Trust Your Gut: Learning to Follow Your Intuition

Hello, hello, and welcome back!

I just have to say that I am so happy to have this podcast. It’s been such a privilege to talk to a lot of people over these last couple of weeks who are saying they were listening, and were loving it. It’s really a dream come true as we’ve shared a couple of times already.

Gigi and I both have been really tuning into what are the topics that are most alive for us right now.

And I had a great coaching session a couple of weeks ago, and this theme of intuition came up. Intuition has been a passion of mine – an interest of mine for many years now. I’d say I’ve been on my journey of learning to follow my intuition for about 12 years now.

I want to tell you a few stories today that revolve around this topic of following your intuition. Because we’ve all heard this term, “follow your intuition”, but what does it actually mean and how can you do this in your day-to-day life?

I have learned through a lot of trial and error. I had no idea what I was doing when I started.

I’ll share some of those key experiences over the years that really taught me what intuition was. How to begin to use it as a navigation tool to have a better life – to help guide me to things that I could not have predicted or planned or come up with on my own. 

As I shared, I started out having very little connection to my intuition. Who knows, as a kid maybe I did. But as I went into my teen years, I went more into my head than being connected with my heart and soul. I was really in this phase of doing what I thought I should do or what logically made the most sense, or what I saw other people doing that seemed to make them successful. I was really coming from this place of my mind as I was making decisions and navigating through my life.

Case in point was deciding to go to business school – nothing wrong with that. I trust that it was the perfect thing in my journey. But the truth is if I had studied what I was really interested in and really fascinated by, I probably would have studied psychology, and possibly communications.  And so that was one example of going with my head over my heart and soul. 

It was all perfect. I don’t believe that we make mistakes. I think it’s all a part of our journey.

However, I can see now that I was navigating my life in a very different way. So sometimes I would come from desire. But I want to make some distinctions today between desire and intuition and how can you tell the difference. 

Gigi and I are actually going to record another podcast episode – because I’ve always been fascinated by what is the difference between aliveness and intuition. Because aliveness is a lot of what we teach and what we talk about in our work and our coaching – alignment and aliveness. And how does intuition play into that? 

Because to me, it’s actually something different. It’s another tool that we can use. There may sometimes be overlap, but they are actually different.

And so I thought, I could just have this conversation offline with Gigi and really understand the distinctions from her point of view – with her 38 years of experience. Or we could get on live on a recording here for you all and have it as an open dialogue. So, we will go deeper into that in a future episode. 

Today though, I want to talk about distinctions as I see them. 

Sometimes I was coming from desire in making my choices – what did I want? It wasn’t that I always chose what my head said was the right move. But again, intuition to me, though it can sometimes overlap with desire, is a different thing.

I want to share what I’ve learned again through the lens of these stories. Stories where I, or sometimes people close to me, either followed our intuition or did not follow our intuition, and then what happened as a result. And I believe in imperfect shares here. So if you guys hear my lawn care happening in the background, we’re gonna just lean into this topic anyway. Because the information we’re sharing here is more important than perfect sound quality. 

So wherever you are, I just wanna say on your journey of learning to follow and trust your intuition, I hope these stories inspire you to lean in and listen even a level deeper.

And if you’re brand brand new to this topic or even thinking about this, then hopefully this opens something up for you and has you start to reflect in a new way.

A little bit of context. My background or the way that I grew up was very much about your aliveness and doing what you love. But then through the challenges we went through in my teens, that I’ve shared about in other episodes, I really shifted into this head over heart – head over intuition approach. But I would say it was really more head over heart.

I didn’t even know what intuition was at the time. I’d heard the term, but I had no connection to it. So some of you may be in that place where you’re listening to this going, “I’ve heard it. I kind of get the idea, but I don’t really know what that means.” And so that’s how I was coming into this. I don’t know how to explain it, but certain things just happened. I guess we all have intuition and sometimes we follow it. And sometimes we don’t. 

One of my first big intuitive choices or leaps was when I was probably 25 years old and I was living in California. I had moved out here after university and I had just started my first business in copywriting and marketing strategy.

