today I want to talk about Introvert instinct  something that I I guess for the longest while I don't have and now I'm starting to believe I do have to a certain degree. And I don't know whether it's because I reflect this kind of thing or because stuff has happened. But learning to trust your emotions is really interesting because we are all born with a certain amount of intuition. The problem is from a very young age, we're often told to maybe ignore our feelings or our feelings are not justified or our feelings are just wrong.

Much like force feeding, an infant can cause the child to start ignoring the natural hunger control mechanisms. It's the same with emotions. The more we're taught to push down our feelings, the more likely we are not to trust our emotions. Sometimes you get a gut feeling, a feeling in your gut, a gut feeling that something is wrong. Everyone has a natural ability to know that something's sort of not right in any given situation. The problem is, over time, you may have pushed down those feelings as maybe wrong or crazy.

You might meet a new person who you've no real known reason makes you feel like something's a little off. You could talk to someone and believe that they're lying. Wait, while you may not want to react to these instances because they are not cause for immediate danger, keeping an open mind and keeping your eyes open, chances are you might find out that you write more than you're wrong. Sometimes you might feel a tug to help somebody. TV commercials are really good at like using these emotions when they want you to send money to the starving children in Africa or donate to save abused animals feelings.

What you feel when you're watching those commercials are normal and you should respect them. However, when you do feel compelled to help people, don't push it down, really offer help. But just keep in mind what you're thinking about things. And another thing that our intuition helps us with is maybe we feel pulled to do something different, you might be sitting in a cubicle, bored to tears, waiting desperately to do something different, but you're kind of afraid to change and you're not sure what to do.

You feel that you're being pulled in a different direction, but you just don't know what to do about that feeling. And maybe you don't even recognize it as a feeling. Maybe you just think that you're having a bad day. If you do feel pulled in a new direction, take the time to give it some real consideration instead of nixing it. Because if you go ahead and fix it immediately, it's not necessarily the best thing to do. And also, you might not feel confident in your abilities.

That's something we kind of learn at a young age and that it's really hard to unlearn when you're not feeling confident. Don't push those feelings down or away. You're right to feel that way. But you need to think why you're feeling that way when you feel good about yourself is not misplaced pride or bragging. And so often people, especially women, are taught from a young age not to boast about their abilities. This tends to put young women at a disadvantage from their male counterparts when it comes to job and fair pay.

Allow yourself to feel confident when it is appropriate and acknowledge the different emotions you experience. Don't push away any emotions that you have about drugs, alcohol or food. Instead, allow yourself to experience a full range of emotions as appropriate, because learning what these feelings and emotions are and how to deal with them is super, super important to knowing when you're just having a bad day or when you're just feeling off. Write down your feelings, keeping a feeding's journal for yourself to help you process different feelings that you're having and different things that you note other people might be having reactions to, situations can be useful as datapoints.

Your journal can help you work through your emotions in a healthy way, as well as give you something to look back on when you're having trouble. And one thing that's really helpful is to test your judgment, accuracy. So if you're afraid to go with your gut due to having pushed down the skull from a young age, pick one thing to test. For example, if you feel the need to switch jobs, start job hunting in earnest, it won't help to go on some job interviews and test your intuition.

You might find the job of a lifetime. Or if you feel strange, then then don't go ahead and do it. As you learn to trust your emotions by practicing actually feeling them, you're going to get better at discerning what's right from wrong and what's just like a weird feeling. And that's what I've been learning. I've had some gut instincts about a couple of things and I've been afraid to move forward with them. And I've had someone point out to me that any time I've had that feeling have been more or less correct.

So I should just go with it and said, that's what I'm doing over a couple of things these next few months. I hope you have a great week. Feel free to reach out to me at Janice@thecareerintrovert.com, helping introverts build their brand and get hired.