{
  "$type": "site.standard.document",
  "bskyPostRef": {
    "cid": "bafyreifiiv2tqdedhqx3fbziasgi7vipa5ielkrtdgrf47tvxgjfcdewnm",
    "uri": "at://did:plc:5etifnk2vdjcny5wylbudbmt/app.bsky.feed.post/3meqpsu7pawp2"
  },
  "coverImage": {
    "$type": "blob",
    "ref": {
      "$link": "bafkreic3ao4n4onurg6fpp2zd3qqxxlw62c6cckzgid7fbl3txrosw5q5i"
    },
    "mimeType": "image/jpeg",
    "size": 637968
  },
  "description": "Whether leading or following, the first person you have to trust is you.",
  "path": "/dance-of-lead-and-follow/letter-2-trust-your-own-lead/",
  "publishedAt": "2026-02-13T14:30:12.000Z",
  "site": "https://grokk.ist",
  "tags": [
    "The Dance of Lead+Follow",
    "Margarita Steinberg"
  ],
  "textContent": "Letter 2: Trust your own lead\n\n0:00\n\n/1043.656644\n\n1×\n\n> If everything around you seems dark,\n> Look again.\n> You may be the light.\n> - Rumi\n\nHow do you take even one step, if Doubt steps in to block your every impulse?\n\nFor most people, there are realms where they feel greater confidence, making it easier to move — and others where they act more hesitant. You probably already know which is which for you.\n\nWhen you’re experiencing doubt, it’s relatively easy to notice the concerns that give you pause. But have you ever wondered how you _do_ doubting?\n\nIt’s an intriguing process. Doubt asks you to split into two and sing as if with a double-voice, adding a tremulous treble line above the base-note hum of your original impulse. Doubt’s counterpoint melody goes, _Yes, but wait…_\n\nBefore Doubt butted in, there was no decision to be made. This is the state that Taoism and Zen refer to as ‘not-doing.’\n\nIf you watch a toddler, they’re all in. They don’t pull back a hand reaching for a morsel of food, or a toy. They haven’t yet learnt to question if they _really_ want it. They want it: that’s all they know, and that’s all there is for them to know.\n\nThen grown-ups come along and ask, _Are you sure?_\n\nHow do you answer that? Where do you turn to look? What do you listen to? Do you sniff at your proposed course of action, to check that it smells right?\n\nDoubt comes in wearing sensible garb. Its calling card is helping you to double-check that the path you intend to tread is solid, free from traps, wise.\n\nWe trust Doubt because, sometimes, it helps us to avoid disaster. Fools rush in, we say.\n\nBut let Doubt have the upper hand, and instead of doing a quick extra check, it stalls and equivocates. Maybe it’s safe to go ahead, but on the other hand…\n\nIf you let Doubt move in and become your everyday companion, it can make it seem as if there is no way to resolve the to-and-fro of pros and cons. Its spell teaches you to hover in the Land of Indecision.\n\n> If you let Doubt move in and become your everyday companion, it can make it seem as if there is no way to resolve the to-and-fro of pros and cons.\n\nIs there a voice that can break Doubt’s spell?\n\nWe often hope that such a voice can arrive from outside ourselves. We ask friends’ opinions, we consult colleagues, we sound it out with our spouse. (This ‘we’ includes me, by the way.) We look for a boost from the outside because our own voice, turned against itself, only carries half its original strength.\n\nIf the authority you consult is powerful enough in your world, you may feel happy to nod and follow its lead.\n\nBut at least some of the time, Doubt then does a double-take and asks, _But is this right for me?_\n\nWhich brings you back to the task of deciding for yourself.\n\n* * *\n\n## **Speaking over yourself**\n\nIf you watch someone doubting themselves, it can seem as if they are darting back and forth between two chairs:\n\n_Chair 1:_ Shall I?\n\n_Chair 2:_ Or perhaps better not?\n\nNotice how, when you’re in Chair 2, doubt sounds like your own voice, like it’s “me” talking. But as soon as you switch chairs, doubt seems “not-me,” an opposing force.\n\nThis sets up Doubt as something that you need to wrestle down. Something to conquer. A victory over yourself.\n\nBut there is only yourself to achieve it with! What a conundrum!\n\nWe have another phrase for this oscillating state: to be in two minds. But how can you be in two minds at the same time? It sounds almost spooky…\n\nOur language and traditional common sense speak of a person’s mind as if it’s all one thing, like one of those chairs. But at least since Freud, we’ve been aware that a person’s inner landscape contains multitudes. You don’t just have one inner voice — it’s more like an inner chorus. You can carry within your psyche many varied, and sometimes contradictory, perspectives.\n\n> You don’t just have one inner voice — it’s more like an inner chorus. You can carry within your psyche many varied, and sometimes contradictory, perspectives.\n\nSo it’s perfectly possible for one person to entertain two contrasting points of view on the same topic.\n\nDespite this, our language still carries on with the metaphor of battling doubt. Some even talk of teaching you how to “banish doubt forever.” Since this inward battle is pitching you against you, this frame sets up for one part of you to lose, by default.\n\nAnd that’s not all that’s in play when we’re grappling inwardly with doubt.\n\n* * *\n\n## **Meeting your inner ‘monster’**\n\nFreud once used the image of a house as a way to describe and map the many modes and faculties inside a human being. In a letter to a fellow psychologist, Freud wrote that he was particularly fascinated with the basement, the hidden depths of the psyche, for which he coined the term the sub-conscious.\n\nIt’s no secret that Freud viewed the sub-conscious with a mix of fascination and suspicion. But he was not the originator of this outlook. Over the previous two thousand years, many religions espoused the view that human nature is split into two: good and evil, spirit and body, “higher” and “lower” self. The well-lit above-ground chambers of intellect and aspiration, and the dark dank sub-basements where everything you’d rather banish lingers.