I remember I was living in this apartment with three other guys – my partner and two other guys. I didn’t have a lot of money at the time. I had $60,000 in student loans that I was paying off. I don’t think I even owned a car yet. I was just brand new in starting my career – starting my journey. 

I had started this business sort of – not even really planning to start a business. When I came out of university, I couldn’t really find a job that I wanted. I worked a job for six months and then I just said, “What else can I do that people need?” Because I couldn’t find something that was really interesting for me and would give me the flexibility to travel and do the things I wanted to do.

So here I am in this apartment and I’m working 60 plus hours a week – doing copywriting, getting my business started. I remember I had started following these different coaches. This was early on in the coaching industry – sort of starting to take off. I was starting to write copy and do marketing for coaches and speakers and authors. So, somehow I had come across these coaches online and their names were Nisha Moodley and Sarah Jenks, I believe.

They had paired up and they were going to host an event in Northern California in Sonoma called Live Free – Live Free Retreat. It was three days or something like that in this beautiful resort. Interestingly enough, it was the Lodge at Sonoma.

And in a full circle moment, we are actually hosting our fall retreat there this year (2024) in September at the Lodge at Sonoma. It’s been 11 years since that experience or this story that I’m telling you. And we’re just having this beautiful full circle moment. It’s a gorgeous resort right in the heart of Sonoma County in wine country. 

So I’m online and I see this retreat come out. I immediately had this very strong feeling – I need to be there. I don’t remember exactly how much the investment was, but I want to say it was somewhere in the range of $2,000. Maybe $1,500 to $2,000, plus food – or maybe some meals were included – plus lodging and getting there and everything else.

That was a lot of money to me at that time. And I didn’t know why, but they had a payment plan option available and I was just like, “I’m in, I’m going.” I must’ve been one of the first people who signed up because it was like minutes after they put it out there. I was like, yes! and I signed up right there on the website.

I ended up driving up with my boyfriend at the time – I didn’t have a car, remember? So we drove from San Diego up to Northern California. 

One other thing happened before we went…

Which was that I saw these photographers online, must’ve been through Facebook because I wasn’t even on Instagram. I don’t think at that point if it even existed. I saw these people doing these photoshoots, with these photographers in Northern California named In Her Image. I looked it up online and it looked like they were within an hour from where the retreat was going to be held. And they just did these gorgeous photos that were very goddessy and beautiful.

So I thought, “Well, I’m starting this business. I’m going to need headshots.”

This was how I logically talked myself into it. I said, I’m going to need headshots for my website. My website at the time was a WordPress blog that I built myself and tried to make it look like a real website. These were very, very early days. We didn’t have the amazing drag and drop builders that we have now. 

So I said, I’m going to do a photoshoot before I go to this retreat. I signed up for the photoshoot. We drive up to Northern California and I show up – I do this photoshoot. At first we took headshots and that’s all great. Then I had thrown all these more costumey fun things into my suitcase, just thinking maybe we’ll get a few shots of something different. And they were like, “Oh, these are beautiful. Let’s do it!”

And we ended up in this field – it was a field where there’s high grass. Think about that. It was in Petaluma. The sun is out. It’s this beautiful day. I got this gold floor length skirt that my mom had given me with this beautiful satiny fabric and this crop top and all this jewelry. They do my hair in a unique way. And we take these photos. 

When I left that photoshoot and I’m heading to the retreat the next day, they sent me a sneak peek within 24 hours. It was this photo of myself in a field, throwing my skirt, looking to the side and just looking so bold and fierce and powerful. 

It was this powerful moment for me – “Wow, that exists in me.” 

Because you have to remember I was not very confident at this time. I wasn’t making much money. I was working really hard. I had never really fit in. I was homeschooled my whole life and went to a university – which was wonderful, but just not really a fit for me culturally. 

And here I saw this image of myself embodying something. And it was such a transformational moment and it kicked off my love of photo shoots – which I’ll share more about in other episodes. Not only that, I’ve worked with these photographers many, many times since. So more to come on that part of the story.

