you have great leadership, then you need to be able to see yourself as that leader, even before the evidence of whatever you're going after arrives.
And what happens a lot of times is that women feel fear, they feel uncertainty, and that fear and uncertainty can take you for a ride. It can have you outsourcing your authority to other people. So what do I mean by outsourcing your authority to other people? You start asking your bosses for their opinion, your partner, your friends, experts, and coaches. And listen, I want you to be able to get other perspectives and get a diversity of knowledge in for yourself so that you have things and it’s data points, but I want you to discern and I want you to be using your inner authority to decide, oh, now I have all this information, I've asked these questions. Not looking for the right answer, but being curious and getting better context from other people.
But at the end of the day, you're choosing, you're consciously choosing to be the authority to take the next step. And sometimes the bosses will agree, and sometimes the partners won't agree, but you're saying, I trust myself to move forward. I trust myself even to make a mistake. I trust myself to learn and figure it out. So it's not so much that we're scared of the no. We're scared of our ability to trust ourselves because what happens to a lot of women, and this happens in little moments, it's like we abandon ourselves.
I used to do this too. I was really bad with boundaries. I didn't know how to trust myself with boundaries. I didn't know how to stand up for myself. And at work, I would just not even make plans for my birthday because I was like, it's budget season. I got to work. And so it was like, really bad. You know, you're not trusting yourself to be like, I can get the work done and I can celebrate my birthday, right? I can do both, right? But this takes learning to trust yourself and learning to have that maturity and learning to decide how you want to live your life, not waiting for other people's emotions to dictate that, right?
You get to consciously choose. I'm going to go after this thing. I'm going to trust myself to handle, I'm gonna figure out what's next for me, and I'm gonna own my choices. That doesn't mean I don't ask people their opinions, and I don't get more context. And if there's resistance, well, resistance is a data point. I get to ask more questions. Why don't you like that idea? What about that idea makes you uncomfortable? What are you concerned that will happen if we move forward here?
Sometimes we stop ourselves from asking those questions. We're just like, oh, we heard a no, so let's just back down. Let's tell the authority person that they have all the power, and, you know, I'll go think of something else to do. Our ability to trust ourselves, move forward, and have our own back is everything. If I didn't have this, I would not have accelerated as quickly as I did, especially after that director level, because at that director level going into VP, you need to start demonstrating that you trust yourself, that you're like, hey, I could be off here, but I wanna move ahead with this idea and see how it lands, and here's why.
This is where people start seeing you as like, oh, she's not just executing other people's ideas and strategies, she's coming up with her own. And she's got like the tenacity to figure it out. And she's not scared of making mistakes. And we want more people like that. More people willing to move when they're not 110% certain. More people willing to try things out. And more people willing to trust themselves and have their own backs and ask for other people to trust themselves.
What powerful women actually trust, right? They don't just trust their outcomes because we don't know the outcome. The reality is like we cannot control the outcome. So what powerful women actually trust again, it's not the outcome. It's not the circumstance. It's themselves. This is an opportunity for you. This is where self-trust gets built. Powerful women trust themselves to hear no, to be disappointed, to be misunderstood, to make mistakes, and to recover, to learn, to try again.
Listen, I've been here. I tell people all the time when I started my coaching practice and I was doing webinars, like literally one person showed up and I get to decide for myself like, okay, this is the very beginning. I am learning to do this at the very beginning. And then a few years later, I'm on a TEDx stage telling people about my story, sharing with them my journey, talking to them about anger and leadership, right? That is a journey of self-trust, me expanding and me showing up for myself at every part of the journey with the rejection, with people not really understanding, like, why would you leave your amazing CFO corporate job to be a coach? They're not trusting themselves and they don't really understand me, right? But it's me trusting me.
And so I don't answer to anyone except for me when it comes to my life and what I want to do. This is the thing powerful women do. They trust themselves. Power isn't certainty. Power isn't control. Power is trusting yourself to handle what happens next. Power is exercising your ability to influence and to create in your life. And I want you to really go to school on yourself. Where are you trusting yourself and where are you not, right?
And I have this for myself all the time. I've got to tell you, I'm about to embark on this vacation with my husband. And part of me is like, I really want this. And by the way, my husband does not like to travel. He likes to spend time with me, but he doesn't love traveling. We have two little kids, right? But I trust myself to say this is the best thing for me and my marriage and for us. And I do a lot of logistics to make it happen. You know, I have my mom come from Chicago. I plan everything. But there is something in me that believes this is important and we are moving forward. And I trust myself all along the way.
