Trust Yourself First: Cultivating Self-Awareness, Confidence and Resilience

By Doris Sew Hoy

"Trusting yourself is about learning to lead yourself... about caring for yourself... then you can quietly exude the kind of leadership, confidence and persona that others want to follow."

In Trust Yourself First: Cultivating Self-Awareness, Confidence and Resilience, seasoned executive coach Doris Sew

• Language: English
• Publisher: New Degree Press
• Release date: May 5, 2022
• ISBN: 9798885041867

Doris Sew Hoy

Doris Sew Hoy is a proud New Zealand-born accredited executive coach and leadership specialist who facilitates the mindset and actions necessary to achieve a deeper appreciation of your authentic self.Her 20+ years of experience have culminated in her first book, a self-help-guide-cum-memoir, that she wishes she could have read when she was starting her career. She hopes her clients and her readers, as well as her two amazing daughters, are inspired by the wisdom within the pages to become more curious, attentive, and trustworthy, and lead more fulfilled lives.

Book preview

Trust Yourself First

Cultivating Self-Awareness, Confidence and Resilience

Doris Sew Hoy

new degree press

copyright © 2022 Doris Sew Hoy

All rights reserved.

Trust Yourself First

Cultivating Self-Awareness, Confidence and Resilience

ISBN

979-8-88504-078-5 Paperback

979-8-88504-707-4 Kindle Ebook

979-8-88504-186-7 Digital Ebook

To my family:

Simon, Sara-Louise (Sasa),

Lucinda (Lulu), and Mylo.

My parents, Yip and Lai Kum Sew Hoy,

and my grandparents, YeYe and MaMa.

And Esther, Wallace, Jack, Helen,

Fiona, Shona, and Kevin.

THE

WAY

OUT

IS

IN

Thích Nhất Hạnh

October 11, 1926 - January 22, 2022

Contents

Advanced Reviews for Trust Yourself First

Introduction

PART 1

Awareness

Chapter 1

Why Trust?

Chapter 2

Where Do You Come From?

Chapter 3

Who Were You Before?

Chapter 4

What’s Going on Inside?

PART 2

Choices

Chapter 5

Valuing the Light

Chapter 6

What Would You like to Have Happen?

Chapter 7

Rhythm of Time

PART 3

Behave

Chapter 8

Learning to Learn

Chapter 9

Compassion Is Caring

Chapter 10

The Success of Failing

Chapter 11

Cultivating Healthy Habits

Epilogue

Resources

Acknowledgments

Appendix

Advanced Reviews for Trust Yourself First

Excellent—clear, concise, comprehensive, and timely as many of us wrestle with who we are and what we really want to do. This book is an investment in ourselves.

–Mike Brent, professor of Practice at Hult International Business School and co-author of The Leader’s Guide to Influence.

"Seamlessly weaves together ideas, stories, and learnings with an engaging style that feels like a personal conversation, inviting you to learn more about yourself."

–Gina Campbell, author of Hope in a Corner of My Heart: A Healing Journey Through the Dream-Logical World of Inner Metaphors.

A refreshing book filled with resourceful activities we can implement for ourselves and share with others. Having worked with Doris, I can attest that she walks her talk on cultivating healthy—and vital—relationships.

–Sharon Small, founder of Clean Language Institute, USA.

"An authentic writer who opens her heart to you. I particularly like the key messages and reflective questions at the end of each chapter; helps you explore and connect with yourself more deeply and to trust yourself more fully."

–Julia Feng, Positive Change coach of Positive Change Practitioners Center, Philippines.

A must-read for anyone yearning to discover more about what makes them tick. Delivers a tour-de-force lesson in how to better trust ourselves, harness our potential, and unleash our inner leaders.

–Dan Magill, UX writer and Communications consultant.

So authentic and powerful, especially loved the chapter on Compassion is Caring which was handled so clearly and sensitively and really resonated. The book gives me the vocabulary to articulate feelings, understand why they are there, and how to deal with them.

–Tiggy Munnelly, volunteer teacher at Myanmar Education Centre, Kuala Lumpur.

Introduction

When you let go of what you are, you become what you might be.

It’s summer 2020, about four months since the UK—and most of the world—went into lockdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic. I’m out walking my dog, breathing in the fresh air, AirPods in, and listening to an audiobook, Wolfpack, by Abby Wambach.

Wambach is a retired American soccer player, two-time Olympic gold medalist, FIFA World Cup champion, and the highest all-time international goal scorer for male and female soccer players. I’m no soccer fan, but I’m fascinated listening to her clear and impassioned voice tell her story. Abby knew who she was when she was playing soccer and leading her team, but after retiring from soccer in 2015, she began questioning herself: who was she without soccer? Or, perhaps more accurately, who did she want to be now?

These are the kind of questions I’ve often asked myself and my coaching clients. It’s a variation of that perennial question, Who am I? As I listen to her story, I can see and sense many connections to my own life, the choices I made in my work and career, and where I am now, professionally and personally.

Abby is saying how grateful she is for being honored by ESPN, the American cable sports network, for her achievements in soccer. She, alongside basketball and football stars, the late Kobe Bryant and Peyton Manning, received an Icon Award at ESPN’s nationally televised awards show. As the three champions left the stage after the ceremony, Abby realized that … while the three of us were stepping away from similar careers, we were facing very different futures (Wambach, 2019).

