TAIU

Tool 79 · Develop yourself

Do I trust my own judgement, and does the record support it?

Self trust is not general. It is domain by domain.

A guided 15 to 19 minute conversation using ChatGPT. Free, no account, nothing to sign up to.

  1. 01

    Copy

    Take the TAIU prompt.

  2. 02

    Paste

    Open ChatGPT.

  3. 03

    Talk

    One question at a time.

Copies the TAIU prompt. Paste it into ChatGPT.

You don't need ChatGPT Plus. The free version is fine.

Which subject, exactly?

A good decision can still end badly.

Who do you check with?

What you'll explore

  1. 01The good record
  2. 02The poor record
  3. 03The outsourcing
  4. 04The rebuild

A note from Mark

Mark Eve, founder of TAIU

People say they don't trust themselves as though it applies to everything. It almost never does.

Somebody can read people brilliantly and be hopeless with money, or the other way round. That's useful. General self doubt isn't.

I also look at how decisions were made rather than how they turned out. Bad luck isn't bad judgement.

And then the question I find most revealing: who do you check with, and about what.

What you'll get

You won't finish with a personality type.You'll leave with answers you can actually test.

  1. 01

    The record

  2. 02

    The domains

  3. 03

    The outsourcing

  4. 04

    The test

  5. +

    Your TAIU handover — a portable summary of everything the conversation established.

See everything included ↓
  • 01Where your judgement has been good
  • 02Where it has not
  • 03What the pattern suggests
  • 04What you keep taking on trust from others
  • 05What would rebuild it
  • 06The rival reading
  • 07What deserves protecting
  • 08Where this goes next

What now?

  1. 01 · Save it

    Where the record is sound.

  2. 02 · Test it

    Make one small decision without asking anybody.

Explore this further ↓

What I would do

  1. 01

    Write the record, both sides.

  2. 02

    Split it by subject rather than by how you feel.

  3. 03

    Notice the conditions under which you decide badly.

  4. 04

    Notice who you defer to, and about what.

  5. 05

    Make one decision without checking, and see.

Test it

  1. 01

    Where has your judgement been good?

  2. 02

    Whose judgement do you take instead of your own?

  3. 03

    What was the last decision you made unaided?

The alternative

The usual reading is that a person who doubts themselves needs more confidence. Often the record shows sound judgement and a habit of deferring, which is a different problem with a different repair. The reverse also happens. Somebody trusts themselves easily in the one area where the record is genuinely poor, and confidence is the problem rather than the cure.

Think about this

  • Where your judgement has actually been good.
  • Where it has not.
  • Whether that is about the subject or the conditions.
  • Whose judgement you take over your own.
  • What the last unchecked decision was.

Take this to Ask Mark

You've done the exercise. Now challenge what came back.

Interpretation, not another copy-and-paste exercise.

Take this to Ask Mark →

Recommended by the TAIU community

What helped you?

If you've read, watched, listened to or tried something that helped you think about this differently, we'd like to hear about it.

We review recommendations before sharing them with the community.

Finished the exercise?

What did this uncover?

Tell us whether it helped and what you discovered. It takes less than a minute.

Next tool

Am I being honest with myself?

If the record and the story do not match

Continue →What should I actually do? →

Further thinking

  • Self-efficacy: toward a unifying theory of behavioural change

    Albert Bandura

  • The trouble with overconfidence

    Don Moore and Paul Healy

  • Quit

    Annie Duke

Explore the thinking ↓

Article

Self-efficacy: toward a unifying theory of behavioural change

Albert Bandura

The paper that broke confidence into pieces. Bandura's argument is that belief in your capability is built for a specific domain, mostly out of things you have already done, and that it transfers far less than people assume. That is why a person can chair a board and dread a party without either being a contradiction. It also names the strongest source of confidence, which is not encouragement but mastery experience.

Article

The trouble with overconfidence

Don Moore and Paul Healy

Moore and Healy separate three things people muddle together: overestimating your ability, overplacing yourself relative to others, and being too certain you are right. The useful part is their finding that people tend to be overconfident on hard tasks and underconfident on easy ones, which predicts exactly the pattern where somebody is falsely modest about what they do daily and dangerously certain about what they have never done.

Book

Quit

Annie Duke

The counterweight to almost everything else written about avoidance. Duke argues that we are far better at persisting than at stopping, and that most of the cost of a bad commitment is paid after the point where we already knew. If the thing you keep postponing is something you have quietly decided against, this is the book that gives you permission to say so and a way to test whether you are right.

Article

Generalized Expectancies for Internal Versus External Control of Reinforcement

Julian B. Rotter

Rotter's monograph is where the internal and external control idea comes from, and it is more careful than the pop version. An internal orientation predicts persistence and initiative, but it also carries a cost when someone applies it to outcomes nobody could have controlled, which is where responsibility turns into self blame.

Article

Identity-based habits

James Clear

A short piece with one idea in it: every action is a small vote for the kind of person you believe you are, and the tally is more honest than the label. It is the clearest statement of the assumption this exercise runs on, which is that what you did tells you more than what you would say.