I stayed in advertising agencies too long. I was bored and frustrated. I asked my coach about it, more than once. I asked friend after friend. And still I stayed. It cost me my peace of mind and any real satisfaction I was likely to get from work. I wasn't working in my purpose. I wasn't aligned with myself, and I certainly wasn't aligned with a lot of the people I worked with.
I was asking everyone except myself, and the truth be told, I already had the answer.
Trusting yourself is mostly a matter of acting on what you already know. And if you can't find the answer, the problem is often the question itself. If we aren't getting an answer, try asking the question you are afraid of and word it in a way so that it has a yes or no answer. Listen to what comes back. Then act on it in one small way.
The cost of not doing what you know
When you know something and don't act on it, you create noise in the system. Your system. It is a kind of internal turmoil, and it doesn't stay truly internal for long: it leaks out. Things start to feel off. Your dealings with people can start to 'not flow'. It costs you time, because things don't run smoothly. It costs you energy, because part of you knows you're not doing what you need to do.
The voice doesn't go quiet. If anything, it gets louder. It gets antsy - and a little bit angsty towards yourself, and the world.
I see this with myself and with my clients. A client of mine was growing restless with someone in her life and was starting to blame this person for how she was feeling when the thing that was unresolved was actually something she knew she needed to act on and hadn't. It was costing her her agency, and it was actually freezing her. From that place, she was unable to move.
Why asking everyone else doesn't settle it
Most of the time, most of us ask the wrong source. We ask friends, books, experts and now AI. Very few of us go inside at the very moment that matters.
AI is an interesting case. It can give very good answers, and if you know how to ask, it gives very very good answers, even though it carries some bias.
The risk comes when we ask it things only we should answer ourselves. Which direction to take in life. Whether to stay, or whether to go. The decisions that come from the heart. At that point, we are outsourcing our own knowing.
AI can still help with those. It will guide you towards your own answer, but only if you ask it how to get there, rather than asking it what the answer is.
Experts are the same. All of us want one, and all of us will ask one at some point in our life. But in the end, the invitation is to go inside, because the answer that matters most is already in there.
A lot of us, unfortunately, need someone to hold the space before we can get reflective; before we stop and access what is already there. Even me. I rarely do it by myself. As soon as someone is with me, the answer is much easier to reach.
That isn't ideal. You - and I - can get better at it by practising going inside by ourselves, over and over. But most of us don't start practising until we have sat with someone and learnt that what we were looking for was inside us all along. And often, we learn the hard, long way.
Ask the question you are afraid of
Our 'guts' often struggle with big, complex questions. But what our intuition and 'gut' loves is an opportunity to answer a powerful question with a clear yes or no.
"What should I do with my career?" is hard for it to answer. "Am I done here?" is not.
The answer usually shows up as a feeling in your body, not as a sentence you hear in your ears.
So be bold, and be definitive. Ask the question you have been avoiding. It is the one your intuition has been waiting to answer. Or, you can take the long, hard way.
Five minutes, then one small step
The first thing I ask a client to do is the simplest exercise there is, and most of us don't get taught this.
Take five minutes. Tune in to that voice, and listen for the message underneath the noise.
You will know when it arrives. You feel it in your body, and it feels good. It rings true because it is coming from you, from a part of yourself.
That message gives you the message and the motivation to make the change - but only if you start to act on what you heard. So act on it in one small way. You start trusting yourself again by listening and by acting on what you heard.
If you want to practise this, I have made two small tools to go with this note. The first, Where do you already trust yourself?, looks at three areas of your life, shows you where you already act on what you know, and gives you one small thing to try this week. The second, the kept-decisions scorecard, is a one-page sheet for the week: one small decision a day, whether you kept it, and what you felt before you decided.
Is that my gut, or my old fear?
This is what clients ask next. Most of them can tell the difference once they slow down. They have had moments before when their gut was obvious, and most of us have also had moments when old fear creeps in.
To distinguish between them, you slow down, tune in and listen. How does it make you feel as you listen? Invariably, your gut feeling makes you feel calm/excited/lighter - some version of a positive feeling.
But know that you can feel calm about what you heard and still be afraid of acting on it. Both can be true at once, and I wrote about that in Can't make a decision?.
The gut is not the only way in
Where I disagree with "just go with your gut", is that the knowing doesn't arrive the same way for everyone.
For some people it comes from the heart. For some it comes from their emotions. And for a few, it comes from the head: those few need to think a decision through until the answer is clear. But the 'feeling' that lands once we have arrived at that answer feels calm/excited/lighter.
If it's something close to your heart, where you can never have all the information and criteria for a truly informed, rational decision, the answer comes from tuning in.
In either case, the advice is the same: carve out the space and time to listen.
What to do tonight
Ask yourself the question you have been avoiding asking - the one you are afraid of. Word it so that it has a yes or no answer. Then wait, and listen for your own wisdom to answer.
If you would like someone to walk you through this, I keep a free 45-minute call open: peteradams.coach/call.
You may not know how yet. But I know you can trust yourself.