The worst part is that you knew. Not fully, not with proof, but somewhere along the way there was a moment when something felt wrong and you talked yourself out of it. You gave a reason. You decided you were being unfair, or tired, or paranoid. And now that it has all come apart, you keep going back to that moment, and the person you are angriest at is not the one who hurt you. It is you, for seeing the warning signs and looking away. That anger has spread, and now you second-guess everything, because if your own instincts could fail you like that, what can you rely on?
I want to talk with you about restoring trust in yourself, because I have been there, and I have sat across from a great many people who were there too. In police work and security, the professionals who get burned are almost never the ones who saw nothing. They are the ones who saw something and explained it away. The same is true in leadership and in church. What I learned over the years is that the instinct was almost always right, and the failure was in what came after it. That is good news, though it may not feel like it yet, because it means the equipment works. What needs rebuilding is your relationship with it.
Your Instincts Did Their Job
Start by separating two things that have gotten fused in your mind. The first is perception, the moment when something registered as off. The second is decision, the moment when you chose what to do about it. Your perception worked. It flagged the problem, sometimes early and sometimes repeatedly. The breakdown happened at the decision, where you weighed the flag against other things you wanted to be true and chose the other things. That is a real failure and it deserves honest attention, but it is a narrow failure, and it is a fixable one.
Go back to the moments you keep replaying and write down what you actually noticed each time. Be concrete. The story that did not add up. The way they handled a small challenge. The gap between what they said about a person and how they treated that person. When you lay these out, you will probably find that your read was accurate and specific, and that you noticed more than you gave yourself credit for. That list is proof that the part of you that reads people is worth trusting. It is also the beginning of a set of signals you will not override next time.
Understand Why You Overrode the Alarm
People do not ignore warning signs for no reason. They ignore them because acting on them would have cost something they were not ready to pay. Maybe you had already committed publicly and admitting doubt felt like admitting failure. Maybe the person was charming and confrontation felt cruel. Maybe you needed the relationship to work because of what depended on it, a job, a marriage, a ministry, a friendship you had invested years in. Whatever it was, name it, because the pressure that made you look away is still in you, and it will be there next time.
I would also ask you to look at the voices that helped you look away. Sometimes the person you trusted was actively working on your doubts, wounded that you would question them, reminding you of their loyalty, pointing at someone else as the problem. Sometimes it was your own belief that a good person gives the benefit of the doubt without limit. David heard from more than one source that Absalom was at the gate winning hearts and building a following, and he did nothing until the trumpet sounded, because he could not bear to see what his own son was. Love is a good reason to hope. It is a poor reason to stop looking.
Restoring Trust in Yourself Means Building a Process, Not Waiting for a Feeling
The doctrine I have carried through every job is that trust should be tested, not assumed, and it applies to your own judgment the same way it applies to anyone else’s. You are not going to wake up one morning feeling confident again. Confidence follows evidence. So build a small process for how you handle a warning sign from now on, and then use it enough times that it becomes habit. When something feels off, write it down the same day, in specific terms, before you have a chance to explain it away. Then decide on one small thing you will do to check it, a question you will ask, a fact you will verify, a small trust you will extend and watch.
That process does two things. It gives your instincts a place to land, so they are no longer competing with your hopes in the privacy of your own head. And it gives you a track record. Each time you notice something, check it, and find out you were right, you make a deposit. Each time you check it and find out you were wrong, you learn something about the difference between a signal and a mood, which is also worth knowing. Either way, you are no longer overriding. You are investigating, and a person who investigates does not have to fear their own blind spots the way you do now.
Make the Cost of Looking Lower Than the Cost of Looking Away
Most people override warning signs because checking them feels expensive. Asking a hard question might offend someone. Verifying a story might feel like an accusation. So make checking cheap and normal. Decide in advance that you ask follow-up questions as a matter of course, with everyone, warmly and without apology. Decide that you verify claims that matter, and that anyone who resents being verified has told you something useful. Decide that you will bring your doubts to one trusted person outside the situation before you decide they are unfounded. When checking is your ordinary practice, you never have to gather the courage to do it in the moment.
Joseph’s brothers came to Egypt twice, and both times Joseph tested them before he revealed himself, even though everything in him wanted to embrace them the first day. He put a silver cup in a sack and waited to see what they would do when one of their own was in trouble. He did not let his longing for reconciliation decide the question. He let their conduct decide it. That is what a process looks like when the stakes are personal. It does not mean you feel nothing. It means your feelings do not get the final vote.
Forgive Yourself the Way You Would Forgive a Good Officer
I have had to sit with people after a call went wrong, when they missed something they now believe they should have seen. The ones who came back strong were the ones who could hold two truths at once. Yes, they missed it, and the miss had consequences, and they owned that fully. And also, they were operating with the information and pressures they had at the time, and they were doing their best with it. You are allowed to hold both of those. Owning the failure without drowning in it is what maturity looks like, and it is the only posture from which you can actually learn.
So give yourself a timeline and a task. For the next several months, practice noticing, writing down, and checking. Keep a record of the times you were right. Talk to yourself the way you would talk to a good officer who made an honest mistake and wants to be better. Trust in yourself will come back the same way trust in anyone comes back, through a long enough run of tested behavior that the evidence becomes hard to argue with. You will not be the same person you were before this. You will be someone who listens to the alarm, and that person is much harder to fool.
Go Deeper
If the warning signs you ignored came from someone with authority over you, and you stayed longer than you should have because leaving felt disloyal or impossible, I wrote a book about that. It follows David through the years he spent serving a king who wanted to see him fall, and it draws out how he read the signs, how long he waited, and what he did when the moment came: The Spirit of Saul.
Commissioner William Epps is an author and security leadership consultant with a background in law enforcement, fire service, private security, and federal government. His books are published through E.P.P.S. Method Publishing Co.
Leave a Reply