Why you shouldn’t listen to your gut

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Your gut is not always the best guide when making decisions. Your gut wants you to feel safe and comfortable, which is not always the goal. An ambitious and balanced life is not one that feels comfy and cozy, it’s one that has you putting yourself out there and going after big goals. In today’s podcast, I want to share with you 3 ways to make decisions that is not based on your gut. I will also breakdown exactly what that mysterious “gut feeling” is and when you should and shouldn’t be following it.

Topics in this episode:

  • How your gut has been deceiving you

  • Making decisions you know are “right”

  • Defining what is “right” for you

  • Why you don’t do the thing you know you should do

  • 3 ways of making values-based decisions

  • Why you shouldn’t follow your gut when you want to do something big

Show Notes & References:

Episodes on overcoming the fear of failure and making decisions:

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Transcript


Intro

Your gut is not always the best guide when making decisions. Your gut wants you to feel safe and comfortable, which is not always the goal. An ambitious and balanced life is not one that feels comfy and cozy all the time. It's one that has you putting yourself out there and going after big things. In today's podcast, I want to share with you three ways to make decisions that are not based on your gut. I'll also break down exactly what that mysterious gut feeling is and when you should and shouldn't be following it. This podcast is gold for any working mom that has been feeling stuck wanting to make some changes in their life or their career and go after the happy and balanced life that they want, but can't seem to get over that hurdle of discomfort that comes when they think about going after it. You ready? Let's get to it. 

Welcome to the ambitious and balanced working moms podcast, the place for women who want to balance their ambitious career goals with their life as a mom. If you're looking to feel more confident, decisive, and productive at both work and home, then this is the place for you. I'm your host, Rebecca Olson. Let's get to it. 

Hello, working moms. Happy Monday. I decided to do today's podcast topic because I'm seeing a sort of theme for working moms right now. It's this theme of stuckness. Being stuck in indecision, being stuck in wanting to change jobs, stuck in wanting to go after a career that's more fulfilling to them, stuck in wanting to feel less stressed and less overwhelmed at work. Stuck in wanting to prioritize their family instead of their job, stuck in maybe even wanting to quit their job for a while and take a break just feeling stuck. And 100% I know what this feels like. Many of you have probably heard me share at least bits and pieces of my story over the past couple of years, but I wanted to share a little bit about it because I do know what it feels like to be stuck.

Before I became a coach, I was in high level event management. I did logistics for big tech companies like Facebook, Twitter, and things like that in the San Francisco Bay Area. And that job paid well. I carried the benefits of the family. A good portion of my paycheck went into our retirement, and I wasn't happy. I felt stuck and really wanted to make a change, but I was scared that it wouldn't be the right change or maybe I would do something crazy like change jobs, and then I still wouldn't be happy. There was a whole good year of really just feeling stuck. I felt very responsible for our family because I made more money than my husband and because of all the benefits and all these things and the savings that we had. I felt like I had to maintain that on some level. And that didn't give me the freedom that I wanted or the flexibility that I wanted to maybe do something different. And looking back during that time, there was something very specific that I did that got me out of that place of stuckness. And now it's something that I coach on with a lot of my clients. So here's what I did. I stopped listening to my gut. Yes, you heard me right. I stopped listening to my gut. 

What I mean by ‘your gut’

Let's start by talking about what your gut is. I mean, of course, we're not talking about the health of your gut. There's a lot of research out there that talks a lot about making a healthy gut and the microbes and all of the different enzymes that go into gut health. Like, that's a big thing out there right now. But we're not talking about that. We're talking about your gut feeling. The reason why it's called your gut feeling is because it's literally a sensation that most of us feel right around our stomach. It's sort of like the lower section of your torso, your belly. Now, most of the time when we refer to that experience in our gut, we describe it as being almost something that's peaceful or calm. There is a sense of this kind of makes sense, and everything feels at rest or at peace within you.

But have you ever asked yourself where your gut instincts or that sort of gut feeling ever comes from? It's sort of magical. And we talk a lot about our gut feeling or those gut instincts when we're making decisions. It's almost like an internal guidance system that's telling us what to do. The problem is that our gut instincts are like intuition, if you will, is based on our past experiences. So unless you want to continue to repeat your past, you likely should not be always listening to your gut. This gut feeling is actually associated to a part of your brain that controls safety and security in your body. So it's basically a voice in your body that's always trying to keep you safe and comfortable, which is why it has this kind of mysterious feeling of peace and calm and has a feeling of safety to it. 

