You've built your whole life by someone else's blueprint: the training, the schedule, the version of success you were handed before you ever got to choose it. What if you could redesign it, on purpose, starting now?
She Changed Her Mind is for the physician and high-achieving professional who did everything right and still feels stuck. Each week, we bring design thinking (the same rigor you'd apply to any hard problem) to the parts of life that feel unsolvable: burnout, identity, ambition, the quiet sense that something needs to shift. You'll learn to build your own Life by Design Blueprint, a living draft you get to keep revising as you change, instead of a fixed plan you're failing to follow.
This isn't about forcing yourself into a better mood or grinding harder toward someone else's finish line. It's about capacity: building the internal steadiness to notice what you actually want, and the practical skill of acting on it. Expect real tools, honest conversation, and permission to treat your own life as a work in progress worth designing well.
Hosted by Dr. Emma Jones, a pediatric palliative care physician and burnout coach who's done this redesign in her own life and now guides other high-achieving women through it.
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Summary
In this episode, we explore the nuanced differences between being 'fine' and being grounded, as well as the distinction between self-reliance and self-trust. These insights are crucial for high-achieving women in healthcare to build resilience and inner confidence. Key topics
Difference between being fine and grounded confidence Practicing transition rituals for emotional regulation Impact of grief and loss on self-trust Building self-trust through practice and systems change Distinction between self-reliance and self-trust Role of societal systems in trust development Tools for grounding: breath, body, yoga, meditation Importance of small acts of kindness and gratitude Decision-making and trusting your discernment Creating a system for ongoing self-trust development
Key takeaways
Grounded confidence is about believing in your body's and mind's ability to handle life's challenges. Practicing transition rituals like walking, yoga, and breathing helps return to your grounded center. Grief and loss deeply impact your sense of trust and require intentional healing practices. Self-trust is built through consistent practice and systemic change, not just willpower. High-achieving women often rely on self-reliance but need to develop true self-trust to withstand life's storms.
Enroll in Self Trust School. Doors close September 13th.
Hello. Welcome back to She Changed Her Mind. Took a couple of weeks off, a little bit of a summer break. Even though this is a new podcast, I still needed those weeks off, so I did it. But I'm back. Today I want to talk about two concepts that are kind of can seem like their intention, but they're actually really different. The first is the difference between being fine and being really grounded. And the second is the difference between being self-reliant and actually having self-trust. So those are two things that sometimes we think are the same, but they're really not the same. So let's talk about how I think about these things and how I coach people about these things. So thinking about, you know, this idea of being fine, we all say it all the time. How are you? I'm fine. I'm fine. I'm fine. There's memes made about it, you know, the dog with the burning house and saying, I'm fine. And we all kind of joke about this, right? You know, never believe a woman who says she's fine. But what do we really want, right? Obviously, we don't want to be fine. We want this grounded sense where things really are okay. I can believe in my body, in my bones, that things are gonna be okay. That's what I would call grounded confidence or grounded self-trust. So let's think about, you know, kind of like a day in the life. You're working your shift, you're getting home after a hard day, you're starting to cook dinner, you've probably delivered bad news or witnessed hard things all day long, and that kind of residue is probably still living in your body, and your family's like, how are you doing? How was your day? And you say, fine. And it doesn't feel good though, because you're like, I can't actually talk about anything. You still feel kind of hyperreactive. If your kids talk too loud, or your husband scrapes his spoon on the inside of the bowl, your skin's crawling. So you're not really fine, but it's the only answer that feels available in that moment. And so you're practicing the skill that nobody really taught you, but you learned through repetition and practice to look composed on the outside and carry on and probably run your life pretty darn well. And that's the thing about being a high functioning woman from the outside. We tend to look pretty good. But on the inside, you're carrying something enormous that you don't know what to do with. You feel alone in, and you really don't know how to ask for what you need, how to put any of it down, or where to go. So the myth of I'm fine is that we can look confident on the outside, right? It's easy to kind of look good, especially when things are going well. But what we're left with when things start to go sideways is where we need that grounded confidence. That really, like I know my center and I can figure out what do I need? Do I need rest? Do I need water? Do I need food? Do I need somebody to just give me a hug? Do I need to just say I can't talk about my day, but I want to hear about yours? Or can we just play a game together or listen to music together? Because I want to be with you, even though it really doesn't feel safe or accessible for me to tell you anything about my day right now. Especially