Confidence versus trust

The 3 brains, self-awareness and the bigger picture

Trust is better than confidence, Tal Wilkenfeld put forward, when Lex Fridman asked her how she has the confidence to get up on stage in front of enormous audiences.

Confidence, she argued, can build a wall between you and the audience just the same way fear can, whereas trust allows you to stay open to inspiration and to the audience. It allows for flow, whereas confidence implies a certain amount of posturing - a certain identification with being a certain way.

I loved that. Fuck confidence.

It’s a thing I’ve been pondering lately, wondering if a lack of it is holding me back from anything I might want to be doing, or any way I might want to be showing up. I’ve also been pondering trust, as I feel it’s something I used to have more of (and life felt better).

Confidence or trust

When I try to connect to confidence I feel a kind of stiffness enter me, a bit of a forced expansion. It feels effortful. Foreign. I get images of people who I associate with that word and who I feel are very different to me in terms of energetic constitution, which further distances me from that quality.

Trust feels loving, warm, expansive, comforting. My whole system relaxes, shoulders drop, relief floods through me. “Oh yes, everything’s ok.”

So where does confidence come from? And where does trust come from?

In my experience, organic confidence comes from me doing something and learning that I can do it; then I have confidence that I could do it again. It’s very me-centred in that it depends entirely on my ability to do or be something.

Trust on the other hand feels like it includes the more-than-self; it feels far more wide-reaching than just my ability to do or be something. I can trust in myself, but also in the intelligence of life, in the divine; it’s not just up to me.

Trust acknowledges that I am part of a web, that I am held, that I have a place here that does not require me to push or strain or try to be anything other than I am.

Confidence feels conditional whereas trust feels (potentially) unconditional.

Trusting ourselves

So where does trust in myself come from?

At a more superficial level I would say this is similar to confidence - that is, it grows through life experience. At a deeper level though I think trust is a feeling-state that is always available to us (if we have relatively regulated nervous systems; chronic dysregulation can have a big impact on our basic level of safety, which impacts our trust levels).

Real trust is a somatic, embodied thing. It is not purely intellectual, in fact I would argue that it is primarily a thing that lives in the body, in the gut. Trust says, “Everything is ok”, or “Everything is going to be ok”.

Young children are inherently trusting. Think of toddlers learning to walk; or the way kids can dance unselfconsciously in public. They haven’t yet learned not to trust.

“A bird sitting on a tree is never afraid of the branch breaking, because its trust is not on the branch but on its own wings.”― Charlie Wardle

As an adult, trusting ourselves has a lot to do with self-awareness. Knowing our values, knowing we are resilient, knowing we have the capacity for creative thinking. Knowing that we have the ability to receive and process information from our subtle senses as well as diverse external sources.

A big part of it is trusting that we won’t betray or abandon ourselves.

Many of us learned at some point to betray or abandon ourselves in order to maintain a relationship with a caretaker, and these early attachment wounds impact our relationship with ourselves, as well as our relationships with others.

Restoring that trust means practicing honouring ourselves (our needs and desires) first in small and then in larger ways, so that we (re-)learn that we are safe. Trusting ourselves to keep ourselves safe is the most fundamental level of trust, and from there we can expand it to other areas of experience.

Safety being a root (first) chakra issue, we can then learn to trust ourselves to honour our creativity and sexuality (second), our ability to persevere and assert our will (third), the resilience and truth of our hearts (fourth), the power and importance of our voices (fifth), the intuitive information we receive (sixth), and finally, the connection to the divine (seventh).

Receiving information

So it turns out we actually have three brains; one in our head, one in our heart and one in our gut. By brain I mean a neural network; one that is able to process, store and retrieve information. The head brain is best at thinking and creating, the heart brain best at emotions, and the gut brain is primarily safety-oriented.

We function best when we use all three brains, but most people in Western culture are, to a greater or lesser extent, disconnected from their heart and gut brains. This creates an impoverished access to important information that our body is constantly providing us with.

Our heart can let us know if something will be good for us (which might go against what the rational mind says). Our gut brain can let us know if someone is trustworthy or not (which, again, could go against what the head brain says). These neural networks are picking up information that is not accessible consciously, i.e., to the head brain, but that is nonetheless important information.

The fact is, all the information about all things and all people across all time and space is available to us in every moment.

That’s because information is vibration, and we exist in a multidimensional, interconnected web of energy. Nothing is ever lost. So in theory, anyone can access whatever information they want about anything whatsoever. People who have a strong natural ability to do this are often referred to as psychics, but everyone has this ability and can improve it should they wish to do so.

The heart and gut brain are often picking up on information that is beyond the information consciously available to us; have you ever walked into an old building and felt a shiver run down your spine? Or found a particular place to be “creepy” or sad without knowing why? Or met someone and instantly distrusted them, without having any obvious reason to?

We often write off information that we can’t rationally validate (guilty🙋‍♀️) but it’s actually likely to be the most trustworthy as it hasn’t been interfered with by the mind (which can often layer over information with our personal experiential lens, preferences, hopes, fears etc.). Learning to trust our heart and gut brains is therefore key in increasing self-trust.

The bigger picture

I also want to trust life; to trust the intelligence that moves in and through all life in the universe, which (I believe) is animated by the fundamental frequency we call love.

I believe that we live in a benevolent universe and that therefore (when you zoom out far enough, and remember the blessing - cue sardonic laugh - of free will) all is unfolding perfectly.

When I remember this truth (as I have experienced it directly through meditation, plant medicine and other experiences) I am restored to an existential peace that feels like home.

It is the resting place of my soul - I know this.

And this further confirms my sense that it is truth; because deep down, far below the troubled waters of my mind, I remember.

"All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well" - Julian of Norwich

So trust wins, imo; anything that feels expansive and open is always going to get my vote over something that requires contraction of any kind.

May we all remember that peace, and may it float down and settle upon the world from now until forever.