Your gut is never going to tell you to do something risky

In other words, your gut is never going to tell you to do something risky, to do something where failure is the potential to do something where your reputation might be put on the line, or where somebody else might have to sacrifice on your behalf. No, your gut is never going to tell you to do that. In other words, your gut is never going to tell you to leave a good job, even if you're unhappy for another job, where the potential for happiness is there, but it's not guaranteed. Your gut is never going to tell you that now is the right time to quit your job and start that dream business. Your gut is never going to tell you to leave work at 5pm today when you have a presentation due tomorrow that you're only half prepared for. Your gut is never going to tell you to protect the time you placed on your calendar to get your own work done when somebody else has asked to schedule over it.

If you want something different than what you are experiencing in your life right now, your gut is not going to be your guide.

If you've never invested in yourself before, your gut is also going to tell you to not spend $8,000 to hire a coach. If you want something different than what you are experiencing in your life right now, your gut is not going to be your guide. Let me say that again because I really want this to be very clear to you. If you want something different than what you are experiencing right now in your life, your gut is not going to be your guide to get there. Now, I'm not suggesting that you don't listen to your gut or your intuition at times. Like, for sure, if things are going just fine in life and you like things the way they are, you want to keep things the status quo, then great. Your gut has been leading you exactly in the direction you want to go. If you're feeling happy and balanced, you're exactly where you want to be in your career. You're meeting your personal goals and professional goals - that's amazing. Keep going. Keep following those instincts. Keep following your gut. BUT, if you're not there right now, if you're not experiencing the happiness and the fulfillment and the balance that you want in your life, then you're going to have to stop listening to your gut. You're going to have to start making decisions in a different way, and that's going to feel uncomfortable.

My coach likes to say ‘if it makes you feel like you're going to throw up or it kind of turns your stomach a bit, then you're on the right track because change is always going to feel uncomfortable.’ Even when you know it's the right thing to do, it still feels uncomfortable. And that's sort of my point. When you know something is right in your brain but it feels uncomfortable in your body, that sense of being right is not coming from your gut because your gut is sort of flipping out and feeling totally anxious, there's something else that's telling you it's right. So you essentially have two parts of you sort of in opposition to each other. You have your gut that's feeling super anxious and uncomfortable. That's connected to the safety and security in your brain. That's why it feels uncomfortable. But then you have this other part of you that you've tapped into in your brain that could understand why you might choose to move forward and do something that feels sort of risky or where you might fail or things might be different. You're able to tap into the part of your brain that can see reason and logic and priorities and trade offs and values and goals and kind of weigh all of those things and you can make a decision from that place that feels kind of right in your brain, that feels totally in opposition to your body because your body is flipping out in safety mode.

We want to make sure it is the right change

The problem is when we are making changes in our life or doing anything that's different, whether it's super big like changing jobs, or it's just small, like trying to get up in the morning to have a little routine for yourself or to work out. The problem is when we're making change, we want to make sure it is the right change. But rightness is completely subjective. You just simply get to decide what is right for you and your family and your life. There's no real right or wrong in life ever. But what most people mean when they start talking about wanting to make a right decision and you can't really see me, but I'm putting that right in quotation marks, right, is that they want to make sure that whatever they decide that they're going to succeed, that they're not going to fail, it's going to be the ‘right’ choice. 

Getting something right is not synonymous with everything working out.

The trade offs that they're making in moving forward, doing something different, are going to pay out in the end. When somebody is stuck in making a right decision, the only reason they're stuck is because they're trying to be certain they don't fail, which of course we can never actually be certain of. You could go back and listen to a couple of episodes on this podcast where I really talked about failing. If that's a struggle for you, I'll link to those in the show notes so that you can even dive deeper into this idea of failure. But for the sake of this podcast, what I really want you to hear is that getting something right is not synonymous with everything working out. Getting something right is not synonymous with everything working out. So you could leave your job right now where you're unhappy and you can go to another one where you're pretty sure that you're going to be much happier. Only to get there and still not be happy doesn't mean that you made the wrong decision, it just meant it didn't work out for whatever reason. But for sure you're going to learn some lessons along the way. For sure you're going to learn a lot about yourself in the process. For sure you're going to build some resiliency, some clarity, have a better sense of what you want next.

I have a client where this has been their exact experience. In retrospect, they went after this new job and the way it was presented to her when she was in the interview process, everything seemed like it was the ‘right’ decision for her. And then she got there, it just didn't work out. It wasn't the right environment, it wasn't the right vibe, she wasn't making the right relational connection with people. It doesn't mean that she got it wrong. 

‘Recognizing that I really couldn't fail.’

For me, I left a really cushy job to start a coaching business where I had no idea if I was going to be successful or not. I didn't really know what it took to be successful in a business. I had never done it before. And if it didn't work out, meaning I could not make the money that I wanted to, it would not mean that I got it wrong or that I even failed. This was a really important conversation I actually had with my husband about this. I told him as I was deciding to invest in coach training and I ended up having to sell some of our retirement stock in order to pay for that training and so forth. In the middle of all of that, I got to this point where I said, look, I'm not sure if this is going to work out. This could be basically the most expensive personal development journey I have ever been on and I still think it's worth it. That thought right there was actually one of the ones that really unlocked for me the ability to make that change and make that leap into my coaching business is recognizing that I really couldn't fail. The business will succeed or it won't. But either way, I will have gotten exactly what I was supposed to get from the experience, and I will learn and I will move on from it.