if you work in high mortality fields like oncology or palliative care or emergency medicine or ICU, we really are trained to compartmentalize. And that skill can quickly turn into disconnection. So that when you're home, you kind of feel like you're having this somewhat out-of-body experience where your body is there, but your mind is somewhere else. So, how do we come back to the grounded confidence? Well, that's what we practice, right? Practice makes practice, not perfect, and maybe not even progress. I mean, maybe we practice just so that we practice. But I do think that we build skill over time through consistent practice. So if what we are practicing for is to develop a solid, grounded center, then the point isn't really to arrive at some finished state. It's really just to keep practicing returning to yourself. So, how might that Tuesday evening look different if you're in the grounded and confident state? Again, asking for what you need, taking a little bit of time to transition, recognizing that moving from the intensity of a clinical environment into the sort of mundaneess of dishes and cooking dinner and helping with homework is a can give you a little bit of whiplash. So building some transition rituals into your day, maybe taking a walk, doing a little bit of yoga, doing some breathing techniques. These are all things that I teach people so that they can have them in their toolkit. You may choose different ones on different days, but the goal is to kind of come back to that grounded center, to be able to feel kind of solid in the middle. And you're gonna do it throughout the day. We're not just gonna let this stress response, chronic stress residue build up all day long. So it's just like bubbling out our eyeballs by the time we get home. We're really gonna have little snacks throughout the day, if you will, where we're gonna reground, kind of come back to ourselves. Using the breath, using the body are some of the greatest tools that you can use. And that's why I teach yoga and meditation. No matter what topic I'm talking about, those are gonna kind of be toolbox things that we come back to. The other reason that there's kind of this difference is because of grief, right? So we know and when we observe, and if we have been through any of the losses that we're allowed to name, this kind of pervasiveness of funk that lives around you when you're experiencing grief. But when you work in these high mortality, high-stakes fields, you absorb and experience grief. Some of it belongs to you. You are actually bearing losses, but some of it belongs to other people, but it's kind of on you too. And so often people, grievers who have had a lost a loved one or people after divorce also kind of have this refrain of, I'm fine, because they really don't know what to say. So there's similarity there and things that we can learn from. One of the techniques that I do really love as a transition ritual, but is also really in itself therapeutic is kind of brief journaling practice, not like I'm gonna explore my childhood. Just can I write down a few things that happened today? Now you can go one of two ways. This can either be processing. You can either say, let me just tell my story, right? I need to just kind of get it out, a little bit of a brain dump, get it out onto paper, then it lives on the paper, doesn't have to live in your mind. You don't have to hold it and perseverate it on anymore. Or we can do a little bit of like lean into what I want to see. That would look like a gratitude practice, like, let me write three things that I'm grateful for today, three things that I did right today, three people that I helped today. One of the things that I love to do is just tell three people thank you. And you can do that in real life, like text them or actually walk up to them and say, thank you so much for helping me today, or thank you for making that phone call. Thank you for leaving me that message, thanks for throwing away my coffee cup. It doesn't have to be a huge issue, but expressing a little bit of thanks towards other people, sending a text, or if you do this practice kind of after you've already left work, you can just write it in your notebook or even want to go old school, send them a thank you note in the mail. Write them out a whole thank you card. That could be a lovely practice. It's really, really healing to intentionally recognize the small acts of kindness or big or big ones that have happened, but really to kind of train to look for those glimmers of goodness that happen all around us can really help us go into the second half of our day with a much more positive attitude after a hard day. So that's the difference between fine and grounded competence. The second distinction I want to make, which is often tied up when I start to talk about self-trust, is self-reliance, right? Emma, I don't need to trust myself more. I need to be able to trust other people. I need to be able to rely on other people. And that is something those are different. Yes, most of us who are high-achieving, high-performing women are very competent and capable. We can do almost anything, and we have, and we will, and will continue to show up. That hyperindependence is actually part of the perfectionism paradigm. So all of that will look very familiar as I start to talk about self-trust. And when I say what you need is more self-trust, you may say, no, I don't, because I have plenty. But I want to invite you to think about this a little bit differently. What you have is self-reliance. You do know that you can do the thing. But what I would wonder, I certainly did not when I was in my burned-out, overworked, just like grit and grind state. What I did not have was an actual trust that I was the person I could come back to. My mind, my mental state, my