And who knows what can happen, right? Our flights could get canceled, something bad could happen. I don't know. But I trust myself to make these decisions. I trust myself to create my life according to my values and according to what I believe is important. This is the same thing in the business world, right? I trust myself to speak up truth when I don't agree with something. I trust myself to have my own back. I trust myself to tell the CEO, you know, and it might be more in private than in public depending on the dynamics of your CFO or CEO, to say, hey, I don't agree with that and this is why, right? You've got to trust yourself.
So I want you to really look at this self-trust versus just confidence. I think women sometimes we put all this stuff in like confidence, confidence, confidence, but think about it as self trust, a moment by moment decision.
So this is three ways to build self trust. Number one, keep small promises to yourself build evidence that you can own your own decisions. And number two, make one decision faster. Stop endless deliberation. A thing I like to tell myself is if I'm clear, confident, and capable, what would I want to do? There's actually a whole episode in it. So I've done an episode on that very thought that I'll have them put in the show notes, but you you can listen to it, make one decision faster.
This is like where you're like, I'm gonna choose to trust myself. What does my gut say? Let's go for it, right? And stop asking everyone else. And if you do choose to ask people, really decide for yourself, I'm going to say yes to this because X, Y, and Z. Not because my coach told me, not because my partner's upset with me, not because my boss said you have to do it. You're like, I'm deciding, right? I decide to act and own it, own it.
Pick one thing this week and truly own your decision. Self-trust isn't something you think your way into, it's something you practice, and you start feeling your body and your emotions all aligned when you start trusting yourself more and more and living by those values, living by what matters to you. And this is exactly the type of work that we do in Command, in my group coaching container, my leadership accelerator, we practice learning to trust ourselves. Because I am far more excited and mission-driven about women learning to trust themselves than simply feeling confident in one little thing, right?
Yes, you can feel confident saying something, or you can feel a powerful sense of self-trust so that no matter what happens to you, no matter what comes your way, you learn to have your own back. You trust yourself, you follow through with yourself.
All right, this is not about learning more. It's practice becoming somebody who trusts themselves. And when you are the woman who trusts herself, people see it, people know it, people are gonna be magnetically attracted to you and the certainty that you have because you lead with that self-trust. And so few people do, so few people do. So this is an area that you get to differentiate yourself. This is an area where you get to show up for you and nobody can take that away from you. No one can take away your self-trust. No one can take away the resiliency with which you deal with a no, which you deal with resistance. You get to trust yourself, lean into that self-trust, and practice it over and over again.
All right, I hope you have a beautiful week. I'd love to hear how this episode landed with you, how you're practicing trusting yourself in those moments, especially when resistance comes that you're like, well, I have my own back, and this is how I'm gonna show up. All right, go out there, do your thing. Let me know how it goes. I believe in you, I see you. There's a person inside of you that so wants to trust themselves no matter what. Let that person lead you. All right, have a beautiful week ahead and I will see you soon, bye.
Thank you for being a part of The Balanced Leader community. We hope you found today's episode inspiring and actionable. For more resources and to connect with Yann, visit us at aspire-coaching.co. Until next time, keep leading with confidence and purpose.
Welcome to The Balanced Leader, hosted by Yann Dang, a Leadership and Life Coach with over 20 years of corporate experience. Drawing from her journey as a former global finance leader and second-generation immigrant, Yann understands the unique challenges women face in male-dominated workplaces.
Each episode offers insights on balancing masculine and feminine energies, mastering soft skills and building emotional intelligence. Join us to transform frustration into empowerment and unlock your authentic leadership potential.
Hey, podcast listeners, welcome to today's episode. We are going to talk about a subject that I feel so strongly about. It's actually a pillar of my coaching philosophy, which is learning how to trust yourself. And I'm going to tell you about some coaching that I've done recently, actually inside the Leadership Edge.
One woman came because the big question I was asking women in the Leadership Edge, which was a active live coaching, I invited a lot of people to, and if you're interested in it, we're gonna do another one on June 30th. So please join me, it's totally complimentary. It's a place where you can get coaching and hear other women get coaching. So the question I was posing to women is, what happens when you stop holding back? And I was coaching this woman who was like, oh my gosh, I want to go for it. I'm excited for the next level of my career. And I asked her, what is the thought that you're having that holds you back from going after things. And she was like, I am extremely scared of hearing no.
