Psychology Today49%
How Leaders Can Learn to Trust Themselves 61%
By Ina Gjikondi Ed.D.0%
7/18/2026, 6:09:47 PM
BS Summary: This article contains 30 faulty reasoning types, including Indoctrination, Appeal to Emotion, and Confirmation Bias, with Unattributed Quote as the most egregious example at 23% saturation with 229 hits. Analysis detected 1,650 faulty-reasoning hits from 995 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 57.5% and a BS Rank of 61% (7,076 of 18,099 articles). This article is worse (more manipulative) than 60.90% of the article peer group.
"I don't know how to make decisions anymore.
I don't trust myself."
She said it before she had fully sat down, and then reached straight for the remedy: time-management skills, a way to prioritize, something to cut through the fatigue of choosing.
"How can I know how to trust myself?"
she asked.
"I am stuck in decision fatigue.
I need a matrix with criteria to evaluate my options on this project."
I asked her if I could ask a question; she agreed to try answering it with her eyes closed.
"Can you remember a moment when you knew exactly what to do?"
She was quiet.
Then: "This morning, when I picked my aubergines in my garden.
I know exactly when they are ready.
And I like to pick them with my eyes closed."
With your eyes closed, I said, how do you know?
"When I touch them, they're plump—the pores in the skin feel a little warmer, juicier, not as hard as when they're not fully ripe.
And there's a scent coming through them; they smell different.
When I open my eyes, I can see the most shimmering purple color, and my whole mouth remembers my grandmother's cooking, still warm in that earthen dish, the mud dish, we called it—the one she made everything in."
And then she adds, "My grandmother taught me about the garden and all the vegetables and the fruit, and the flowers.
It was our little game."
Her eyes were still closed, and a few tears came through.
It was a beautiful remembering.
So I offered: "That decision you're weighing—the one about the project that you are stuck in—can we try it on this way?"
She nodded.
"You're in the garden.
You approach the project.
Now reach out and touch it.
What do you feel?"
"Not a ready aubergine.
It's a little slimy, even—like the droplets that come out when you cut something too early.
And the earth around it is dry.
It looks like it needs water."
She opened her eyes.
"This project needs more time.
It needs a little more attention, a little more water.
Not yet."
And then, wide-open joy: "I can't believe this.
I do know.
I had forgotten this."
## How We Come to Know
She asked how to manage decisions and reduce fatigue, but chronic decision fatigue is rarely about time or too many options.
It stems from losing the ability to make choices directly.
There are two ways of knowing: one that analyzes from the outside, and one that knows directly and embodies experience.
Mezirow (1991) called it a disorienting dilemma: The moment the familiar, analytical way of making sense stops working, and something in us goes still with doubt.
The way back is not around the thing again.
It is in and through the senses, through the body.
We have inherited a narrow story about knowing: that it happens in the "head," in language, in reasons we can defend out loud.
We know the world through the body long before we reason about it.
Perception, Merleau-Ponty (2012) insisted, is not an operation the mind performs upon experience; it is something the flesh already lives.
To know is first to be in contact.
My study of ecocentrism in coach education kept surfacing exactly these more-than-cognitive ways of knowing—sensory, intuitive, embodied—and naming the body, centered in the heart, as the true site where knowing happens (Gjikondi, 2025).
This is not the opposite of knowledge.
It is its oldest root, known directly through our primal senses.
## Why the Aubergine Knows First
My central research finding was this: The recognition of non-human agency strengthens human agency (Gjikondi, 2025).
When we let the plant, the soil, the season be genuine partners in our knowing—teachers rather than objects—something is returned to us.
And the non-human is not always a plant, or an animal; it can be a living memory in your earthly body.
The aubergine is not a metaphor my client reached for.
It is a place where her knowing has never once failed her—a body of competence built in relationship, handed down across a kitchen table.
She simply knew, because her body had been trained by years of loving attention.
So when I asked her to reach out and touch the project, I was borrowing a channel she already trusted completely and letting the decision travel down it.
The slime, the dry earth, the not yet—that was her own accurate knowing, speaking in the only language it never doubts.
And that is the language of her body, and aubergine is what her knowing feels like.
## Building a Baseline for Knowing
You can build embodied knowing deliberately.
* **Find your aubergine**.
Name one domain where your body knows without hesitation.
* **Study its signature**.
What does "ripe" feel like in you—the scent, the give, the warmth, the settledness?
And what does "not yet" feel like—the slime, the dry earth, the slight pulling-back?
* **Try the decision on**.
Close your eyes, hold the decision in your hands, and let your body report: ripe, or not yet?
* **Return and calibrate**.
Do this often enough, and you build a library of your own knowing.
It lives in your hands, and in your throat, and behind your ears, and in your hair.
## A Leader Who Trusts Her Knowing
We do not think our way back to knowing.
We remember it.
Agency is not something a leader reaches for out in the world; it is something she recovers by going into the body that has been slowly, accurately knowing all along, often since childhood, perhaps in a garden.
"I do know.
I had forgotten this."
Every leader I sit with is closer to that sentence than she believes.
And a leader who trusts her own knowing gives everyone around her permission to trust theirs—which may be the most important decision she ever makes, and the one her body already knew how to make.
Analysis
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