No, I’m not referring to the razor (though they do save oodles of time, don’t they?) – I’m talking about the other women’s intuition: The internal compass that helps you make important life decisions. We all have one, but do we remember how to use it?
There are many women who aren’t going after what they want – they’re going after what they think they want. I used to be one of them. I’ve spent most of my life perpetually confused, as I’m sure many of you have. As young girls, we were taught the all-important mantra:
Be yourself.
Yet as adults, when we actually started living this mantra and dedicating ourselves to a life of coloring outside the lines, everywhere we turned someone was looking at us like this:
Clearly, we missed the little asterisk after our mantra that indicated the following footnote:
*Just like everybody else.
The incessant, contradictory tug-of-war between what others expect of us and what we want for ourselves has left us lost, quashing the most important voice in the room: Our own.
More specifically, our women’s intuition.
“As women, we’ve spent so much time and effort living up to the standards of a patriarchal society that we’ve almost completely disconnected from our own deepest, authentic truth,” says Leela Francis, author of “Woman’s Way Home: Navigating Your Path to Embodied Power.” In her book, she discusses the importance of telling the difference between ego-driven and intuitive decisions.
Ego vs. Women’s Intuition
Let’s say you’re offered a job that pays double what you make now. Your ego tells you to snap up the opportunity – you even start browsing for the new wardrobe you’re going to buy with your new salary. However, once the initial adrenaline wears off, you start to feel panicked and queasy. That’s your women’s intuition telling you it needs a consult.
This is where our ego and women’s intuition battle it out like a couple on the verge of divorce: When the line blurs between what we really want and what we feel obligated to want, we lose touch with our instincts and end up making decisions that conflict with our personal integrity.
It’s most helpful if you can recall times in your life when the outcome of a situation didn’t meet your deepest needs. Can you look back and recall an intuitive nudge that you didn’t pay attention to or an inner stirring that was tugging at your awareness but which you didn’t heed?
Yep. Every decision I made in my twenties. So how do we stop letting ego run the show and give our women’s intuition more of a say?
Take Women’s Intuition for a Test Drive
Francis suggests using the following exercise to help you recognize when your women’s intuition is sending up a flare:
1. Pick a decision, any decision, that you’ve been struggling to make.
2. Write down all of the options you have to choose from.
3. Label each option as “ego-driven” or “intuition-driven.”
4. Think about each option one at a time: How do you feel about them? Define the quality of each based on the sensation.
Go back and forth between your ego-driven and intuition-driven options so you can feel the difference between the two. Once you’re able to do so fluently, you’ll finally be able to live your life on your own terms – and you know, not like this:
How often do you listen to your women’s intuition?
Related on EcoSalon:
6 Ways to Free Yourself From Comparison Thinking
10 Slightly-Terrifying Ways to Become a Better You
25 Inspirational Quotes on the Power of Women
Image: James Cheuk