Trust Your Gut

It is clear there is something very wrong with you.

There must be, or you wouldn’t have gotten so lost.

You wouldn’t be challenging what you’ve been told.

You wouldn’t have so many follow-up questions to the simplistic answers you’ve been given.

You wouldn’t keep turning around and wondering what exists between the lines, beyond the boundaries, off the paths and trails of destiny.

You wouldn’t keep sighing “what if?” when others are living what is.

But there’s a feeling in the pit of your stomach that there’s something better for you. An instinctual urge that you have long practiced suppressing, that keeps pushing through in the most inconvenient ways. And maybe you tried to follow that instinct once, and got burned. So you locked it up and promised to never trust it again. Or you have wavered, letting it tug on you and disrupt any hope of stability or success. That gut feeling is a liability, isn’t it?

What if it isn’t? What if what your gut is trying to tell you is actually important? 

Your gut is trying to get a message to you, but fear is trying to tune it out. Your instincts aren’t bad, just because they have failed you. And if the best version of the life you can live, the place where you will find the most fulfilment, is off the beaten path, the only way to get there is to begin to hone those instincts. You cannot walk away from the way you’ve been told the world works and find security. You will be leaving security on the well-lit road behind you.

But how do you actually do the work of trusting your gut?

The first step is to understand what is happening when you feel that tug away from the familiar or expected. Stop everything for a moment and just listen to your inner dialogue. What are you saying to yourself? Do you immediately try to talk yourself out of whatever you’re feeling pulled toward, because that thing is not practical? Do you list all the perfectly valid reasons for self-doubt?

You cannot know what will happen if you choose an impractical idea. If you try for something beyond your reach. We know that there are risks involved in pursuing a life worth living, but fear is a powerful force for self-preservation. And it is not without value. Fear can keep us safe from harm. But if you begin to really evaluate when those danger alarms go off, I believe you will find that most of the “harm”  you want to fight against isn’t life-or-even-security threatening. The harm is to our ego, our feelings of self-worth, our defense mechanisms, our comfort. But we treat those things as if they are critical to our survival. They are not.

Trust your gut and see if it isn’t trying to push you away from meaningless preservation into the kind of risk that is always necessary for growth.