So I drove to the Lodge at Sonoma – this beautiful resort, very close to the heart of Sonoma. I checked in, and I’ve got a roommate for the event. I proceeded to have this beautiful 2-3 day experience where I met maybe 40 women at this event. It was a fairly big size and just heart centered, open-minded women. And we were talking about our lives and our businesses and it was a beautiful 2-3 days.

But the interesting thing is that, it wasn’t something that happened in those 2-3 days necessarily that I look back on and go, “Oh, my life was changed.” It was the people I met largely.

So at the end of the retreat, we were able to stand up in a circle and share if we had an ask for the group. I stood up and I knew nobody in the group was from San Diego. 

I said, “I know none of you are from San Diego, but I just moved there not that long ago. And I’m lonely. Basically, I’d love to meet other people like you in San Diego. If anybody knows anyone, would you please introduce me and let’s get together.”

As a result of that, I got three introductions from people. I went out to three different friend date dinners. And two out of those three people ended up becoming friends. One of them in particular introduced me to another woman, who then introduced me later to North County, San Diego, where I live now in Encinitas, Carlsbad. She invited me to a party up there. I started to meet these people in North County, San Diego, and I just fell in love. 

I found my community. I found my friendships. 

I could go on and on and on with this story, but not only that – so friendships came out of it. Clients came out of it. I had people refer me to business or hire me directly that I met at that retreat.

Not only that, there was someone I met at that retreat who hired me to do some marketing for her. And 7-8 years down the road when my sister was looking for a job, I connected the two of them and she ended up working for her for a year or two.

So it was really incredible – coming together of all these different people and it kicked something off in my life that changed my life forever.

It was also probably a huge part of me staying in California at that time. I stayed in California until 2018 and before I’d had that experience of going to that retreat, I didn’t feel like I fit here. I hadn’t met my people. I wasn’t in the part of San Diego that I really ended up falling in love with. There were so many things that might have led to me leaving sooner if I hadn’t had this experience. 

And staying in California in those years was a pivotal part of my life’s journey – the people I’m connected to and the work that I do – so many different, beautiful results have come out of this one decision that I made to attend this retreat in Northern California. 

I always love to share this story because it’s almost like tendrils that are working their way through my entire life. I can really look back and see, “Wow, how much came from this one decision.”

That was my first experience of following my intuition. My first profound experience, because I’m sure there were other ones prior to that.

I’m going to share a few other stories because I think they’ll give you different lenses and different ways of thinking about what’s intuition for you and how it shows up for you. Sometimes it’s a moment like that with a retreat or a big experience. And sometimes it’s been a quick in-the-moment decision to do something different.

So the night that I met my husband, Sunny, who is Canadian and from the Toronto area, he was traveling in Southern California at the time. The night that I met him, I was supposed to go to a different party. I had a girlfriend and she and I were supposed to go to this one party that night. And at the fairly last minute, I got invited to this other gathering. I have to say for this part, my mind was in there a little bit, because I was looking for my life partner and I heard that it was a men’s retreat, like a personal development retreat after-party. And I thought, “Well, that’s definitely somewhere I probably want to be because I’m looking for a growth-minded man.”

I don’t know if it was so much intuition, but I think there was a blend of intuition and my mind going on that night. 

And I want to share these stories and these distinctions because sometimes your intuition will agree with your mind. Sometimes your intuition will agree with your desire – sometimes it won’t. 

So in that first story, it was pure intuition. 

It was pure, like a pull. Yes, there was a desire. But I wouldn’t say desire is what was leading strongly in that case. It was just like a knowing – I had to be there. It didn’t matter what it took or anything like that. It was just a yes.

The second story I’m telling here is really an experience where my mind said something and my intuition agreed. 

So I changed my plans at the last minute, and went to this after-party for this men’s personal development retreat. It was in Carlsbad, California, where I live currently. It was in a mansion right on the water that they had rented out for the retreat for the week. There was a whole group of men there. They’d come in and they’d had this experience together. 