And I think this is a big one because most women think the problem is rejection. The problem is what they think rejection means, right? And what I do with the women that I coach is that I share that the no is just the very beginning, right? The no is just data, but you have to watch what you make it mean. Because oftentimes, people make rejection mean, or resistance, I like to call resistance or rejection, they make it mean something about themselves, right? Deeply about themselves. And what I like to coach women on is the self-trust gap. Knowing what you want, not trusting yourself enough to pursue it. This is the self-trust gap.
Because the truth is, when you go after what you want, you're inviting uncertainty, you're inviting fear, you're inviting the rejection, the resistance, the hearing no. And if you don't trust yourself to have your own back in those moments, that is the self-trust gap. Not knowing, am I gonna have my own back? Am I going to be able to support myself through the no? Am I going to be able to see that this is just a no and I'm still worthy and I'm still valuable, period, end of story.
So I want you to notice that it is not so much this fear of hearing the no, it's this fear of trusting yourself to have your own back, to take care of yourself. Because what happens to so many smart women is that smart women don't lack the answer, they lack trust, right? They lack trust in themselves to stand by their answer. And so what happens is that a lot of times women overthink, over-explain, begin researching, seeking advice from other people, polling everyone, asking everyone. Maybe you're asking people online, what do you think? They start waiting, waiting for certainty to happen, right?
The work isn't finding the right answer though. If you're looking for the right answer, then you're probably spinning and you're not actually moving yourself forward. The work is trusting yourself enough to follow through on the answer you already know, right? Because you want to notice for yourself, if you are treating yourself as the authority, if you believe that you have great thoughts, you have great ideas, you have great leadership, then you need to be able to see yourself as that leader, even before the evidence of whatever you're going after arrives.
And what happens a lot of times is that women feel fear, they feel uncertainty, and that fear and uncertainty can take you for a ride. It can have you outsourcing your authority to other people. So what do I mean by outsourcing your authority to other people? You start asking your bosses for their opinion, your partner, your friends, experts, and coaches. And listen, I want you to be able to get other perspectives and get a diversity of knowledge in for yourself so that you have things and it’s data points, but I want you to discern and I want you to be using your inner authority to decide, oh, now I have all this information, I've asked these questions. Not looking for the right answer, but being curious and getting better context from other people.
But at the end of the day, you're choosing, you're consciously choosing to be the authority to take the next step. And sometimes the bosses will agree, and sometimes the partners won't agree, but you're saying, I trust myself to move forward. I trust myself even to make a mistake. I trust myself to learn and figure it out. So it's not so much that we're scared of the no. We're scared of our ability to trust ourselves because what happens to a lot of women, and this happens in little moments, it's like we abandon ourselves.
I used to do this too. I was really bad with boundaries. I didn't know how to trust myself with boundaries. I didn't know how to stand up for myself. And at work, I would just not even make plans for my birthday because I was like, it's budget season. I got to work. And so it was like, really bad. You know, you're not trusting yourself to be like, I can get the work done and I can celebrate my birthday, right? I can do both, right? But this takes learning to trust yourself and learning to have that maturity and learning to decide how you want to live your life, not waiting for other people's emotions to dictate that, right?
You get to consciously choose. I'm going to go after this thing. I'm going to trust myself to handle, I'm gonna figure out what's next for me, and I'm gonna own my choices. That doesn't mean I don't ask people their opinions, and I don't get more context. And if there's resistance, well, resistance is a data point. I get to ask more questions. Why don't you like that idea? What about that idea makes you uncomfortable? What are you concerned that will happen if we move forward here?
Sometimes we stop ourselves from asking those questions. We're just like, oh, we heard a no, so let's just back down. Let's tell the authority person that they have all the power, and, you know, I'll go think of something else to do. Our ability to trust ourselves, move forward, and have our own back is everything. If I didn't have this, I would not have accelerated as quickly as I did, especially after that director level, because at that director level going into VP, you need to start demonstrating that you trust yourself, that you're like, hey, I could be off here, but I wanna move ahead with this idea and see how it lands, and here's why.
This is where people start seeing you as like, oh, she's not just executing other people's ideas and strategies, she's coming up with her own. And she's got like the tenacity to figure it out. And she's not scared of making mistakes. And we want more people like that. More people willing to move when they're not 110% certain. More people willing to try things out. And more people willing to trust themselves and have their own backs and ask for other people to trust themselves.
What powerful women actually trust, right? They don't just trust their outcomes because we don't know the outcome. The reality is like we cannot control the outcome. So what powerful women actually trust again, it's not the outcome. It's not the circumstance. It's themselves. This is an opportunity for you. This is where self-trust gets built. Powerful women trust themselves to hear no, to be disappointed, to be misunderstood, to make mistakes, and to recover, to learn, to try again.
