Not long ago a client strug­gling with his con­di­tion­ing asked a telling ques­tion: “If I can’t be sure that the mes­sages I’m send­ing myself are true, how on earth can I trust my own judg­ment?” The con­di­tion­ing he bat­tled had to do with his con­stant wor­ries that he was mak­ing too many mis­takes in his work, mis­takes vis­i­ble to his man­ag­er and oth­ers in high­ly placed lead­er­ship roles. He might find a minor error in a report he’d writ­ten and be dev­as­tat­ed by per­son­al recrim­i­na­tions — as if the error would cause every­one to lose faith in him and his career instant­ly would turn to dust. It was as if he could feel their pro­found dis­ap­point­ment in him — a very uncom­fort­able projection.

I thought his ques­tion had mer­it. How could he trust him­self if his inter­nal world can be so eas­i­ly flood­ed with anx­i­ety and guilt over an error whose impor­tance he has severe­ly cat­a­stro­phized? In this sit­u­a­tion it was quite clear that oth­ers did not see his minor errors the same way that he did. In fact, they saw him in a strong posi­tion for advance­ment. They con­sid­ered him to be a crit­i­cal prob­lem-solver for the orga­ni­za­tion and a respect­ed col­lab­o­ra­tor, some­one deeply val­ued for both his tech­ni­cal and human rela­tions skills. If they noticed any­thing, it was that he some­times appeared to lose faith in him­self. What they could­n’t see was the major inter­nal dev­as­ta­tion that went on pri­vate­ly behind that appar­ent loss of exter­nal confidence.

My clien­t’s ques­tion about trust­ing his own judg­ment is a core lead­er­ship ques­tion — a ques­tion only he can answer. All the reas­sur­ances in the world from oth­ers can­not per­ma­nent­ly erase it, although they might briefly ease the inner pain. He can’t sim­ply be informed that his self-judg­ments are inac­cu­rate. Some­how he has to find that out for him­self, and in a way that is indis­putable. Only then can he tru­ly mutiny against the per­son­al mis­in­for­ma­tion and self-gaslight­ing that are going on with­in him­self. In the mean­time, he lives on the face of a cliff feel­ing as if his future is con­stant­ly pre­car­i­ous, as if he is some­one climb­ing ver­ti­cal rock with­out a rope. He is dri­ven by a com­bi­na­tion of anx­i­ety and guilt — by anguish — which is to say by the need for emo­tion­al survival.

How does he come to trust his own judg­ment? It might be help­ful for him to risk ask­ing oth­ers about how they per­ceive him and the minor errors he believes he’s made from time to time. Undoubt­ed­ly, his col­leagues would try to pro­vide the reas­sur­ance that he’s doing not just fine, but excep­tion­al­ly well. But again, this strat­e­gy only works so long as he uses that feed­back to decide for him­self that it is pri­mar­i­ly some­thing inter­nal that is scar­ing him and plac­ing him on the cliff; that he is ham­pered by con­di­tioned bull­shit he tells him­self — a pat­tern learned ear­ly in his life that has set him up for this expe­ri­ence as he pro­gress­es in his career to ever “high­er” sta­tions. Indeed, there’s also been a pat­tern of him leav­ing a vari­ety of orga­ni­za­tions over time when­ev­er his mis­per­cep­tions about his abil­i­ty to per­form cause him to panic.

Peo­ple often use the term, “bull­shit meter,” to point to times when it’s obvi­ous some­body else is pre­sent­ing bogus infor­ma­tion they’d like us to believe. Less fre­quent­ly we dis­cuss the bull­shit meter we need to use to accu­rate­ly judge our­selves. Some­times that meter might eval­u­ate our ego­cen­tric­i­ty, but in my coach­ing expe­ri­ence it’s just as impor­tant to use it to eval­u­ate con­di­tion­ing that caus­es per­son­al fear or humiliation.

All of which rais­es the ques­tion of how we know who we real­ly are, for sure­ly there must be some­thing — some ulti­mate cri­te­ria — upon which we can rely. And yet, as awk­ward as it may seem, there does­n’t seem to be any such absolute at all for us, only a void or some­thing mean­er, a swamp of twist­ing inner chan­nels that only lead us back to where we start­ed. We may pre­tend by try­ing to rely on per­son­al val­ues, by hold­ing on to some frag­ment­ing con­cept of self-esteem, by try­ing to float on what­ev­er per­son­al philoso­phies or spir­i­tu­al prac­tices we’ve devel­oped over time. In the end, we may find all such ideas are boo­by-trapped. Our ratio­nal brains may not seem able to reach across the gulf and we are left alone with only the exis­ten­tial qual­i­ty of the inquiry and a feel­ing of emptiness.

In the end, I think it’s enough for us to see how we are capa­ble of lying to our­selves, some­times deeply, often as part of entrenched pat­terns of per­cep­tion we have inher­it­ed. In this our mem­o­ries can help us, if we are will­ing to acknowl­edge the pat­terns we find in how we are trig­gered and what that expe­ri­ence is like. If we can see the pat­terns, rec­og­niz­ing them for what they are — old forms of self-pro­tec­tion — we can begin to break them because we are more than our pro­gram­ming, more than a machine that only thinks one way. Our intel­li­gence is not arti­fi­cial. By acknowl­edg­ing an untruth we’ve told our­selves, we choose to trust our­selves a lit­tle more. We find we are enough, even if we can’t explain exact­ly how that dis­cov­ery ulti­mate­ly makes itself known.