I walk into the party, do the rounds and there are some amazing people there. I really was enjoying myself. I had girlfriends there as well. I didn’t really meet anybody though that sparked my curiosity in a romantic sense.

I said, “Great, I’m just going to have a nice time. Perfect.”  And I just went about my evening.

After a little while in the evening, Sunny, who had been in the bedroom because he wasn’t attending the retreat – he was actually filming the retreat. He had a background in film and television. He had been finishing up some things on his computer with the video footage. He walks out of the bedroom that he was staying in, which was on the same floor that I was in – in the living room. And I’m standing in with a group of women talking.

And as he tells the story, he walked out, he saw me and made a beeline over. It was this instant recognition, desire or pull – whatever you want to call it. And he walked over, he started talking to me and some of the other ladies. Then we basically talked for a long while. And he always says he chased me around the party until I caught him. Something like that. 

Anyway, we had this instant connection and he took me out on a date the next day. There’s a much longer story here I’ll tell in another episode. We were pretty much head over heels in love immediately and have been together eight and a half years since. And are still head over heels in love. 

So I just look at that night and I go, “What if I had gone to the other party?” 

He wasn’t going to be in California that long and he had just gotten there a couple of weeks prior. And what if I hadn’t gone – my life would be so incredibly different. I’d love to think that we would have met anyway – that fate would have brought us together. But who knows?

It was a split second decision and it changed the course of my life forever. That’s often with intuition and our whole life is making choices, making decisions.

It’s not to put pressure on yourself about that, but it is to go, “Wow, if I can really develop this skill, this tool of learning to follow my intuition,  how much more profound will my life become? How much more in alignment can I live?” 

And when you develop the skill of intuition, the skill of aliveness and following your aliveness, those two skills to me are the key to really living a life that’s in alignment for you. 

So Sunny, let’s just go to his story for a moment.

He always knew he wanted to live in California since he was a little kid. He would always say, “I’m going to be in California someday, or I want to go to California.” He didn’t really think twice about it. A couple of times he almost ended up in California, but it didn’t quite pan out. 

I’m not going to go into his whole story, but when he was going through a lot in his life, he ended up deciding to do this personal development workshop. He had never done anything like this before. He had quite a strong opinion that it was not for him. But it came up three times in the course of two days. People brought up this personal development seminar, which was called The Landmark Forum. 

He was so living from his head at that time. He calls himself like a walking TV commercial. He always had the right thing to say. He was completely living from the space of logic and no connection to intuition, no connection to aliveness, no connection to spirituality, or any of these things.

And yet when he was hitting this low point in his life, and three people in two days mentioned The Landmark Forum to him. He said, “Okay, fine. There must be something here for me.”

Instead of doing it in Toronto, where he might run into people that he knew, he decided, “Oh, there’s one in California. I’m going to fly out there and do it.” 

He happened to bring his video gear, which was pretty unusual because he had a carry-on of clothes and then his video equipment. Interesting, right? So he comes out here. He did The Landmark Forum and had a huge breakthrough.

He stayed and skipped his flight home. He did the advanced course the following weekend, and had another huge breakthrough. Then decided he wants to live in California and try to make that real. And he ended up filming this men’s retreat on the third weekend. He had met a man who asked him to come in and film –and he happened to have his video gear.

So all of these different things converged again.

He had the intuition on some level to go to California. He had the intuition to pack his video gear, even though he only had a small suitcase of clothes and was only supposed to be coming for a weekend. All of these elements contributed to him being at the party that night and to us meeting. This was something he always had a feeling about. 

Like when I did this coaching session with a client a week or two ago she said she’s always had a feeling about Europe. And I said, “There’s something there for you. We want to explore that and see.” Because it hasn’t gone away. It’s been persistent and consistent her entire life. 

Same thing with my husband and California. Another way that his intuition showed up is he always knew what I would look like – what I would be like, what I would feel like. He would tell his best friend to tell other people, “She’s going to be blonde hair and blue eyed. She’s going to look Swedish and act Southern.” And for those of you who don’t know, I’m from Texas – so I’ve got that part of my roots. 

