Why High Achievers Stop Trusting Themselves (And What To Do Next)

Many successful professionals reach a point where they quietly realise they’ve stopped trusting themselves.  They usually say something like “I don’t know who I am anymore” or “I don’t know what the right next move is”

When I hear this, I know for certain this is not a confidence issue.

These high achievers tend to radiate confidence. They’ve built impressive careers.  They know how to perform at a high level. 

Yet their worries about their futures feel very real, very disconcerting and very uneasy to them.  Enough to erode a little of the trust and confidence they’ve spent years building in themselves.

What’s happened to them is a more subtle thing.

Why High Achievers Lose Trust In Themselves

In a nutshell, they’ve been rewarded for following rules. 

Rules which have slowly replaced their own quiet internal compass. 

Successful professionals internalize rules such as:

-       what success should look like

-       what a “good” career path is

-       how to excel

-       what is considered sensible, strategic or impressive

Rule following can start very early on in people’s careers. It can begin as early as choosing a career.  One client went into teaching straight out of school “because her mother thought it would suit her”.  Another became a lawyer because she was “bright and good at English”. I’ve heard one person say she “became an accountant to keep my parents happy and a mother to keep my husband happy.”

And, from there, the rules of the game are set.

Over time, almost imperceptibly, external approval becomes louder than internal guidance. 

And slowly their own quiet knowing erodes so much that they don’t even notice its quiet whispers anymore.

This isn’t weakness.

It’s just conditioning. 

This Isn’t A Confidence Issue

When people say “I don’t trust I know what I want anymore” they often assume they need more clarity, a strategy, some form of outside help to make them feel more confident.

But building confidence isn’t the issue here. 

Following someone else’s idea of a plan or a framework for your life can feel as discombobulating as not knowing who you or what you want. 

It just doesn’t feel right. 

It feels heavy and when you listen to it like its gospel, you notice how all your energy starts to slowly seep out of your body like you have a huge hole in the bottom of your foot.  I know this from personal experience particularly in trying to find the right “way” to build my coaching business (aka searching for my best next step). 

What’s going on here is that you’re so used to having external certainty rather than internal authority that you head down that path anyway thinking ‘surely, they know something I don’t’. 

What you’ve lost is something deeper than confidence.

You become disconnected to your own internal navigational equipment - your inner compass.

Before Reinvention, Reconnection

Of course, when this realisation hits, most people want to jump straight into imagining a new future for themselves.

And imagination absolutely matters.

But before reinvention comes something more foundational: learning to listen again.

And I don’t mean only with your ears.

I mean somatically. Listening to your body.

Your body knows what feels expansive and freeing – to you.

And it knows exactly what feels restrictive and confining – to you.

It knows what lights you up and drains you dry – to you.

And the body knows all this at lightning speed long before your thinking mind can acknowledge or rationalize it.

The thinking mind can get us all tangled up in knots when it comes to our true desires.

The body is far clearer when you learn to understand how it communicates to you.

Reconnecting with your in-built internal compass and noticing the navigational directions it gives you is the most powerful tool you have available in figuring out who you are or what your next best step is. 

In the beginning it’s not like being hit by a lightning bolt which jolts you into knowing, it’s much slower and gentler than that.

But once you start to notice again, and choose to listen, little by little life starts to get easier and you start moving in the right direction, for you.

Imagination Isn’t Fantasy – It’s Grounded In Your Own Internal Authority

Once you begin to reconnect with and begin following your own quiet inner knowing, your imagination changes.

In the research world, where I spent over 20 years of my working life, we’d have to be very clear in innovation or ideation sessions that we ran for clients that the ideas we were destined to uncover using our tools and methodologies were not based on ‘blue sky’ thinking – or about pulling ideas out of ‘thin air.’  Clients wanted to uncover innovations or new ideas that would work.

This meant we were very careful in how we designed the sessions, what prework we asked the teams to do first, how we encouraged the teams to ‘get into the mode of creativity’ on the day and the parameters we put around the brainstorming exercises.  All so we could imagine within the framework of the system we were dealing with.

It's much simpler for an individual.  The set up involved in accessing and utilising our imaginations for the capacity of trusting ourselves again or reinventing our lives or an aspect of our life, is literally grounded in using our very own body signals as the parameter – or thermometer – for which to measure the ideas we have.

By reconnecting with ourselves first, when we start imagining, our ideas and dreams feel:

-       grounded

-       energizing

-       real

-       aligned.

Imagination is a powerful tool when it’s no longer borrowed or expected to fit into a predetermined set of rules, processes or procedures. 

When Internal Authority Returns

When people reconnect with their inner knowing, their own inner compass, something starts to shift.

Reinvention no longer feels risky or reckless or like a beautiful, nonsensical dream.

It has a pull to it.  A little quiet voice inside you saying ‘Really, could I really…’?

It feels inevitable. 

Because when you’re no longer chasing something external, you’re responding to something true.

The most radical move a high achiever (who is moving through change) can make isn’t a pivot.

It’s getting quiet enough to hear themselves again.

From there, the future doesn’t need to be forced.  It just begins to unfold. 

Like a new plant, unfurling from within the soil.

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If you’re navigating this quietly disorienting stage of success, this is the kind of work we begin inside a Wonder Session.