Trusting Yourself

Quite often a strong inner prompting suggests a course of action that is contrary to the one we have made consciously and one that is based on seemingly reasonable rational reasons.

Inside something says ‘no’ though. It’s a more subtle voice because it’s a feeling sense, perhaps even a felt sensation in the body.

The reasoning mind makes a good argument for carrying its plan though….it can have a strong desire behind it, or a motive based on fear of consequences as a driving force, or even greed or a desire to please others.

I’ve had many of these lessons and I’m still getting them. They are reducing in negative consequences which may suggest I’m starting to get it and just slipping up now and then.

I often find out that the inner voice was right after all, the best answer was given to me and I ignored it or overruled it with a sensible reason, or fear or desire. Or I listened to it and then said no and let it go.

Here’s my latest example hot off the press. I have been dreading starting a design for a client. For weeks and weeks I delayed starting. I was perplexed why I wasn’t doing it. After all it was a nice client, and a prestigious job. Something didn’t feel right about it at all but I couldn’t see why, and the reasons for doing it outweighed not doing it.

The inner resistance was so strong though. I then proceeded to berate myself daily for not getting round to starting, for procrastinating. I got anxious delaying it, imagining the client getting annoyed waiting. I spent weeks feeling anxious about why oh why I wasn’t just sitting down and doing the damn work!

Well he just contacted me to say he chose to go with the original designer. And actually as it turns out, due to my procrastination and strong resistance to doing the project I hadn’t done too much work when he did decide to tell me. Whew. I could have done so much more work on it for nothing.

A lesson.

It reminds me of a previous lesson, a much harder one with dire consequences. I took on a project a couple of years ago that my insides were screaming ‘no’ to me about. My desire to please led to the words ‘yes’ coming out my mouth instead of ‘no thanks’.

It ended in months of stress, everything going wrong, lawyers, a £30k loss, damaged my business big time, and caused months and months of stress. We have recovered now and it’s history. And a painful lesson was had. Thank you to that situation.

So how to trust oneself? For a start the fear level we have has to be relatively low or it will crowd out any more subtle inner promptings. Fear creates much noise in our heads. A plethora of the ‘what if’ thoughts, and the catastophising.

Desire for an outcome and ambition can crowd it out too.

We have to learn to relax deeply and so be in touch and quiet to hear how intuition wants us to move. There is a will and path I sense that is wiser and it’s available and accessible if we listen. It has been called the razor edged path for good reason 🙂

And an open curiosity to observing what is being felt, the self compassion to give time to the less heard parts of ourselves.

My conflict and inner dissonance was a battle between what I knew intuitively and my reason that I ‘should’ be doing something I really didn’t want to do. Sometimes procrastination can be telling us something important, that what we intend to do isn’t in alignment with our authenticity.

Off to the park with the dog for some nature peace.