And he would describe me and he says, he thought at the time that it was just preference. He was thinking that that’s the kind of woman he was attracted to the most. But he recognized it when he met me. It felt more like a recognition than meeting someone for the first time.

He said it was like, “Oh, there you are. I always knew what you would be like.”

And when I first met his best friend, we sat down at dinner and his jaw was on the floor. He was just looking at me then looking at Sunny and looking back at me and saying, “You’ve been describing this woman for as long as I’ve known you.”

So another example of intuition, these feelings, these strong… It’s very different than a thought like, “Oh, I only want to date this kind of person.” But it is this feeling that doesn’t go away. 

It’s so strong. It’s so persistent. 

Intuition played a huge role in my career pivot where – I tell the story deeply in my story episode. It was 2016-2017, and I was in my marketing career and starting to have this feeling that something needs to change. There’s something more you’re meant to be doing. Those were the only thoughts that were connected to the feeling.

But the feeling in my body was like, “Something’s not right. Something needs to change. I’m supposed to be doing something more.”

And my mind was arguing saying, “No, no, no, no, no, no. I’ve worked really hard. I’ve built a successful career. Why would I start all over again?” 

And this to me was an example of my head and my intuition arguing with each other. Or at least my head arguing with my intuition – I don’t know if it argued back. It just kept saying this thing over and over. There was this feeling over and over that did not change – there’s something else you’re meant to be doing. Something needs to change.

And I didn’t listen at first. I was like, “I don’t really want to hear that.” 

As I continued to not listen, this developed into anxiety, panic attacks. I started having all of these symptoms of my body speaking very loudly to me and there was nothing physically wrong with me. And I look back on that and go, “Wow, my soul, – if you want to call it that – my intuition was trying to get my attention. It was pivotal enough that I make some change that showed up physically because I was not listening.”

What would have been possible if I had just listened? I probably wouldn’t have had to go through such a long period of time where I was having daily panic attacks, thinking I was dying. And maybe I could have stepped onto my path sooner.  But I don’t believe in regrets. It was all a part of my journey and it was all perfect somehow. And I learned a lot from that experience. 

So that persistent feeling, “There’s something more, something needs to change.” Those feelings, those deep inner nudges, or whispers. 

Some people are more auditory. Some people are more sensory. So your intuition might show up for you as a sentence like that – which is more auditory. It might show up as a feeling. Like I get a lot of feelings in my body. It might show up as a visual image in your mind.

So you get to play with “How does my intuition show up for me? How do I receive these messages from my soul.” – which is where I believe they’re coming from. You might say from God or the universe, if that’s something you connect to. To me, my soul is connected to God and the universe. So whatever your belief is around where this comes from, we have some kind of deep inner knowing. It’s how you start to connect to that and listen to what it’s telling you.

For me, it’s usually this deep down – in my body, in my gut or in my chest – feeling a push or a pull in a direction. Sometimes there’s a word or two that goes with it, but typically I’m not super auditory. So it tends to be more of a push or a pull or an expansion or a contraction. 

This led me, among other things, to make the change, to ultimately step into coaching and the work that I do today, along with my mom and my mentor, Gigi Sage, stepping in and so many other things that supported me in making that shift. 

But it started with an intuition. And I just didn’t recognize it fully at the time. 

Sometimes intuition leads you to challenges. I want to talk about this just a little bit because when people lose trust with their intuition, sometimes it’s because they make a decision based on an intuition and then it leads them into some challenging experiences. They go, “Well, there’s no way that was my intuition, or my intuition can’t be trusted because it led me here.”

Somebody asked me about this when I was sharing about intuition one time. They said, “Well, I have a friend who felt so intuitively called to move to Vancouver or something like that. She went there and she spent a year there. And she hated it and she ended up moving back. How was that her intuition?”

And I said, “Well, that’s an interesting question. How was that her intuition?”

I don’t know her, so I can’t really tell you. But I imagine that there was a very important reason that she spent that year in Vancouver. We don’t know what that is, but I imagine if she looked deeply enough, she could find it.

