How to Trust Your Gut and Why it Could Save Your Butt
The amount of trust between the gymnasts in the photo is astonishingly high.
She has to trust that her partner isn’t going to let her fall, and he has to trust that she’s balanced correctly for the pose.
And they each have to trust themselves to know and speak up if something doesn’t feel right.
But how often do we trust ourselves, really?
The Prevalence of Self-Doubt and Its Cost
Self-doubt, dare I say it, is natural.
What’s unnatural is letting it take over our everyday confidence.
There are people who appear to trust themselves every minute of every day, following their intuition — listening to their gut — and ending up ahead.
In stark contrast are those people who second-guess every little decision they make, ending up miles away from where they’d like to be with no idea how to get there.
Trust Yo’ Gut
The difference is that the first type of people learned to listen to the signal their brains send about practically every situation.
Your brain is processing situations and how it thinks you should be responding (emotionally, physically, hormonally) far faster than you could articulate it.
It’s why we get a “bad feeling” about some people but can’t really explain why.
It’s why we feel like taking a different route to work in the morning and later find out about a shooting or a car wreck right along our normal path during the time we would’ve been driving through there.
It’s why sometimes we can walk through our cities at night without a problem, but one night we just feel a sense of impending doom and ask a buddy to join us.
In any of those situations, going with your gut absolutely has the potential to save your life.
And the cost could be losing it.
How to Trust Yo’ Gut
Like anything, it takes practice.
You likely already know what it feels like when your gut is warning you of something you can’t explain.
If you’ve gotten to the point where you’re in a constant state of anxiety and everything feels like impending doom, please see a therapist.
Because of the prevalence of self-doubt, we don’t trust our own brains to be honest with us.
We might go with our gut decisions and arrive on the other side with nothing bad having happened on the normal path.
But the one time something does happen that we managed to avoid — your gut seems pretty friendly now, doesn’t it?