So the question is, how do you know that something's ‘right’? And again, I put that in quotes. It's not going to feel peaceful. If you're going to make a change, you can't ensure that it's going to work out. So there are really only three ways to evaluate a decision that I want to share with you that's going to tap into the part of your brain that's not the safety and security part like your gut is. It's tapping into the part of your brain that can think on a higher level, can take in all of the trade offs and the values and the goals and all of the perspectives and things that you need in order to get to the ‘right’ decision even when your body is flipping out and is completely anxious and uncomfortable, while you're making the decision, that's ultimately what you are going to need to do. You're going to have to tap into a different part of your brain. You're going to have to use your brain in a different way in order to make a decision to get to a new place in life if you want something different - even while your body and your safety and security brain is flipping out, your gut essentially is flipping out.

Okay, so I'm going to talk to you about three ways to evaluate a decision that's not really based on this nice, lovely, peaceful gut feeling that we all wish we had about every decision that we make in life. The first one is something that I do with my clients, both my one-on-one clients and the clients that are in the Ambitious and Balanced Working Moms Collective, which is that I want you to create for yourself almost a filter that tells you more objectively what's right for you.

Your gut instinct is a feeling.

Remember, your gut instinct is a feeling. And feelings come and go, they ebb and flow. If you're in the middle of thinking about changing your job, for sure you know what I mean, right? One day you're on top of things at work and everything seems manageable, and you're like, oh, maybe I should just stay. And then the next day things are super overwhelming. You have way too many things on your plate and you're like, oh my gosh, I cannot stay here at all. So your gut feeling sort of ebbs and flows based on your circumstances of life, because you're thinking different things about your circumstances at various points on it, sometimes moment-to-moment, sometimes day-to-day. But when you're making decisions to be happy and experience balance and be fulfilled, we don't want you making that decision because probably it's going to require some change in your life. We don't want you to be making that decision based on your feelings when they're going up and down. We want the decision to be based on something much more concrete.

In coaching, I bring all my clients through naming three things: their core values, their identity and their purpose. And at the end of doing those three exercises, they have a total of maybe like 12 to 15 words that really describe who they are at the core, what's most important to them, how they want to show up in this world. And these values that my clients name are sort of universal. They are core to who they are, not to their job or just to their mom life, they sort of transcend everything and that's what makes them highly valuable. They become something that is like a compass for making decisions. It becomes a filter for making decisions because it's not based on any one area of life, it's based more on the core to who you are.

So a lot of times with my clients, when they're in the middle of trying to make a decision about something, I will ask them to bring back up their values, their identity and their purpose. And I will say, hey, based on these words, based on what you know about yourself, what answer seems logical to you right now? What do you think these words have to say about the answer?

Taking the guesswork out of making decisions.

I just did this the other day with one of my clients who had been considering leaving her profession of ten years, and I had to bring up all of these words and make an argument for me about why she should leave her career. I love helping my clients create this filter for making decisions because it takes so much of the guessing out of our decision making and it brings it into a much more logical, much more values based place instead of this mystery gut thing that we all wish that we had. So that's the first one. You want to make decisions that are right for you. You want them to be in alignment with the deeper core parts of you, which means you're going to have to name some of those deeper core parts of you, like your values, your identity, and your purpose.

And just as a side note - if you already know that this tool would be life changing to you, that you're stuck in a place of fear and comfort and you need something like this to help you really make some important decisions, I encourage you to schedule a time to connect with me about coaching. I offer a free coaching session to anyone that's interested in working with me as a coach, either one-on-one or in the Ambitious and Balanced Working Moms Collective. So this is resonating with you. We can talk a lot about this in that free coaching session and really discuss for you a plan for how to get you to the right decision in your life. And I would say, of course, if it's your gut, if your instinct is saying, yeah, I should probably reach out, I've been thinking about reaching out, I want to say that, but it's more like if it makes logical sense to you, like you've been trying and trying and trying and you can't figure it out and you still just feel stuck and stuck and stuck and more time has gone by, then why not trust your higher self and let's just schedule this call. It's like a way of practicing what we're talking about today, right? Trusting your higher self, trusting your more logical part of your brain instead of all of that emotional stuff that's going on.

Ask yourself, does this get me closer to my goal?