Maybe she’d always had the feeling that she wanted to move there and she needed to actually rule it out in order to go back to where she came from. And have a whole series of experiences that she was meant to have. But if she hadn’t left, maybe she wouldn’t have had those experiences.

So I know this is a very trusting way of going through life. It takes a lot of faith. And I’ve just had enough experiences that clearly point to the reasons why intuition has led me in a better direction – that I just do not doubt it whatsoever anymore.

It’s not to say I never hesitate, like, “Am I reading this right or what’s the right decision for me?” Maybe I’m not getting an intuition about things sometimes one way or the other, and that can be challenging. 

But I have to say, you get to explore and experiment with this on your own. I’m not saying to trust me blindly. I’m saying start with small things, practice and then see. And that’s how you can build into trust. 

I do want to share that sometimes your intuition will lead you into challenges. When I was making my career change, I also got the strong feeling that I needed to leave San Diego. This is 2018 and I loved it here. I loved my friends and community. The weather. The beach. There were so many reasons. Yet I was having this feeling like “Leave, leave, leave. Go somewhere else.”

Gigi also helped me get clear that it was a strong feeling and that I needed to follow that feeling.

So I came back from that trip to Costa Rica where I had my turning point moment. I went to my husband, Sunny, and I said, “Okay, I’m doing it. I’m making this career change. I’m going to start to transition into coaching. I really think we need to leave San Diego and I can’t really explain why.” 

And he loved San Diego – it was his dream to be here. Surprisingly though he was like, “Okay, where are we going? Where do you want to go?” 

And so from that conversation, to living in Austin, where I’m from originally, we moved six weeks later. We moved fast. We were a little bit shell shocked when we got to Austin. We were like, “Oh my gosh, what did we just do?” We proceeded to live in Austin for five and a half years up until just this past fall of 2023. 

It was a really challenging journey in many ways. But there were so many things that were perfect about it.

I needed to go somewhere new to reinvent myself as I was stepping into coaching. I needed to be around people who didn’t know me that well. Apart from a few family members, I didn’t have that many connections in Austin anymore. So I was starting over again. And I could completely reinvent myself and see myself in a new way and be experienced by others in a new way.

We were in Austin for COVID and my whole family – a lot of my family ended up being there at that time. My mom came back from Europe and was living there. My sister and my brother were there. And that felt really good to be close to family and in a place where there was quite a lot of openness – it was a pretty good place. All things considered, to spend a very challenging time. 

We bought our house in Austin right before the market went crazy. We had this beautiful series of events that led to us buying a home and really having a lot of growth and the value of that home. There were so many things that happened in those years – even the challenging things.

It was the early years of starting my coaching business and getting that off the ground. It was challenges we went through in friendships and community that really made it clear to us what we value in the people that we spend the most time with. And really made it clear to us how special what we had here in California was. And we stayed connected to our friends here. 

There were just so many things that when I look back, I’m like, “Wow, that was pivotal.” It shaped me. It shaped us to go to Austin, even just to leave this place that we love and realize how much we love it. That was a huge part of the journey as well. 

So we thought that we were going to stay in Austin, but we ended up eventually seeing that wasn’t for us and moving back to California. I just wanted to share that story because I had this strong pull. Although we went through so much in those years, there were a lot of good, but also a lot of challenges. I can see so clearly now in hindsight. 

And that’s also the story I choose to tell myself, is looking at, “Wow, what did that give me?”

And so much of that in life is what are the stories you tell yourself about what happened. It’s not so much the thing that happened as what we’re telling ourselves about it.

I want you to realize that even if something challenging happens, it doesn’t necessarily mean your intuition led you astray. That’s just something I wanted to put in there. You get to experiment with it for yourself and see what you feel and what you believe. But that’s been my experience.

Last story or two here. 

When Sunny and I were getting engaged, we got engaged and – well, first of all, I wanted to get married, I think about two to two and a half years after we had been together. I started to get this very strong feeling that I was ready to get married. I was like, “I’m ready. I want to get engaged. Let’s do this thing.” 

