I used to work with a woman who couldn’t make a decision without asking everyone around her first.
Colleagues, friends, family, it didn’t matter.
No matter what decision she was trying to make — career, personal, practical — she’d ask.
And when she got an answer, she’d nod, then go ask three more people.
Second-guessing yourself is exhausting enough when it’s happening to you. Watching it happen to someone else made one thing very clear:
More input wasn’t her problem. Self-trust was.
And if you’re trying to figure out how to stop second-guessing yourself, that distinction matters.
Why you can’t stop second-guessing yourself
At first, I’d share my honest take when my co-worker asked. But it never landed. Whatever answer she got was never quite enough to settle on.
So she’d loop back into panic mode…throwing out the decision she’d almost made and starting over again.
She couldn’t sit with anything long enough to hear herself think.
Over time, she got frustrated with the people around her for not just telling her what to do.
But even when someone tried redirecting her by asking “what’s your gut telling you?” she’d get defensive.
Because that question assumed she had an answer inside her. And she didn’t believe she did.
If you’ve ever wondered why you keep second-guessing yourself, this is usually where it starts.
More input just gives you more to second-guess
My co-worker wasn’t confused because she lacked the facts.
She was confused because she’d never quite trusted that she had the answers inside her.
And until she found that quieter, more solid sense of her own inner knowing, nothing external was ever going to land the way she needed it to.
That’s also what self-gaslighting does — it takes something you already know and talks you out of it before it has a chance to breathe.
More input doesn’t fix that. It just gives you more to weigh, more to second-guess, more noise between you and the answer that was already there.
The fix isn’t doing more research.
It’s learning to come back to yourself.
What changes when you stop outsourcing your decisions
The women I work with have often spent years piling on more articles, more advice from people who don’t actually know them, more opinions from people who mean well but are answering from their own life experience, not hers.
When they stop doing that (not abruptly, just gradually) something shifts.
They become more grounded. More at ease with their own instincts.
They still ask for feedback. They still talk things through with people they trust. But they’re not dependent on it anymore.
Because they know that when it’s time to decide, the answer is inside them.
It always was.
One of my clients described it this way after we worked together:
“Through Kerry’s coaching I have developed a sincere gentleness and tolerance of myself around perfectionism. I no longer feel invisible, and most of all I have learned to trust myself more.” ~ DKW
That last line is the thing. Not “I learned a better decision-making process.” Not “I found a framework.”
She learned to trust herself. That’s the whole work.
What does coming back to yourself actually look like?
It’s not a dramatic shift. It’s quieter than that.
It’s noticing the moment you’re about to rush to someone else for reassurance…and pausing instead.
It’s recognizing that the unsettled feeling isn’t a sign you don’t know. It’s often a sign that you do, and you’re not quite ready to trust it yet.
Part of that is learning to tell the difference between your own voice and all the other ones that have gotten comfortable sounding like you.
If that’s unfamiliar territory, learning to listen to your inner voice is a good place to start.
Coming back to yourself is a practice, not a single moment.
And it starts with learning to hear yourself again — which is exactly how to stop second-guessing yourself for good.
If this resonated, my free guide How to Stop Second-Guessing Yourself is a good next step.
It walks you through the Try It On Method — a simple three-step process that helps you hear yourself clearly before a decision, without needing anyone else to tell you what to do.
Kerry xo