Guest post by Martha Alderson:
Leaders often rely on surveys, empirical data, conscious reasoning, concrete evidence, facts, logic, and scientific research before making decisions or changing the current course of action. We turn to experts for insight as we attempt to understand and solve a complex problem. We lean into tried-and-true strategies hoping to replicate past successes. However, life today moves at warp speed. What worked previously, doesn’t apply in today’s world. We’re asked to innovate and create new solutions instantaneously.Rather than turn to others for answers, you have within you something more powerful and honest and reliable and immediate than any outside expert or long-standing model of operation. What you possess serves you better and makes you a unique and trusted leader. That something is your inner voice, otherwise known as your intuition and innate wisdom.
Trusting Your Inner Voice
When you’re asked to react on the fly, fix what’s not working, and come up with creative solutions, you don’t have the luxury of time to research. Instead, listen to and rely on your inner self for immediate hits of insight, knowing, and understanding. You make a snap judgment of the situation, the person, or the problem. This, then, becomes a starting place to form solid decisions as you invite in ideas and possibilities to plot a plan and determine a course of action.
If, however, you doubt your instinct and what you’re intuiting, or disrespect the inner guidance you’re being offered, believing your inner feelings are an illusion and can’t be proven, are immaterial, a weakness or insignificant, you’re negating your greatest strength. Your inner voice offers you the true nature of reality beyond the physical. Your sixth sense nurtures your confidence and grows your faith in yourself to inspire others.
Rely on Your Intuition
Your intuition is the non-physical and deepest part of you. It asks that you demand no proof and no evidence of its truth, but to simply trust when you pick up on subtle cues from those you’re leading, when you sense you’re headed in the wrong direction, when you feel an inner clarity. Your inner voice is that which you know to be true even when, especially when, everyone and everything else say differently. When you rely on your inner messages, you rarely make a wrong move. A hunch, a feeling, your gut reaction often lead you to answers you never could have come up with through your intellect alone.
We often have difficulty hearing our innate wisdom beneath the clamor of our learned responses and conventional wisdom. It takes courage to have faith in your intuition and to stick to your decisions when what you’re proposing goes against all available evidence to the contrary. To stand in your truth is daring and audacious, and often threatens your ego with fears of being wrong or laughed at when you know you know but have no idea why or how you came to be so certain, and are unable to explain beyond the simple statement—I just know.
As you learn to trust and are guided by your intuition, you lead by example, which in turn encourages those you lead to begin trusting their inner voice, too.
MARTHA ALDERSON, MA is the author of the best-selling The Plot Whisperer. She writes novels for readers, plot books for writers, and most recently Boundless Creativity: A Spiritual Workbook for Overcoming Self-Doubt, Emotional Traps, and Other Creative Blocks for anyone looking to enrich their lives with more creativity and inspiration. Her other books are Writing Blockbuster Plots and Writing Deep Scenes, The Plot Whisperer Workbook, The Plot Whisperer Book of Writing Prompts, as well as several ebooks. Look for her latest novel Parallel Lives: A Love Story coming out summer 2020. She lives and writes in Santa Cruz. Learn more about Alderson on her website, and connect with her on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Youtube.