Sunny didn’t quite feel ready yet, not because we weren’t sure – we were 100 % sure. But because he felt he wanted to get his ducks in a row first. He wanted to be in a certain place financially. He wanted to have certain things set up. So he dragged his feet a little bit and he will share this. He’s comfortable with me sharing this because we talk about it often.

He dragged his feet a little bit and ended up waiting. We even bought the ring. Then he waited a while to try to get the perfect engagement together and all these different things. So we waited to get engaged longer than I would have waited.

Then we ended up planning the wedding. We wanted to get married in Italy because I love destination weddings and spending a few days with family and everything. Sunny and I both love Europe and I love Italy. And Sunny’s family is actually half Italian. So it was this beautiful opportunity to have his extended family come. They live in Canada now, but his grandparents came over from Italy.

So his whole extended family was going to come, and have this reunion in Italy and I would get to have this dream Italian wedding. So that’s the backstory on the engagement.

So once we got clear, we wanted to get married in Italy. We went to Nashville, Tennessee, and my sister lives there, Brianna. It was Thanksgiving. We went to a party after Thanksgiving and it was a really fun party. They were playing music – Brianna is a musician and a lot of her friends are musicians. I had just started telling everyone we want to get married in Italy. I was clear on what I wanted and I started telling everyone. And someone said, “Oh, this couple that’s at this party just got married in Italy. You should talk to them.”

So we went and we talked to this couple. They said, “Oh my gosh! We loved our venue. It was this olive farm in Tuscany and it’s family owned.” And so they shared about it and they showed us photos. I ended up doing a lot more research and that was still the venue that I chose.

So we planned this dream wedding. Sunny and I flew out to Italy a year prior to get to see the venue and do our engagement photos. And we had this magical, magical trip to Tuscany and traveled all through Tuscany.

The wedding ended up getting planned for June of 2020. And we all know what happened then – three months before COVID hit and our dream wedding was canceled.

There was just no telling when the world was going to open up again. There was so much uncertainty – I’m sure you all remember. We couldn’t have our dream wedding.

It was devastating but I was so grateful that we had the opportunity to go and have the experience of at least visiting and traveling around there. That was really beautiful.

But I’ll never forget, Sunny came up to me a few months later and said, “Baby, I just want you to know that I recognize now that you wanting to get married sooner was your intuition. And I should have listened. Because if I had listened to you, we would have been getting married a year prior to when we got married and we would have had our dream wedding.”

And I was just like, “Wow, I hadn’t even made that connection.” I just thought, “What is this weird desire to get married sooner?” Because I had never been that kind of person.  I had never been like, “Oh, I can’t wait to get married.”

Of course, I love wedding dresses. I love clothes and dresses. There were certain things about a wedding that were exciting to me and I enjoyed thinking about – but I was not in a hurry to get married.

So when I had that strong feeling – “I want to get married. I’m ready. Let’s do this now”, I didn’t recognize it as intuition. I thought maybe this is just a desire. I don’t know where it’s coming from, but maybe I have some strong desire to get married. And I kind of downplayed it and didn’t really give it the credence. 

Sunny and I hadn’t built enough trust in our relationship and in my intuition yet to listen to it on a deep level. But when he came to me and he said that – which I was just blown away by him making that connection. It really was such a perfect learning opportunity for us both because it solidified our trust in my intuition. Men and women both have the ability to have very strong intuition. And a lot of times, women have a closer connection to it or an easier access to it. And that’s a generalization, of course. But it’s just something that we’ve seen and experienced in our work with people.

So often the woman in a relationship, if you are in a male-female relationship, will be the one who has more of these strong intuitive feelings one way or another if she learns to develop the skill set. 

If you’re a woman listening to this, it’s really beautiful for you to start to experiment with yourself – and then in your partnership over time. You can start to play with this as well and see, of course, whoever you’re with, the other partner can also do the same thing. And you may find that you are the one that often has these knowings, these visions or these seeing.

So this wasn’t a preference. Just like Sunny knowing what I was going to look like wasn’t a preference alone. It was a knowing, it was an intuition. 

I’ve covered a lot of different things around intuition here. And I just want to recap a couple of them so that you can start to reflect on what those nudges are for you. 

