Learning to Trust Yourself

This week, we’ve invited Tama Kieves, Harvard-trained lawyer turned career/success coach and bestselling author, to share her perspective on how she repeatedly sees people holding themselves back and what we can do about it. Don’t miss Tama in Chicago here at ALTAR Community for her One-Day Retreat on January 31st, 2026. 

Ready to live your exceptional life in 2026?

I invite you to stop following mediocre thinking and to trust the integrity of your love and knowing instead. Explore your power at a different level. Say yes to your own originality, intelligence, and connection. Dare to have the adventure of your lifetime.

You will do this by learning to trust yourself. There is already a path within you. I will remind you that you have guidance. I will remind you that there is always something working.

Hey, I know you might have a lot going on…

And I know what it’s like to not trust yourself. Oh my God, I have second-guessed myself, doubts badgering me like nervous kids, hand-wringing grandmothers, and blowhards in the backrow.

Then I started learning how to listen to myself and the truth of what I know. That’s a brand-new day. I want you to experience it. Because you can soar instead of hesitate. You can love your life now instead of waiting for some other time.

When you don’t trust yourself, you are not using your higher resources—not in the way you can.

It’s as though there’s a kink in your garden hose, and the water can’t gush all the way through. No one can live an exceptional life on a squirt or a trickle, though many of us actually think that holding ourselves back is a winning move.

You may doubt the genius and instruction of your own life-force. But I don’t. I’ve seen what happens when we trust our power. You have no idea what you can accomplish when you are in your zone and undiluted. 

Life doesn’t just have to happen however it happens. You’re a conscious being—and there’s a reason for that. You have a wild light inside you that can alter any circumstance. Wouldn’t it be amazing to learn how?

Sure, you think you have to be “realistic.” Not go all gung-ho positive mindset or “spiritual” in our metric-centered, material, madhouse world. I get it. I went to Harvard Law School. Enough said. Who wants to be bizarre or Pollyanna? You don’t want to be wrong. And you don’t want to be the one caught with your rainbow pants down, clutching your crystals and instant manifestation kit. 

But you are putting a kink in your garden hose. You are telling yourself it’s safer to listen others than it is to listen to yourself. You are voting to trust the masses instead of your instincts, your knowing heart, your Yabba-Dabba-Do-Divine Intelligence, or whatever you call a revelation of bullet-proof information.

Maybe you waver, trust your connection to brave intuitive forces only some of the time. You tell yourself you are being “responsible.” Preventing foolish disappointments.

Yet in the name of intelligence, you are blunting your highest intelligence.

Because a part of you senses there is another way. There is your path. There is the way this life is meant to work for you. 

Here’s what telling yourself to be “realistic” can mean: 

You are unconsciously training your eyes and ears to look for a more limited identity than the infinite energy within you. You are acclimating to an image of yourself as helpless or held back by “how things work.”  You are feeding this image. You are creating that world. Over and over. 

Still, it doesn’t feel right. A diluted life is not a life you love. 

Things feel familiar— but they don’t feel right.

There is a hunger within you to be whole, to not deny your instincts, but to become the person you dream of being. You know there is more to you and more for you. You know it. 

Even when you try to ignore it, the tug of yearning will not go away. It’s always there. This isn’t a delusion or a fairy tale. It’s a knowing. This is the voice of inner guidance. You crave the feeling of being the real you. It’s your birthright. Your blueprint. Your inner salsa. Your code.

Your life purpose is to listen to your inner voice. But, listen to the voice of love inside yourself, instead of the voice of fear.

The voice of strength instead of the voice of weakness. This is the paradigm shift. This is how you step into a new identity—and a true relationship with yourself and a responsively alive universe. 

Why not commit to your exceptional life? 

Here’s what that might look like:

You will move in the direction of phenomenal instinct. 

You will not swallow your impulses or truth. 

You will not collect evidence of lack but evidence of quantum leaps, love, and support. 

You will finally be on your own side, the conductor, choreographer, and press agent of your own possibilities tour. 

This is how you eat awe for breakfast and ride momentum that arises of itself. Can you imagine that? I can. 

Exceptional Focus Creates Exceptional Results

The right focus lights up circuits in your brain and energy you didn’t know you had. 

Trusting yourself is a focus like none other. 

You learn to stop diminishing yourself. You unlearn every assumption that weakens or dilutes your genius and vitality. 

And maybe, just maybe, you love your own being in a way that empowers you to accomplish damn near anything you desire.   

Tama Kieves and her latest book, "Learning to Trust Yourself."

Tickets are available now for Learning to Trust Yourself: a One-Day Retreat with Tama Kieves  on January 31st, 2026. You can secure your seat here. Looking for more thought-leaders and change-makers at ALTAR? See full calendar of events and offerings here.