I don’t know if I’ve ever shared this with you, but I never had a burning desire to be a lawyer. I loved being an undercover police officer but I recognized that buying cocaine was not a mom-friendly kind of job.

I’ve always been interested in law, but practicing was not a calling. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed it – and I was good at it.

Have you ever felt that way?  Not the part about being an undercover cop, the part about you doing something, but it’s not YOUR SOMETHING. It’s the something you think you should be doing.

Along the way I’ve had to learn to trust myself to walk away from things that aren’t “my thing”, even when something else isn’t sitting there waiting, even when other people tell me I shouldn’t do it, even when I know I can lose.

I’ve spent too much time placing too much importance on what other people think. Can you relate?

I realize now, almost 50-years into this journey, that we don’t trust ourselves to make the right choice. We turn that power over to forces outside of ourselves because we assume they know more than we do.

We make all sorts of choices and decisions based on what the world thinks is good for us, not what we innately know to be true for ourselves.

You are not small or insignificant. You are powerful and capable. It takes courage to trust yourself.

Here is the strategy that has helped me gain more self-trust… and you’re not gonna like it.

I started cutting my goals in half. Yikes! Some of you have already hit the unfollow button. Hear me out on this.

So often we are told to have big hairy audacious goals and then when we don’t hit the target (because it’s a lot harder than we thought it would be), we feel like a failure and we give up – which leads to us not trusting ourselves to accomplish things.

There’s nothing wrong with big goals – I have them too. But I’ve learned that moving the finish line a little closer makes me want to race again, and again, and again. Because it allows me to win again, and again, and again.

This strategy has given me the confidence to trust myself while accomplishing important smaller goals along the way.