There are times when everyone around you is convinced something is a crisis.
They’re worried. They’re sounding alarms. They’re telling you why this is VERY BAD and that things could go verrrry wrong if you don’t quickly do something about it.
And you’re sitting there thinking… I don’t think this is a crisis.
You don’t feel the alarm they feel. In fact, you may feel calm while they’re in the storm.
And it’s not because you’re in denial. (Although some may think you are.)
This happened to me recently.
The circumstances and the people involved were telling me one thing, so of course I passed what I was feeling through my own gut check.
Am I missing something? Am I minimizing this? Is there something I need to pay attention to?
But every time I pulled my energy out of the drama and came back to myself, I felt like it was okay.
I couldn’t necessarily SAY that. Telling a room full of people who think there’s a crisis, “Hey, guys, I know this looks bad, but it’s not as big of thing as you think” isn’t always gonna sit well.
It can actually escalate the situation. So I didn’t try to convince anyone else that what I knew was true.
I just needed to trust it myself. And, in this particular situation, everything turned out fine.
But I’ve experienced the exact opposite, too.
Someone is telling me everything is fine…
…and I know it isn’t.
I don’t necessarily have physical evidence. I can’t lay out my case and prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that something is wrong.
But I know. Like in every fiber of my being. And it’s not from a place of heightened fear or creating my own conspiracy theory about it. I just know.
I’ve experienced this with people I’ve hired. I’ve known someone didn’t have my best interest at heart or wasn’t doing right by me, even when I couldn’t prove it.
And sometimes I’ve let those situations go on WAY too long because I didn’t have the evidence to justify what I knew.
Then I finally trusted myself and ended the relationship.
And guess what?
The physical evidence showed up afterward.
That has happened enough times in my life that I’ve become much more willing to trust my knowing before I have the proof.
That doesn’t mean I blindly believe every thought that runs through my head.
There’s a difference between spinning out in fear and dropping into that grounded place inside myself. And sometimes it takes me a minute to find it. (Or it can take hours.)
When there’s a lot happening around you, it’s easy to take on other people’s fears and beliefs and make them your own.
Other people bring their own experiences, fears and opinions to the situation. And before you know it, you’re trying to sort through their stuff while your own brain is busy imagining every possible way this could blow up in your face.
What if I’m wrong? What if I piss someone off? What if I make this choice and regret it? What if there are consequences I didn’t see coming?
That’s usually when I know I need to get out of my head for a minute.
There have been plenty of times when conventional wisdom, other smart people or even the current results pointed in one direction, while something inside me was saying, Nope. This isn’t the optimal way for me to achieve this.
Maybe you want to pivot even though what you’re doing isn’t technically broken. You’re being pulled toward an idea that doesn’t make complete logical sense yet. Or you’re done with something that still works, which is especially tricky because there’s no tidy explanation for why you’d walk away from it.
It would be much easier if every intuitive hit came with a stack of evidence and a guarantee.
I would LOVE for the Universe to occasionally hand me a notarized document that says:
THIS IS ABSOLUTELY THE RIGHT MOVE. PROCEED WITH CERTAINTY.
But usually I have to decide before I know how the story ends.
When things feel particularly noisy in my head, I try to mentally step out of the circumstances for a minute. I quit trying to solve the whole thing, predict everybody’s reactions or figure out every possible consequence. I bring my attention back to myself and feel for what’s underneath all of that noise.
What does my heart know is true? What if I didn’t care what people thought about my choice? What if I wasn’t worried about protecting anything or pleasing anybody?
Those questions have been very powerful for me.
The answer isn’t always the answer I’d prefer. I may realize everything really is okay and I can quit feeding the drama. Or I may have to admit that something feels very wrong and it’s time to deal with it. I may know I’m complete with something before I have any idea what’s replacing it.
And there are times when I don’t know jack diddly doo.
Then I wait.
The point isn’t to make every feeling mean something or convince yourself that your intuition is infallible. It’s to quit automatically overriding that grounded knowing just because the circumstances are screaming in your face, you don’t have proof yet or somebody else sounds really freaking convincing.
Take in the information. Listen to people you trust. Look at the facts and consider the consequences. Gut-check the hell out of yourself.
Then come back to what you know.
Because ultimately, you’re the one who has to live with the choices you make in your life and your business.
And I’d much rather discover I was wrong after trusting myself than spend my life knowing what was right for me and being too afraid to follow it.