Are you listening to your gut? Do you ignore it because of outside influences? The ability to listen to our guts and triggers is often toned down in our lives, and we forget to cue in to the subtle hints and ideas. We may have had bad experiences with listening to it before, or we may have forgotten how to reconnect with ourselves.
Our goal today is to listen to those reactions. Not just the fight or flight response, but the subtle hints and cues our bodies are trying desperately to convey. Take a moment to pause, think, and relax.
Resources Mentioned:
Captivate by Vanessa Van Edwards
Connect with Kim:
Kim: Hey there. I wanna know. What's your gut telling you, what is it telling you that you already know? Let's talk about that.
So how do you know what you know, and what do you do about that? I know this is such a weird topic, right? Such a weird thing to say, but I wanna know. You listen to when you have a gut reaction, are you the type of person that has a gut reaction and says, uh, no.
Nevermind. I'm not listening to that and runs the other way, or are you the type of person that has a gut reaction and stands up and says that reaction is the reaction I had and I am no longer moving forward with whatever that might be. You know,, honestly, I've been reading a lot of self-help books and I'm reading this one book it's called, I believe captivate or captive something.
I'll put it in the show notes, but the cool thing about it is that it actually talks about your gut reaction. It actually talked a couple chapters ago about this. And when I had written the topic down months ago, I actually wasn't reading this book. And then I read the book. and I forgot. And now I see that this topic has come up again and I'm like, oh my gosh, that is so crazy. I actually read this book and it had this information in the chapter about it.
And it specifically talks about people's gut reactions and what they do about those reactions. How do you know what you know, and that is usually done via a gut type reaction. So, you know, if you see something, of course, anything like fight or flight type thing, those are gut reactions. And a lot of times people do listen to those.
They do understand, and they do get. But sometimes it's not just cut and dry as in you are in danger or no, this is exciting. You know, sometimes it's a little bit in between and you have to, you have to really listen to what your gut is telling you, what your, what you know is telling you. So if you're in a situation and.
For instance, you're in a situation and somebody at the water cooler is talking smack about somebody. Of course, your first reaction is, uh, you know, maybe that person's the, the town gossip or the, the office gossip or, and you think, oh, I'm not listening to that because that is not, you know, she never has anything good to say, or he never has anything good to say about that.
Anybody. So you're probably going to omit that. But maybe that person said something and that thought stayed in your head and then you come to find out maybe a week or two later, that that little inkling that was in your head is actually true. So you knew that. and you knew what that person said was true.
You just, maybe didn't put two and two together until later. Right. But wouldn't it be great if we could figure out how to put those two and two together earlier rather than later, because sometimes we are just ignoring our gut or we're ignoring what we know because of where it came from. I know. So interesting to think about this.
Having somebody say something, maybe this was negative or maybe it was positive. Although I'm going to suggest that positivity actually would breed more of you thinking about it, whereas negative things or things that are way out there wildly out there. People have a tendency to. Under think about, so they'll say no, that didn't happen or they'll say something like, I shouldn't think about that in your head.
Of course. You know, I shouldn't think about that, but again, as in, we talked about a couple of episodes ago. Once you have that baby idea, there is always a manifestation that's happening. Right. And again, once you've had that baby idea stuck in your brain vault somewhere, you're gonna say, oh yeah, That's right.
I did hear that when you hear it next time. And when you find out it's true, you know, how many times have somebody said, you know, for maybe a missing person? Oh my gosh. I, I saw that person and she looked fine or he looked fine. And then you think about it and you say, ah, you know what. Now that the news is telling me that that person had a tattoo on their left arm.
I do remember that tattoo. That's what stood out. I remember that clearest date. And I remember now where I saw that person you never know what's gonna trigger that idea of what, you know, in your head. right. And listening to your gut and listening to those triggers is something that I think we have kind of.
Tried to tone down in our lives. we had more of these thoughts when we were younger. Definitely. If it's a fight or flight specifically, that definitely we listen to, but the other subtle. Hints, subtle ideas. We don't listen to, we don't have a tendency to pay attention to. I'm even gonna bring in the idea of, I think it's the six person rule where I know six people and of those six people, you know, they know somebody, we are all connected by six people.
I can't remember exactly what that is, but that's kind of another way of thinking about this, right? So you have this thought or you've heard this thought kind of came up out of the blue type of thought, and then you, maybe aren't thinking about it, but then something else happens. And you think about that thought or, you know, you realize, oh, I know that person.
And then you just say, that's so weird. That's kind of a coincidence. But is it a coincidence? Is it really a coincidence or was it really something that you already knew? Right. We just happened to say it was a coincidence, but. I think in some cases we already knew, and some people are really good at this.
Some people have already honed this idea of listening to their gut, listening to what they know better than others. I am working on listening. I try to, I have a note on my laptop and it says, pause and think. Pause stop and think, pause and think. And I have to do that because I have a tendency to just keep going, whether or not that be through the way I was brought up or whether or not that was a learned behavior from the TV show.
And now of course, through podcasting, I personally don't particularly like to have any dead air . So I will just keep rambling. You're probably thinking, yeah, you do. No. I will just keep going because I'm not stopping to think, but those people that do stop, pause and think. Do end up being those same people that are able to put two and two together, way quicker than the other people that aren't thinking.
Now, some people just aren't even aware. That's absolutely. Those people are out there too. We all know somebody like that. But interestingly enough, I think those people that are not aware. Are actually way more aware than we think they are. They just aren't really putting that forward for us, but I definitely think that if you just gave yourself a few minutes to stop and pause, you would actually find out that your gut reaction is accurate and you know, a little bit more of what you're looking.
I know it's kind of interesting. Huh? Just thinking about that. I'm gonna just suggest that you take a moment, stop and pause. And I know a couple of episodes ago I might have called this meditation, but you don't have to listen to yourself, breathe, and maybe you don't even want to meditate. But I do think that when you stop.
Don't talk, pause and think about it. A lot of times, not only will you have a better conversation with somebody, but it will give your brain the time to catch up to where you are and what you're actually thinking about. this week I'm gonna do a lot more stopping and pausing. And maybe relaxing. Right?
Let's do that too. Cuz if we're already stopped and paused, you might as well relax a second or two and just take in what those other people around you are saying because you never know what it is that you can contribute until you stop, pause and think about it. So let's try. Until next time. I hope you keep creating you.
And again, just give yourself a little bit of grace and stop and think about what the next steps are for you until next time.