\n\nIs it any surprise that Freud’s associations with the “lower” regions of the self ran in the same direction as suggested by his culture? In the house of Freud’s imagination, the basement was where the “animal” self lived the life of the flesh and where the “base” instincts lurked.\n\nThis suspicion toward the self is so embedded that people often worry that if they touch some deeper places in themselves, they will uncover some “pit of iniquity,” some revelation about themselves that will have them running for the hills in terror or revulsion.\n\nI remember vividly this expectation welling up inside me at the start of my training in psychology. Probing deeper felt intensely scary.\n\nHow can you trust yourself if you believe that somewhere in your depths lurks a monster version of you? Or if not exactly a monster, then at least a dodgy, slippery, untrustworthy self?\n\n> How can you trust yourself if you believe that somewhere in your depths lurks a monster version of you?\n\nWhat makes it trickier still, if you’re primed to suspect, you can find evidence to support the doubt. Any time you hesitate, or change your mind — there you go again, being untrustworthy.\n\nDoubt is not just about deciding which course of action to adopt — but how to trust the “me” that makes the decision.\n\nOften, people attempt to solve this by striving to “be better.” They hope that it will be easier to trust themselves once they’ve managed to become wiser, more disciplined, a paragon of virtue.\n\nBut of course, in this chase to the pinnacle, people bring along the rest of themselves. So they keep on running into their “imperfections.” Their hope of becoming the ideal fades.\n\nThis is the greater challenge when I talk with people about self-trust.\n\nHow to find a way out of the entrapping circle?\n\nI will offer you the same reply as I offer clients. In countless close-up conversations, when people speak of what they’ve been holding at bay, banished to the nether regions of their psyche, what emerges into the light is not some “resident evil.” Instead, it’s always something tender and intensely human. Something that’s been difficult to make space for. Something that’s been hard to inhabit openly. Something carrying a spark of their aliveness.\n\nThe violence people fear at the hands of their “monstrous” hidden self… is actually their everyday. It is the violation of demanding perfection and denying the organic and imperfect nature of being human.\n\n> The violence people fear at the hands of their “monstrous” hidden self… is actually their everyday. It is the violation of demanding perfection and denying the organic and imperfect nature of being human.\n\nWhen I say something like this in a conversation, a complex mix of responses flash across my client’s face. I don’t ask them to believe. I ask instead that they dare to check for themselves. If they agree, we hold an ‘interview’ with one of their inner ‘monsters.’ It’s their own words — their own answers — that persuade people.\n\nAs the ‘monster’ voice from inside them — often for the first time ever — speaks of its longing, of its pain, of its secret gift, people’s faces light up as their bodies lighten up. Their demeanor changes and they say things like “I love what I’m about!” (This spontaneous joyous outburst from a client’s mouth has become a favourite quote.)\n\nFor me, these moments are like watching the most beautiful sunrise that ever was.\n\nWhat if, all the way down to your deepest depths, what there was to find was warm, flawed, living human beauty?\n\nWhat if you could know and feel this, every day and night?\n\nAnd if you could allow this to be so, even if just for a moment in your imagination, what version of you would you become, bathed in the rays of such a truth?\n\nThe point is, to take any step at all, you need (enough) trust in yourself. When you trust your take, you can take a step — even if you then immediately retract it. Whether leading or following, you’re doing it with your whole self.\n\n* * *\n\n## **Your feet know the way**\n\nRemember how we started, by noticing how Doubt stepped in to put in question what felt real to begin with? Trusting what’s true begins with knowing what you know: your arm wanting to move, your eyes seeing what they see, your ears hearing what they hear.\n\nThe writer Terry Pratchett made up a phrase for this anchor in your truth: First Sight. It means seeing what is really there instead of what one hopes to see, expects to see, or what others see.\n\nWhat if how you see and what you feel could be, as they once were for your toddler self, truths you could trust? Of course, you would arrive here not by reverting to the innocence of childhood, but with the benefit of sophistication won by arduous adventure. You arrive here, as great travelers returning home after circumnavigating the globe, approaching the same place from the other side.\n\n> What if how you see and what you feel could be, as they once were for your toddler self, truths you could trust?\n\nDoubt arrived when your personal inner world first came into contact with the social world — when your First Sight was tested through encounters with how others see and feel. I call the challenge this creates **_Autonomy-in-Connection_**. This will be the theme of my next Letter.\n\n* * *\n\n## **The freedom to change**\n\nThe freedom to take a step has to be matched\nwith the freedom to change your mind.\n\nIf you take a step forward,\nyour very next step could be\nto go back to where you started from.\n\nJust like you could take one step into a room,\nand then decide to leave it.\n\nEach of those two steps\ncan be made with full conviction.\n\nIs there a decision that’s been sitting with you\nthat could feel lighter\nif you knew it could be reversed?\n\n* * *\n\n💃\n\nThe Dance of Lead+Follow is a series of letters by Margarita Steinberg on the subtle, delicate choreography of human relationships — how we meet ourselves, one another, and the world.",
  "title": "Letter 2: Trust your own lead",
  "updatedAt": "2026-05-05T18:46:54.743Z"
}