Trusting Your Intuition to Make Decisions
Have you ever wondered why you make one decision or another? Do you have a “little voice” that helps you make decisions? Or do you just get an idea in your head and sometimes you follow the idea and sometimes you don’t? These are all variations of intuition and intuitive decision-making.
Trusting your intuition to guide you in the right direction is something that takes practice and intentionality.
People who are drawn to the idea of building social businesses or nonprofit organizations likely feel this is part of their mission. Some might also identify as spirit-guide or heart-centered entrepreneurs.
Trusting your intuition is an important part of the journey to create social impact and manifest the life you want. Intuition can help you learn lessons and choose the path that leads to your highest truth or highest self. Making decisions using your intuition can help you move away from a 9-5 full-time job to create your own venture or grow a sustainable social enterprise.
How Does Intuitive Decision-Making Work?
I was the first in my family to go to college. No one could guide me or tell me how to decide between two top-tier colleges in California. One of them was offering me scholarship money and the other wasn’t. Logically, I should have gone where the scholarship money was.
Instead, I got the sense that I needed to physically be on each campus to understand the culture and my potential experience. As soon as I stepped foot on both campuses, my intuition told me right away that one of them was not for me.
I went to U.C. Berkley after working hard to get recruited and accepted. It was my dream school in the era affirmative action era. I knew that I would get into at least one top-tier school in the University of California system. Plus, I had a 4.25 GPA and was super into extracurricular activities.
For some reason, the whole U.C. Berkley thing didn’t feel right. It felt like a version of my reality that wasn’t what I saw for myself. Back then you had to mail your response to college with a packet of information. I waited until the last second to decide and walked up to the box and put the packet for U.C. Irvine in the slot.
My intuition told me that I liked the U.C. Irvine campus, atmosphere, and the location near the beach better than U.C Berkley. I was ecstatic that I was accepted because it was my dream school.
I somehow knew I’d have a better experience and would have a better life if I went to U.C. Irvine. Do I know that’s true for sure? Of course not.
What I do know is that my experience at U.C. Irvine set me up with an internship and scholarship through a program for first-generation college students called SAGE Scholars. That internship helped me decide to pursue a graduate degree in macro-level social work and move to New York to attend Columbia University. Which then led to me spending 6 months working in a trading center in Uganda, being awarded the Presidential Management Fellowship, and starting a 13-year career in the federal government. I used my intuition to help me make each of these decisions on what path I needed to take next.
Now that I’m a mindset coach for female entrepreneurs, I realize that I’ve been using intuitive decision-making since I started college. I just didn’t know what I was doing or how to deliberately use this strategy to my advantage.
3 Reasons to Start Trusting Intuitive Decision-Making
I recently shared this story in a Clubhouse room where we discussed intuitive decision-making. You can listen to that podcast episode here.
I wanted to know if people use their intuition to make decisions. How does that feel for them? What outcomes have they had? Did their intuition do them wrong or did they have an amazing outcome?
Luckily, the Level Up Collective is a fairly woo-woo intuitive bunch so there were a lot of layers to the conversation that shows how complex working with your intuition can be. The ironic thing is, although it seems complex, it’s actually really simple. Here are three reasons why you need to start using your intuition to make decisions right now.
Reason #1: Intuitive Decision-Making Can Help You Break Your Scarcity Mindset
Intuitive decision-making can help you reset your brain if you are constantly stuck in a scarcity mindset.
Having a scarcity mindset creates fear of “what if” or thinking that there is “not enough”. Fear can hold you back from taking a risk or doing something that your intuition might be telling you to do.
When you decide to trust your intuition and get past your fears, you can start to break free from the feeling creating fear inside you. You’re the only person who can trust your intuition to help you get through this. You’re the one that has to do the work by finding ways to listen to and trust your intuition.
Sometimes that might sound like a voice or inner monologue that is telling you not to be fearful. It could also be a thought that is showing you how to get past that feeling of scarcity. Intuition feels and sounds different for everyone so you are the best judge for yourself.
Reason #2: Work In Harmony With Your Highest Self and Devine Energy
If you don’t move in tandem with your vision and your dreams, you can find it difficult to make them happen. Intuitive decision-making helps you tap into the energy of your highest self.
That means connecting to the highest version of yourself with the highest vibe can help you become that person. You can experience internal conflict if you’re working out of alignment with your highest self.
Feeling conflicted is one way your intuition could be telling you to slow down and consider how best to align yourself with the highest version of yourself. If you’re a person of a particular faith, that might include aligning yourself with the creator or universal energy.
You might also notice that when you don’t trust your intuition, you see “signs” that show you that you are not in alignment with where you should be going. Sometimes we ignore these signs and see them as happenstance or unrelated incidents. However, if you have the thought that it might be a sign. It could be an indication that you should at least pay closer attention to your intuition.
Some people even experience what are known as “downloads” or “intuitive downloads” where information is given or gifted to them. These downloads can feel like a bunch of intuitive messages that are coming from the creator or an outside source.
As humans, we have the ability to tap into source energy and ask to receive downloads that will help us reach our purpose and highest self. If you believe in a higher power, intuitive downloads might be something that you’ve experienced or something that you can explore further.
When our minds are in lockstep with our ambitions, our passions, and our desires, with we are closer in harmony with the universe and our purpose. If your intuition is “not working” it could be because your actions are out of alignment with your true purpose and desires.
You can take steps to bring yourself back into alignment by asking yourself what your intuition feels like and remembering the last time your actions felt in alignment with your intuition.
Reason #3: Get the Full Benefit of Logic, Reason, and Intuition Working Together
We are taught to rely heavily on logic to support our decisions. However, sometimes the universe throws us something “illogical” to deal with. If you can’t make sense of something, you might get confused.
Your intuition might sound like it’s telling you to do something the opposite of what your logical brain is saying. This can cause you to ignore your intuition and actually move you further away from your purpose.
When intuition and logic clash, logic helps us organize information, make sense of things, and feel safe. That feeling of safety and the “known” is very powerful but can also limit us to things we think we “understand or “are familiar with”.
Those limiting beliefs and “logic” can be based on trauma and experiences from our childhood. When we are growing past these limiting beliefs and experiences by following our intuition it can be uncomfortable when our intuition seems “illogical”.
Your intuition is designed to guide you from the purest place with the highest intentions. When logic and intuition clash, focus on which feels like the most expansive version of you. Trusting your intuition to guide you past your limiting beliefs can make you feel expansive or limitless. It can also feel exciting or a bit scary. That’s why the fear is there, to hold you back in a place that feels safe but might not be the best place for you.
Get the benefits of logic, reason, and intuition by understanding what your intuition feels like in your body and what it’s saying. The more practice you get working in harmony with your intuition, the more logical and clear things will become.
For some people, this feeling might feel like a “fuck yes!” in your entire body or it might feel like a “fuck no!” Even if your logical mind is telling you the opposite, explore the feeling and the emotion more so you know why your mind is telling you one thing while your mind is saying the other.
Remember Everything is Created at Least Twice
Your intuition helps you extend your imagination, and creativity, and make the impossible possible. Don’t forget, everything that happens, in reality, happens at least twice, maybe three times.
The first time is when the thought occurs. When that happens we might speak about it and that makes it happen at least twice. When we take action that is the third time.
That means all the things we see in the world were thought about, spoken about, or taken action upon before we see them. If that thought occurred some other way, a whole different perspective might seem logical vs. what we currently know.
That’s why it’s so beautiful to work with your intuition.
Thank you!
This post was inspired by a conversation in the Social Impact Level Up Club on the Clubhouse App. Follow the podcast for more conversations like these.
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