Why do I need everyone else’s opinion before I trust my own?

You know what you think. Or at least you did.

Then you mention it to somebody else. “What would you do?” They tell you. Then you ask somebody else, just to see what they think. Now you have two opinions, neither of which quite matches yours, and somehow you’re less certain than you were before you asked anyone.

So naturally, the obvious solution is to ask a third person.

Very efficient.

For some decisions, asking other people is sensible. If I know absolutely nothing about mortgages, cars or why the boiler has started making that noise, I’m very happy to find somebody who does. But there’s another kind of asking that I see quite often. It’s not really about needing information. It’s about wanting somebody else to tell you that what you already think is okay.

When that becomes your normal, something can happen quite quietly. You stop noticing just how often you look outside yourself before trusting what’s happening inside.

When asking becomes reassurance

Perhaps you’ve been invited somewhere and you don’t particularly want to go. You know you don’t want to go. Your entire body is saying, “I would rather be at home in my pyjamas.” But instead of accepting that information, you start building a case.

Is it rude if I don’t go? Do you think I should go? What would you do? They’ll probably be annoyed, won’t they? Maybe I should just go.

Half an hour later, you’re apparently appearing before a jury to justify an evening on your own sofa.

Or perhaps it’s a bigger decision. A change at work. Something in a relationship. Spending money. Trying something new. You have an instinct about what you want, but it doesn’t feel quite solid enough until somebody else agrees with it.

That agreement gives you something important: reassurance. For a while.

Because reassurance can settle uncertainty without necessarily helping you trust your own judgement. If you repeatedly need somebody else to confirm your decisions before you feel comfortable with them, you can gradually start reinforcing the idea that perhaps your own answer isn’t quite enough.

And that can become a difficult cycle. The less you trust yourself, the more reassurance you look for. The more you rely on reassurance, the fewer opportunities you have to discover that you actually can make decisions for yourself.

Confidence can be much quieter than we think

When people talk about confidence, we often imagine somebody visibly confident. They speak up. They walk into rooms without worrying. They know exactly what they want. Perhaps they own an alarming number of blazers.

But confidence can show up in much quieter ways. It can be making a decision without immediately reopening it. Saying, “No, that doesn’t work for me,” without producing a closing argument for the defence. Having an opinion without first checking whether everybody else agrees. Changing your mind because you’ve reconsidered something, rather than because somebody looked slightly surprised when you told them.

Trusting yourself doesn’t mean believing you’re always right. None of us are. It means beginning to trust that you can make a reasonable decision with the information you have and deal with what comes next.

That’s quite different from certainty.

There are all sorts of reasons we can begin looking outside ourselves before trusting our own judgement. Perhaps you really don’t like getting things wrong. Maybe disappointing somebody feels particularly uncomfortable. Perhaps you’ve spent years accommodating other people and have become very good at checking what works for everyone else before considering what works for you.

Sometimes we’ve simply got out of practice.

If the question is repeatedly “What does everyone else think?” before “What do I think?”, your own answer can eventually become surprisingly difficult to hear.

The problem with collecting everybody else’s answers

Other people can be enormously helpful. A different perspective can make us notice something we’ve missed, challenge an assumption or give us information we genuinely need. But other people also answer questions from their lives.

One friend might tell you to take the risk. Another values security above almost everything. Your mum might worry because she’s your mum. Your partner may understandably be considering how your decision affects them. Someone else might tell you exactly what they would do.

None of them is necessarily wrong.

But none of them is you.

By the time you’ve collected everybody’s opinions, you’ve now got to make the original decision and work out what to do with six other people’s thoughts about it. No wonder your head feels busy.

There is a difference between using another person’s perspective to help you think and handing them the decision because you don’t trust yourself to make it.

That’s the bit I’d become curious about.

And usually this is where another thought arrives: But what if I make the wrong decision?

You might.

I realise that’s probably not the reassuring answer you were hoping for.

But so might the person you’re asking.

There are decisions in life where there simply isn’t a guaranteed correct answer waiting to be discovered if we think hard enough or consult enough people. Sometimes we choose based on what we know at the time. Later, with different information, we may choose differently.

That doesn’t automatically mean the original decision was a disaster. It means we’re human beings making decisions in real life rather than contestants being marked on whether we selected the correct door.

For me, this is where confidence and self-belief become much more practical. They aren’t about feeling fearless or certain. Sometimes confidence is being able to say, “I don’t know exactly how this will turn out, but I’m willing to trust my judgement enough to make a decision.”

Before you ask, notice why you’re asking

Over the next few days, notice how often you ask somebody else what they think. I’m not suggesting you stop asking for advice. That would be rather silly. Other perspectives matter, and sometimes somebody else knows considerably more about something than we do.

Instead, become curious about why you’re asking.

Are you looking for information you genuinely need? Are you interested in another perspective? Or have you already got an answer and you’re looking for somebody else to give you permission to trust it?

Before you send the message, make the call or ask, “What would you do?”, try asking yourself one question first:

“What do I think?”

You don’t even have to act on the answer. Just give yourself the opportunity to hear it before everybody else’s voices arrive.

Because if you’ve spent a long time second-guessing yourself, looking for reassurance or worrying about making the wrong choice, I’m not going to tell you to simply “believe in yourself more.” Lovely sentiment. Not terribly useful on a Tuesday morning when you’ve changed your mind four times before breakfast.

Sometimes it’s more useful to understand what has made trusting yourself difficult, how that shows up in your life now and what you would actually like to be different.

That’s something we can explore together in 1-to-1 work. Not because I have the correct answers to your life either, but because having someone outside your own head can help you look at what’s happening, what matters to you and where your own voice may have become rather difficult to hear amongst everybody else’s.

If you’ve recognised yourself in this and you’re tired of needing everybody else’s opinion before you feel able to trust your own, get in touch and we can arrange a conversation. You don’t need to have worked out why you do it first.

That would rather defeat the point.

Jx