You Are Your Own Guru

Think about the person who knows you better than anyone else.

The person who knows what makes you happy, what makes you uncomfortable, what you’ve been through, what you’re afraid of, what you want, what you tend to do when things get hard, and all the little things about you that most people never see. The person who knows all of your secrets, knows what you do best, what you’re aspiring to be, knows all of your hopes and dreams. The person who knows your rock bottom and where you started…and how you’ve gotten where you are today.

Who is that person? Best friend? Partner? Work buddy? Parent? Neighbor? Kid?

…by any chance…did you happen to say that it was…you?

Because whether it feels like it or not, you know yourself more than anyone else ever will.

You’ve lived every experience. You’ve felt every feeling. You know every thought you didn’t say out loud. You’ve watched yourself make mistakes, change your mind, fall apart, recover, grow, repeat patterns, break patterns, and become a hundred different versions of yourself.

And yet, when we’re faced with a big decision about our own lives, what do so many of us do?

We ask everyone else.

We’ve gotten really good at asking for answers

Think about the last decision you struggled with.

Maybe you called your best friend. Then another friend. Maybe you asked your therapist or your coach. You Googled it. You searched TikTok. You found a podcast about it. Maybe you asked ChatGPT.

And sometimes someone gives you an answer…and you don’t like it.

So you ask someone else. (Guilty!!)

I’ve absolutely done this. And at a certain point, you have to wonder: Am I actually looking for information? Or am I looking for someone to give me permission to do what I already want to do?

We have more access to advice than any generation before us. There is an expert for everything, and everyone seems very confident that they know what you should be doing.

Wake up at 5 a.m. No, prioritize your sleep. Push yourself outside your comfort zone. No, protect your nervous system. Work harder. But you have to surrender. Follow your gut. Heal your attachment style. Fix your cortisol. The list goes on...

 Don't get me wrong. Some of this information is incredibly valuable.

Some of it completely contradicts the information you watched thirty seconds earlier.

And somewhere in the middle of consuming everyone else’s answers, it can become harder to hear your own.

Knowing yourself and trusting yourself are different things

This is the part I’ve been thinking about lately.

You can know yourself incredibly well and still not trust yourself to make decisions about your own life.

Because self-trust is scary.

If someone else tells you what to do and it doesn’t work out, there’s a tiny bit of safety in that. Well, I followed the advice. I did what I was supposed to do.

But when you choose for yourself, you own the choice.

I think we often misunderstand self-trust because we think it means being certain we’re right.

It doesn’t.

Confidence says, “I think this is going to work.” Self-trust says, “Even if it doesn’t, I trust myself to handle what happens next.”

BOOM. That distinction changes everything.

You don’t have to know how the relationship will turn out. You don’t have to know whether taking the job is the perfect decision. You don’t have to know if moving, starting the business, having the conversation, or taking the risk will unfold exactly as you hope.

You’re probably never going to collect enough information to eliminate uncertainty completely.

Self-trust is knowing that whatever happens, you won’t abandon yourself in the process.

And that trust is built through evidence. You make decisions. You follow through. You get things wrong. You change your mind. You recover. You adjust. You try again.

Over time, you start collecting evidence that says: I can rely on me.

So should we just “trust our gut”?

Not exactly.

Because sometimes what feels like intuition is fear. Sometimes it’s conditioning. Sometimes it’s a behavioral pattern you’ve been repeating for twenty years.

Becoming your own authority doesn’t mean blindly believing every thought or following every feeling. It means knowing yourself well enough to understand where those thoughts, feelings, and reactions might be coming from.

This is where I come back to the three areas I use in my own work: Body, Brain, and Behavior. Three things we have constant access to...but we rarely tune into.

Your body gives you information through sensation. Tightness. Heaviness. Energy. Ease. Contraction. Expansion. But discomfort doesn’t automatically mean something is wrong. Sometimes your body is warning you; sometimes you’re simply doing something new.

Your brain gives you thoughts, interpretations, predictions, and stories. But a thought happening inside your head doesn’t make it a fact. Learning to separate what actually happened from the story I’m telling myself about what happened can completely change how you see a situation.

And your behavior shows you your patterns. Maybe you withdraw when you’re vulnerable. Maybe you seek reassurance when you’re uncertain. Maybe you people-please, control, overthink, avoid, or immediately look for the next exciting thing. The more you understand what you predictably do and why you do it, the easier it becomes to recognize when an old pattern is trying to make a new decision for you.

Your body, brain, and behavior all give you information.

Then you decide what to do with it.

That’s discernment.

And I think that’s a much more useful version of “trust yourself.”

You are your own guru

Listen, I’m a coach. I clearly believe in coaching. I believe in therapy, education, courses, books, podcasts, experts, teachers, and learning from people who know things we don’t. (I love learning!)

This isn’t about deciding that you know everything.

It’s about breaking away from the idea that someone else has to become the authority on your life.

A great teacher can show you something you couldn’t see. A therapist can help you understand a pattern. A coach can ask a question that changes the way you think. An expert can give you information you genuinely didn’t have before.

But ultimately, you still have to run that information through you.

Something can be life-changing advice for someone else and completely wrong for you. Something that fit you five years ago may not fit you anymore. You can respect someone’s expertise without automatically accepting every conclusion they come to.

Borrow wisdom from everyone. Give your authority to no one.

There will always be another person to ask. Another book to read. Another Reel to save. Another course to take. Another part of yourself to understand.

At some point, you have to take everything you’ve learned about yourself and actually live your life.

Maybe you don’t need another guru.

Maybe you need a better relationship with the one who has been there all along:

You.

Want to go deeper?

This is only part of the conversation. In the full episode of Create Your Fate, I get into why we learn to outsource our decisions in the first place, why self-trust can feel so uncomfortable, how personal development itself can sometimes become another form of avoidance, and how I use Body, Brain, and Behavior to separate intuition from fear, stories, and old patterns.

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Before you go, consider this:

Where in your life are you currently looking outside of yourself for an answer you may already know? And if you stopped asking everyone else what they think, what would you choose?