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

A guided 15 to 19 minutes conversation, here in TAIU. Self trust is not general. It depends on what you're trusting yourself with.

GUIDES

You have named it. Now spend some time on it.

Each Guide gives you a clear way to look at one subject in your own time. Choose where to begin. You do not need to work through everything.

The evidence

What the record says

Look at the decisions you have actually made and how they turned out.

Where this often ends up: An honest record of where your judgement has held.

It may also end with a clearer view of something, or with nothing that needs doing.

Around twenty minutes

Where it holds

Where your judgement is sound

Separate what you can trust yourself with from what you cannot trust yourself with yet.

Where this often ends up: A clear line between where your judgement is earned and where it is not.

It may also end with a clearer view of something, or with nothing that needs doing.

Around thirty minutes

Building it

What would earn it

Work out what would build trust in the places it is thin, if that matters to you.

It may also end with a clearer view of something, or with nothing that needs doing.

Around twenty minutes

This Guide is free, like everything else in The Clearing.

You can see what it covers before you begin.

Start this Guide

A woman in a workshop holding a repaired ceramic bowl and looking at the join she has made

Which subject, exactly?

A good decision can still end badly.

Who do you check with?

What you'll look at

01The good record
02The poor record
03The outsourcing
04The rebuild

A note from Mark

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

This will not sort you into a personality type.It will give you answers about your own life that you can test.

01
The record
02
The domains
03
The outsourcing
04
The test
+
Your TAIU handover: a summary of what the conversation found, written so you can take it with you.

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

When you finish

Bring it back to your tree.

Your tree is where TAIU keeps a picture of your whole life, in parts like work, money and health.

This session works on the whole of you, not one part of your life. Nothing is scored. At the end, you are asked once which part of your life this touched most. You can answer none.

The conversation writes this summary for you. Keep the sheet, print it or paste it into My Tree. Nothing from the conversation is stored by TAIU.

Session
Date
The part of life this belongs to
What we found
The alternative we tested
What deserves protecting
What should change, if anything
Next actions
What to notice or find out
What remains unresolved

Open My Tree

What now?

01 · Save it
Where the record is sound.
02 · Test it
Make one small decision without asking anybody.

See more ↓

What I would do

01
Write the record, both sides.
02
Split it by subject rather than by how you feel.
03
Notice the conditions under which you decide badly.
04
Notice who you defer to, and about what.
05
Make one decision without checking, and see.

Test it

01
Where has your judgement been good?
02
Whose judgement do you take instead of your own?
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 have done the exercise. Now look again at what it found.

This looks at what you found and helps you understand it. It is not another exercise to repeat.

Take this to Ask Mark →

Want to go further?

TRY · 10 MIN

Confidence Evidence Bank

TAIU

Somewhere to keep what you have actually done, for the days you cannot remember it.

Try it →

Was this useful?

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.

A barber wiping down the mirror after closing, meeting his own reflection

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

See 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.