Lion King and Self-Trust | Jeremy Cameron
Self-Trust Isn’t About Feeling Confident, It’s About Knowing Who You Are
You’ve probably heard it a thousand times: trust your gut. Follow your intuition. Believe in yourself.
But here’s what nobody tells you: your gut is lying to you half the time. Not because you’re broken. Because you haven’t learned the difference between what your ego wants and what your actual self knows to be true.
The gap between those two things is where most people get stuck. And it’s the exact gap that separates someone like Simba, who remembers who he is and steps into his power, from someone like Scar, who trusts his instincts with perfect confidence and uses them to manipulate and destroy.
Both of them believed in themselves. One of them was right. The other was catastrophic.
So what’s actually the difference? And more importantly, how do you know which one you are?
The Difference Between Self-Trust and Ego Disguised as Confidence
Here’s the thing about Scar: he knew what he wanted. He believed in it. He was clear on his vision and he executed with precision. By every conventional measure of confidence and self-belief, Scar had it in spades.
But Scar’s self-trust came from fear, power, and manipulation. It came from a place of needing to feel safe through control. Mufasa’s self-trust came from love.
That’s the dividing line.
Real self-trust asks the question: Is what I’m about to do consistent with my principles? It’s not about whether it feels good in the moment. It’s not about whether it will make you look good or feel powerful or earn you recognition. It’s whether your action aligns with who you actually are when nobody’s watching.
Scar wanted to be king. Simba wanted to take his place in the Circle of Life, which meant serving something bigger than himself. Same ambition. Completely different source.
When you’re operating from authentic self-trust, your actions and your values are aligned. When you’re operating from ego disguised as confidence, you’re chasing something external: approval, power, status, safety through control.
The problem is they feel almost identical in the moment.
How to Actually Know Yourself (And Why Most People Skip This Step)
This is where it gets uncomfortable, because knowing yourself requires brutal honesty.
Most people grow up learning to fit in instead of learning to belong. They learn which parts of themselves are acceptable and which parts need to be hidden. They learn to wear masks. And after enough years of that, they genuinely forget what’s underneath the mask.
By the time they’re adults and someone tells them to “trust themselves,” they’re trusting a version of themselves that was constructed by other people’s expectations.
So the first step isn’t confidence-building. It’s archaeology. You have to dig back down to who you actually are.
Here’s how:
Get curious about who you are right now. Not who you think you should be. Not who your parents wanted you to be. Who you actually are in this moment. What do you like? What do you hate? What makes you come alive? What drains you?
Write it down. Journaling works. Reflection works. Prayer or meditation works. The medium doesn’t matter. The act of putting words to it does.
Separate feedback from truth. Other people will offer you perspectives. Some of it will be useful. Some of it will be projections of their own trauma or their own lived experience. Your job isn’t to accept or reject all of it, it’s to check in with yourself and ask: Does this land for me? Does this feel true in my gut?
Bruce Lee said it perfectly: take what is useful, discard what is not, add what is uniquely your own.
Start small with decision-making. You don’t build self-trust by betting your entire life on one big decision. You build it by making small decisions and actually following through. One coach mentioned going on intuitive drives where he’d just ask himself left or right at every intersection. No stakes. Just practice. Sometimes he’d end up at a park. Sometimes at a field. Sometimes at a taco truck. The destination didn’t matter. The practice of trusting his own instinct mattered.
The Role of Values in Self-Trust
Here’s a harder truth: you can’t trust yourself if you don’t know what you stand for.
Your values are your north star. They’re the things that don’t change very often. They’re what you check in with when the decision gets murky.
When you’re clear on your values, the self-trust part becomes almost mechanical. You don’t have to agonize over every choice. You just ask: Does this align with what I value? If it does, you move forward. If it doesn’t, you don’t.
The problem is that most people never actually define their values. They inherit them. They assume them. They let circumstances and other people’s opinions shape them without ever sitting down and saying, This is what matters to me.
That’s why one person can hear the same advice from the same mentor and integrate it completely differently than someone else. They’re filtering it through different value systems.
And that’s also why someone can experience the same trauma as someone else and come out on completely opposite ends. Mufasa died. Simba had to decide whether to accept Scar’s narrative or remember who he actually was. He chose to remember. That choice wasn’t automatic. It required him to have enough of a sense of self, enough of a value system rooted in love instead of fear, to make it.
The Real Cost of Not Trusting Yourself
When you don’t trust yourself, you outsource your decision-making to other people.
One person described it this way: after experiencing a major life event, he realized he had a subconscious program running in the background that said, I can’t do it by myself. It came from a small moment in childhood that he’d long forgotten. But it shaped every major decision he made as an adult. Whenever something big showed up, he felt the need to ask somebody else. He felt paralyzed without external permission.
That’s the cost. Not just indecision. Paralysis. A life lived on someone else’s terms.
The antidote isn’t arrogance or isolation. It’s not doing everything alone and refusing input. It’s being willing to ask for perspective while still maintaining the final say over your own life. It’s being able to say, I hear you. I value your input. And here’s what I’m actually going to do.
The Practice: From Love, Not For Love
Here’s the distinction that changes everything: for love versus from love.
When you create or act for love, you’re performing. You’re doing it to earn approval, to get recognition, to make someone else see how great you are. The external validation is the point.
When you create or act from love, you’re expressing something that’s genuinely yours. You might receive appreciation, and you’ll be grateful for it, but it’s not why you’re doing it. You’re doing it because it’s true. Because it matters to you. Because it’s aligned with who you are.
The same action can be either one. The same presentation, the same effort, the same result. But the source is completely different.
Real self-trust means you can do something from love, receive appreciation for it, and not let that appreciation become the reason you do things. You’re not chasing the high of being seen. You’re not dependent on external validation to know that what you did was worth doing.
That’s freedom.
The Bottom Line: Trust Yourself By Knowing Yourself
Self-trust isn’t a feeling. It’s a practice. It’s something you build by repeatedly choosing alignment over comfort, by checking in with your values instead of your ego, by knowing who you are well enough that you can recognize when you’re drifting from it.
It’s knowing the difference between Simba and Scar. Both believed in themselves. Only one of them was actually trustworthy.
The question isn’t whether you can trust your gut. The question is: do you actually know what your gut is telling you? Or are you listening to fear dressed up as confidence?
Start with one small decision today. Check in with yourself. Notice what you actually want, not what you think you should want. Write it down. Then do it. Build from there.
The rest follows.
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