Listen, I've been here. I tell people all the time when I started my coaching practice and I was doing webinars, like literally one person showed up and I get to decide for myself like, okay, this is the very beginning. I am learning to do this at the very beginning. And then a few years later, I'm on a TEDx stage telling people about my story, sharing with them my journey, talking to them about anger and leadership, right? That is a journey of self-trust, me expanding and me showing up for myself at every part of the journey with the rejection, with people not really understanding, like, why would you leave your amazing CFO corporate job to be a coach? They're not trusting themselves and they don't really understand me, right? But it's me trusting me.
And so I don't answer to anyone except for me when it comes to my life and what I want to do. This is the thing powerful women do. They trust themselves. Power isn't certainty. Power isn't control. Power is trusting yourself to handle what happens next. Power is exercising your ability to influence and to create in your life. And I want you to really go to school on yourself. Where are you trusting yourself and where are you not, right?
And I have this for myself all the time. I've got to tell you, I'm about to embark on this vacation with my husband. And part of me is like, I really want this. And by the way, my husband does not like to travel. He likes to spend time with me, but he doesn't love traveling. We have two little kids, right? But I trust myself to say this is the best thing for me and my marriage and for us. And I do a lot of logistics to make it happen. You know, I have my mom come from Chicago. I plan everything. But there is something in me that believes this is important and we are moving forward. And I trust myself all along the way.
And who knows what can happen, right? Our flights could get canceled, something bad could happen. I don't know. But I trust myself to make these decisions. I trust myself to create my life according to my values and according to what I believe is important. This is the same thing in the business world, right? I trust myself to speak up truth when I don't agree with something. I trust myself to have my own back. I trust myself to tell the CEO, you know, and it might be more in private than in public depending on the dynamics of your CFO or CEO, to say, hey, I don't agree with that and this is why, right? You've got to trust yourself.
So I want you to really look at this self-trust versus just confidence. I think women sometimes we put all this stuff in like confidence, confidence, confidence, but think about it as self trust, a moment by moment decision.
So this is three ways to build self trust. Number one, keep small promises to yourself build evidence that you can own your own decisions. And number two, make one decision faster. Stop endless deliberation. A thing I like to tell myself is if I'm clear, confident, and capable, what would I want to do? There's actually a whole episode in it. So I've done an episode on that very thought that I'll have them put in the show notes, but you you can listen to it, make one decision faster.
This is like where you're like, I'm gonna choose to trust myself. What does my gut say? Let's go for it, right? And stop asking everyone else. And if you do choose to ask people, really decide for yourself, I'm going to say yes to this because X, Y, and Z. Not because my coach told me, not because my partner's upset with me, not because my boss said you have to do it. You're like, I'm deciding, right? I decide to act and own it, own it.
Pick one thing this week and truly own your decision. Self-trust isn't something you think your way into, it's something you practice, and you start feeling your body and your emotions all aligned when you start trusting yourself more and more and living by those values, living by what matters to you. And this is exactly the type of work that we do in Command, in my group coaching container, my leadership accelerator, we practice learning to trust ourselves. Because I am far more excited and mission-driven about women learning to trust themselves than simply feeling confident in one little thing, right?
Yes, you can feel confident saying something, or you can feel a powerful sense of self-trust so that no matter what happens to you, no matter what comes your way, you learn to have your own back. You trust yourself, you follow through with yourself.
All right, this is not about learning more. It's practice becoming somebody who trusts themselves. And when you are the woman who trusts herself, people see it, people know it, people are gonna be magnetically attracted to you and the certainty that you have because you lead with that self-trust. And so few people do, so few people do. So this is an area that you get to differentiate yourself. This is an area where you get to show up for you and nobody can take that away from you. No one can take away your self-trust. No one can take away the resiliency with which you deal with a no, which you deal with resistance. You get to trust yourself, lean into that self-trust, and practice it over and over again.
All right, I hope you have a beautiful week. I'd love to hear how this episode landed with you, how you're practicing trusting yourself in those moments, especially when resistance comes that you're like, well, I have my own back, and this is how I'm gonna show up. All right, go out there, do your thing. Let me know how it goes. I believe in you, I see you. There's a person inside of you that so wants to trust themselves no matter what. Let that person lead you. All right, have a beautiful week ahead and I will see you soon, bye.
Thank you for being a part of The Balanced Leader community. We hope you found today's episode inspiring and actionable. For more resources and to connect with Yann, visit us at aspire-coaching.co. Until next time, keep leading with confidence and purpose.
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