Why I Can't Trust My Gut and What I Do Instead

I could never win at multiple-choice

Not because I hadn't studied. Because the second it came down to two answers, I had nothing. No instinct, no gut feeling, no quiet voice telling me which one was right. I'd narrow it down to two, and then it was a pure guess.

I used to think that was just how my brain worked. Turns out it was something I learned.

Growing up, no one, not one person, ever asked me what I thought. About anything. Nobody said, "Would you like to wear a dress today or shorts?" "What do you think about XYZ?"

My mother made the decisions. All of them. She was holding a family together through two of my father's nervous breakdowns, and she couldn't afford for any of us to fall apart too. I understand that now. But as a kid, I absorbed something simpler: someone else always knows better than you do. Don't trust your own read on things. Play it safe.

The Enchiladas or the Salad

That pattern didn't stay in childhood.

I've held a Mexican menu, torn between the cheese enchiladas and the Navajo salad, for long enough that it's embarrassing. Not because both are appealing. Because I genuinely can't feel which one I want. I'll order one, and for the rest of the meal I'm quietly convinced I should have gotten the other.

It's not indecision, exactly. It's more like a system that doesn't work. Other people talk about "just knowing." A gut feeling, an intuition, a part of them that lights up. I don't have reliable access to that, at least not on the small stuff.

I've spent a career helping other people listen to their bodies and their instincts, and I still can't always explain why mine doesn't hand me an answer the way it seems to for other people. I don't fully understand that about myself. I just know it's true.

The bigger decisions are different, though. It's less that I don't know what I want. It's that I have to give myself permission to do it. Wanting something and letting myself have it are two separate steps for me, and the second one is the hard one.

It's taken me a long time, real years, to see that wasn't a flaw. It was something I learned to do to stay safe. And what you learn, you can unlearn.

I'm not saying I've fixed this, or that I finally always know.

What's changed is I've stopped needing to know before I choose. I'd rather explore something, decide, and know that if it turns out to be the wrong call, I can handle it. I can clean it up. I can forgive myself and keep going.

I still couldn't tell you which one I'd pick off that Mexican menu. Cheese enchiladas or the Navajo salad. Honestly, probably still a coin flip.

But I don't need an answer anymore. I need to know that whatever I choose, I can live with it. That's the only shift that actually mattered. Not fixing the part of me that can't just know. Trusting the part of me that can handle it either way.

That's what I actually want for the women I work with. Not certainty. Capacity. The kind of self-trust that doesn't require getting it right every time.

Over to you

Where does this quietly show up for you? The menu you can't decide on. The email you've rewritten five times. The decision you're still turning over in your head, weeks after you already made it.

If any of this sounds like you, Anchored... trust what you know was built for exactly this. Enrollment opens a few times a year. If it's open right now, you can join. If not, get on the list so you hear the moment it does.