Following your intuition

“What does your gut tell you?” It’s often a question we are asked when we are struggling to make a decision. If you are anything like me (or my former self anyway), decision making is not your strong suit. Even on the simplest things, where the choice seemed obvious, I just couldn’t commit to anything, for fear of making the “wrong” choice.

This can be a dangerous place to stay for very long. If we can’t trust ourselves to make decisions about our own lives, who can we trust? I used to joke about my indecisiveness, blaming it on my Piscean nature. I now realize that my past inability to make concise decisions, even about what I wanted to eat or what movie to see, were symptoms of a bigger problem.

I haven’t always been the most self-aware person. It has only been in the last 3 or 4 years that I have really begun to understand what motivates me, what pushes my buttons and what truly brings me joy. With a greater understanding of myself, I have found that my intuition has made itself known to me in a way I hadn’t experienced before. Perhaps I had experienced it in the past, but it had been so long, I had forgotten!

My new and improved intuition has provided me with some great insights. It is what has led me to discover that life coaching is my passion. It has helped me to make decisions that have made my passion a reality as well as lead me to people and places that will allow me to grow my practice. In addition to the professional benefits, my intuition has allowed me to be a better judge of character. I am able to read people with greater accuracy. While some may consider this another career benefit, being able to relate to people on a level deeper than the language they speak and their actions can help in personal relationships as well. When you can step outside of your own perspective and see a situation from another point of view, it is a very powerful thing!

Being self-aware bring with it greater self-esteem and self-confidence. This allows you to trust the “little voice” in your head that we often disregard. Abraham, via Esther Hicks speaks about our Emotional Guidance System. Our emotions often tell us the answer to our questions, but we ignore them, being taught that me need to base decisions on logic, and not on a feeling. When our “gut” has a bad feeling about anything, why would we go ahead and do it anyway? It doesn’t really make sense to do something that doesn’t feel right, does it? If fear is stopping you, then you have to uncover where the fear is coming from and decide if fear is enough to stop you from doing what you have set out to do. If it’s not fear, but a deep knowing from within that to go ahead is not the best thing for you, then simply decline and move forward.

I am finding that intuition is like our many muscles, the more we use it, the stronger it gets. It isn’t that some of us are born with greater intuition than others (I don’t think so, anyway). I just think that some of us have allowed the negative self-talk, what I refer to as the peanut gallery, to drown out our intuition. It is up to us to quiet that peanut gallery and put our trust in our intuition, the voice of God that resides in all of us.