That realization culminated in anger. An anger that, as Abby described it, had been simmering inside me for decades. The two men were walking off the stage with big bank balances and thus, freedom. But not Abby. While top professional male soccer players get paid millions per year, top professional female players only get a tiny fraction. Abby’s anger ignited the fire inside her, propelling her into her next role.

Abby Wambach is now a best-selling author, an activist for equality and inclusion, sought-after speaker, and co-founder of Wolfpack Endeavour, a leadership development program for women in the workplace and beyond. To achieve the levels of success she did, and continues to do, Abby needed to do more than become a better leader or a better performer; she needed to learn how to trust herself first.

•Trust herself enough to dress the way she liked.

•Trust herself enough to come out as gay.

•Trust herself enough to fall in love, marry her wife, and be a mother to three children.

•And now, trust herself enough to lead a revolution in women’s rights and a better future for the next generation.

I’m no athlete, but Abby’s story resonated with me as I realized it’s taken me most of my life to learn to trust myself more, and to trust myself first. That learning is also central to my belief about what makes an effective leader: you must learn to lead yourself first in order to lead others effectively. While I didn’t know it at the time—the fresh air, AirPods in, my dog tugging at his lead because Abby’s words had stopped me in my tracks—but the seed for this book was planted.

Cultivating the Seed

That lesson, learning to trust myself more and to trust myself first, is both an interactive and continuous one. It’s a lesson that takes time to embody and fully appreciate. I had long toyed with my dream of writing and publishing a book about what I’ve learned in my career, both as an economist and as an executive coach where I focus on leadership and career development. But that book dream never got very far, as I’d become distracted after the first two or three chapters.

Then came lockdown and suddenly I had bucket-loads of time as work contracts dried up and I had nowhere else to be. Therefore, I began writing this book in 2021, just over a year since the world changed forever with the COVID-19 pandemic. While some found the experience of lockdown frightening and frustrating, others, like myself, found it as an opportunity to reflect and reconsider their choices in work and life.

Even before the pandemic, many felt stuck in their career or job. But the pandemic has changed how some people think about life and work, and what they want out of both. People are reassessing their lives, and the pandemic has reminded them that life is too short. In a research survey of 6,000 adults in the UK in late 2021, almost 7 in every 10 employees (69%) said they feel confident to move to a new job in the next couple of months (Randstad 2021).

According to Victoria Short, CEO at Randstad UK, the recruitment agency that conducted the research, The Great Resignation is here and job loyalty is a thing of the past. Very few people moved jobs during the pandemic—the missing quits. A lot of people who wanted to quit just hadn’t and they led to a deluge of resignations. She added that another factor is burnout, and some teams have been running too hot for too long.

Trust in Flow

Whether you’ve felt stuck or relieved about your job situation, you may also feel you have more to give; you want to make a difference and do something more meaningful, other than make sufficient income to survive though not necessarily thrive. The notion of thriving at work is about being in a flow state or being in the zone. That’s a feeling when, under the right conditions, you become fully immersed in whatever you are doing and you have a sense of ecstasy and a sense of clarity (Csikszentmihal, 2002).

Trust is at the heart of being in flow and begins with finding what you can do that plays to your strengths. I define a strength as something energizing you when you do it and you get better the more you do it.

When you use your strengths and others are willing to pay or reward you for that, then you’re heading towards your ikigai, a Japanese concept meaning life purpose. When you play to your strengths, you can be in flow and aligned to achieving personal and economic success. That’s about knowing yourself, doing what brings you joy, and finding a sense of ecstasy, a sense of clarity. When you are in flow, you trust yourself fully and allow your abilities to be on full display. These are some of the concepts and topics I’ll be expanding on in this book.

Step into the Unknown

In writing this book, as I remembered my past and made sense of it, I aligned certain events to lessons I learned through my education and coach training, career choices, and the transitions I made. I didn’t know at the time of these events that what I was doing would eventually lead me to where I am now, doing what I’m doing. What I did know was I trusted myself enough to take those steps into the unknown.

As psychologist and author Adam Grant says: If knowledge is power, then knowing what you don’t know is wisdom. While I’m curious about all sorts of things, especially about people, I know there is so much I don’t know. I know I’ve learned more about the science behind emotions and feelings, and what makes people do the things they do, and at last, I trust myself enough to write about what I know, how I came to know these things, and about what I believe are important aspects in developing oneself and living a more meaningful life.

Sometimes, doubt creeps in. That’s because I know my knowledge is limited, and there’s so much more I don’t know. When I have doubts, I know now how to regulate my nervous system and calm it down so I can think more clearly. I take a conscious breath, in and out, and mindfully allow myself to become even more curious about how my words affect others. I’ve learned, and continue to learn, to stay open with the aid of practices like meditation and yoga.

I believe trusting yourself is about learning to lead yourself. Leading yourself well is firstly about knowing thyself, the Ancient Greek maxim often quoted by Socrates. It’s also about caring for yourself so you nurture and nourish the many parts of yourself —physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual; then you can quietly exude the kind of leadership, confidence, and persona others want to follow.

It’s a process of becoming more aware and conscious about what’s going on with the many parts of you: your conscious and unconscious knowing, instincts, emotions, and body. It’s also about understanding and appreciating how you got to where you are now, and who you were before you became who you are now. It’s about accepting that what you know is only a fraction of what you don’t.

About My Epistemology

This book sets