kind of like internal system, the ground, right? Like the internal center felt really fragile. And as circumstances would start to pile on in life, as things were not going as I hoped them to, the first thing we would do is try to control more, which often looks like doing more things. Again, leaning into this capability and this competence that we all perform so well at, trying to control more of the circumstances, right? Oh, a problem has happened. Let me come up with a solution to that problem. If I got diagnosed with cancer, let me come up with the like 16-step plan of how I'm gonna like optimize my nutrition as I go through treatment or, you know, whatever the case may be, that's the kind of mode that we click into. So feeling like you're problem solving and leaning into that is not the same thing as like knowing that you got this. When you have self-trust, when you can truly believe that you have a strong center that can withstand any storm, you have that steady anchor, you have the recipe for gold. No matter what they take away from you, they can't take you that you show up differently, right? That makes you show up different. The fear goes down, the scarcity mentality goes down. Why would I be afraid if I know I have the recipe for gold? And that's what I want for my people. That's what I want for you. And that's what I think that we're building inside a self-trust school and programs like Thrive or when people work with me. That's always what I'd say my end goal is. Now, that may not mean that anything different changes on the outside. You know, a lot of times people tell me, well, I don't really want to work with a coach yet because I'm not really ready to blow up my life. As if that's the only time that you should do professional uh personal development work is like when you're ready to just completely blow up your entire life. I made amazing changes in my happiness, in my sense of groundedness, in my sense of empowerment, the belief that I could do anything that I set my mind to, my belief that I would have my own back no matter what, my belief that I could get through it and I would be okay, whatever it was, those things changed without really changing much of the circumstances in my life. Um I did change jobs actually as a result of the self-trust process. It wasn't the cause. Being able to trust myself, being able to trust my own mind, go through a process of decision-making that I could feel competent in was actually the thing that allowed me to finally make the decision to leave the Harvard teaching hospitals and go out into no man's land in the community hospice. And it's been an amazing change for me. Other, you know, big life decisions that we often have to face to get married or not to get married, who to marry, to have kids or not to have kids, which city we want to live in, all of these kinds of things do require that we're able to kind of trust our own discernment, trust our own judgment. And I've see just over time, and I think this is because of like erosion of attention and so many opinions that we're exposed to with social media and all of these things, that people are just completely unable to do this anymore. We like are all living our lives by public opinion poll. Have you ever done this, right? Like you want to have to make a big decision and just find yourself asking every single person you meet, what do you think I should do about this? Or what about that? What about that? The people whose opinions really matter should be an incredibly small list. You should have a few people. I mean, I do not mean just go rogue and start never listening to any feedback or accountability, but that we shouldn't really be in this mode where we're having to seek external validation or decision-making support from every single person. Then we get into people-pleasing mode, then we're trying to make everybody happy. So that's the distinction that I see between self-reliance and self-trust. And hopefully that kind of helps figure that out because I get that question a lot. So then how do we actually build it? How do we build the grounded self-confidence? How do we build the actual self-trust? Well, the fact that you don't have these things is not a character flaw personality problem. It's a systems problem. We were never taught how to do these. In fact, we were most of us taught the opposite. Hierarchical, patriarchal systems teach us the opposite. They really don't, the system really doesn't want you to be able to trust yourself. The system wants you to do what it tells you to do, right? And so there's a skills gap. But we close the gap with practice, not with willpower. You don't need to do more. You just need to kind of do the right stuff. So in this culture of hustle and grind, slow structural work, slowing down, coming back to yourself again and again and again, just committing to the returning is the work. So if that sounds good, that sounds interesting and something that you might be worth wanting to explore. I definitely think that self-trust school might be a good fit for you, especially if you are a woman in healthcare in a high mortality field. That's who we help in self-trust school. And you can find the link to enroll or to join the priority list for the next round in the show notes. Definitely drop that. And I'd love to hear how you think about these distinctions. Are you navigating the space between unbind and grounded confidence? Or are you trying to figure out whether you're really overly self-reliant or actually trust yourself? I'd love to talk about that. Drop us a comment or send me an email. Definitely remember to check out our Instagram content and let me know if there's anything else you'd like me to talk about here on the podcast. See you next time.
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