So first of all, remembering that your intuition is going to show up however it shows up for you.

For me, it feels like it very much comes through the body. A lot of people describe that with intuition – that’s why we say a “gut feeling.” It is often what people believe – your intuition starts in the gut or that’s an access point to it. And the gut is like a second brain. As we’ve learned in a lot of the research that’s been done, there’s a lot of intelligence in our guts. 

So to me, it’s a “gut feeling” a lot of the time, or it’s an embodied feeling. Because it bypasses the mind and even sometimes the heart. And it’s at the level of sensation or the body. So it often doesn’t have a lot of words for me – it may for you. It feels more like a nudge or a pull or a push or lan expansive feeling can be a “yes.” 

Like “Yes, something’s the right move.” Because it feels expansive and light energetically versus contracted and constricted or heavy energetically. That’s a tool that you can use – the energy and how that feels. The push or the pull. The yes or the no – the kind of “do this thing even if it doesn’t make sense.” 

I found it easiest to recognize my intuition when it disagrees with my mind and/or my desires. Because when I have a thought and I have the strong feeling that’s going in the other direction, it’s easy to go, “Oh, wait, this one’s a thought and this one is a strong feeling. The feeling is probably my intuition.”

When I have a desire for something, I’m like, “I want to do this thing, but I feel the strong pull in a different direction.” Then it’s easier for me to distinguish while I’m desiring this, but something is telling me otherwise. I’ve actually had the easiest time telling what my intuition is when it disagrees with my thoughts or with my desires, my emotions. 

Where I found it more challenging is when the two agree – as in the story of going to that different party that night or wanting to get married sooner. Then I would sometimes question it and go, “Well, is it intuition or is it just a desire?” And the only way I know to get better at discerning the difference or discerning what is your intuition is to practice and try things. 

And sometimes, like in some of the stories I’ve shared with you, you’re not going to follow your intuition. Whether you want to or not, you’re not going to know the difference maybe. But that is somehow perfect too, because it’s a part of your learning. You’ll be able to look back and go, “OK.” It’s not to beat yourself up about it. 

It’s to go, “OK, this is a learning experience for me. I get to make a decision differently next time or a different choice. because now I know that this is, in hindsight, is 2020, as people often say.” 

We can’t look forward. We can’t connect the dots looking forward. We can only connect them looking back. 

So what are those nudges telling you?

The biggest thing I would love for you to hopefully take away from this episode is starting to tune in and go, “Hmm, what am I feeling intuitively?” 

Now, one last thing I’ll share is that you may not always have an intuition about something. This is something else I’ve learned. There are plenty of choices I make in life that I don’t have an intuitive sense one way or the other. And this is where tools like aliveness are also really powerful.

These two play really well hand in hand or can be used at different times. We’ll talk more about that in the episode where my mom and I go deeper into these two different topics and how they’re different and how they’re aligned. 

You may not always feel an intuitive sense about something. But you can start to tune in and see, “Do I have an intuitive sense one way or the other?” And start to play and to practice, but don’t put pressure on yourself about it. 

Have fun with it. This should be fun. It should be exploratory.

Hopefully these stories gave you a window in to think about some of your experiences. It’s really nice to look back on your life and think about, “Hmm, when have I followed my intuition, whether I knew what I was doing or not?” That’s a great way to start to learn – how does your intuition show up for you.

You can practice with little things to begin. Then over time, get more and more comfortable making some of your bigger decisions from a place of an intuitive knowing. 

So that is our episode for today. I hope you enjoyed it. I love this topic so much.

I love the topic of aliveness as well. So cannot wait to explore more about the differences and the similarities of these two. 

Please if you haven’t subscribed to the podcast – every subscription counts for a new, new podcast. Every download and every rating counts.

If you would take two minutes and just give us a, hopefully a five-star rating. Write a little something about what you’re enjoying so far. It makes a huge difference to a new podcast like us. Share it with the women in your life or the people in your life of any gender. 

And we look forward to seeing you in the next episode. See you next time.