The second way that you should look at making decisions that are not your gut is by simply asking yourself, does this get me closer to my goal? If the answer is yes, then you're probably on the right track. You should probably do it. Let me give you an example. I'm going to use a less big example like changing jobs because I know not everybody is in that place. And I'm just going to talk about managing tasks differently because I know so many of us, so many women are in jobs where their to-do list is just longer than the amount of time that they have to work. There's just never going to be enough time to get down to a to-do list of zero, as I like to call it. So you know that that's never going to be the case and you want to stop feeling overwhelmed. So what you need to do is you need to start turning down meeting requests so you have more time to do tasks you need to start telling people that you aren't going to be able to get to that until next week, right? So you're going to have to push back deadlines, which is going to make people feel kind of disappointed and frustrated. You're trying to figure out how to better manage your tasks so that you can be more productive. And these are the types of things that you think you should be doing in order to do it. My question to you is, if you do these things, do you think that you would get closer to your goal of having a more managed to-do list, feeling less overwhelmed and balanced? If the answer is yes, then you probably need to do them.

I was talking to a client last week where we were discussing organization and productivity and they were struggling and they said that they always kind of felt like they struggled to be organized and feeling like they were just always flying by the seat of their pants and that they really wanted me to help them come up with some better systems. Some better structures. So that they could get more organized. That's what they wanted. And I asked them how much of your problem with being organized and being productive just simply comes from the fear of disappointing others and that need to make sure you get everything right, essentially just to never fail? They said probably 80%. So I told them we don't really need to have a conversation around how to better organize and structure your time. We need to have a conversation about how you can let people be disappointed and how you can just get more comfortable with failure. They told me that the idea of doing that just almost made them sick to their stomach. They would much rather focus on just building better organization and structure so that maybe they will never have to disappoint someone and never have to fail. That's what their brain wanted to do because that was a more comfortable thing to do. And I told them that idea of probably you feeling a little sick, that's a sign that that's exactly what you need to do. It in fact, gets them closer to their goal of in this case, being probably 80% more productive and organized. And so they agreed.

The question I'm posing to you is, does it get me closer to my goal? That's one of the ways that you can go about overcoming the nervous, anxious, unsettled feeling that your gut can sometimes have.

That's the same question I asked a lot of working moms that are thinking about hiring me as a coach. The investment to work with me one-on-one in coaching is $8,000 and the investment in the collective is $2000. Both are significant investments. 99% of women, their instinct is to say, no, they don't want to spend that money. It feels very uncomfortable to spend that kind of money on yourself. Oftentimes in our free coaching session, as we're talking about this, we have a conversation around how they would utilize the money if they didn't invest it right here in coaching.

And just a week ago, I was having a conversation with a working mom that told me that she would just simply pay off her debt faster. And when I asked her how much faster she would pay off her debt, she said probably about four months. And so I said the goal is having a fulfilling career and a balanced life, and if that's truly the goal, is investing the money in coaching going to get her closer to that goal, or would paying down her debt faster help her reach that goal? Now, this is a really important question for your brain to wrestle with and it's why I pose it in these conversations because it made her really question a couple of things. First, was the goal really fulfillment and balance or was it paying off her debt? There's no wrong answer to that. But she needed to ask that of herself to get really clear, because there was a very clear answer for her on what to do based on her answer. So knowing the goal and then asking yourself, what is going to get me to that goal faster? Does this get to my goal? That's going to help guide your decision even when it feels uncomfortable.

Are you saying no out of fear? 

So the third way of making this decision is asking yourself, are you saying no out of fear? You know you really want to leave your job. You're just afraid. You really want to start saying no more to people and pushing back deadlines and saying no to meeting requests, but you're afraid you're going to be passed up for projects if you do that. You really want to tell your team that you're not going to work late tonight, but you fear what they think of you if you said that you really just want to go out on your own and be a contractor, start a dream business, something like that. But you fear you won't make it. Fear is never a great reason to make a decision. Fear makes you feel powerless. 

An ambitious and balanced life is a life of living outside of your comfort zone.

Remember following a dream, making big changes in your life, even just as simple as being willing to disappoint someone else if you're a people pleaser, all of that is going to feel really scary in your body. It's not going to feel very peaceful and calm. So there's going to be fear. And fear is actually a really good sign that you're on the right track. An ambitious and balanced life is a life of living outside of your comfort zone. It's a life of never settling, of doing things different than maybe everyone else around you. It's a life that's not based on staying comfortable, but taking strategic risks.

Conclusion

Don't follow your gut working moms when making big changes in your life and going after big things, it will never be the most helpful guide. I hope these three ways of thinking about making decisions helps you to move forward and get out of that place of stuckness. I do know exactly where you are. Most of the clients that work with me, they come to me wrestling with some of these big decisions that they have in their life, and I would love to be there for you. Reach out, schedule that free coaching session with me. I will put a link in the show notes to that. It's rebeccaolsoncoaching.com/book, and I'll talk to you next week. Let's get to it.

Rebecca Olson