Grow your Business by Completely Ignoring your Inner Wisdom

I love this post and telling this story. Even though it happened more than 20 years ago, it forever changed who I became as a person and still impacts my business today. I wrote about it last August, and still get a tear in my eye when I read it and remember one of the most important lessons of my life.

I’ll never forget the first time I completely ignored my inner wisdom. I was 19 years old and decided I wanted to move to San Francisco. I made my plans, set my date… and then this nagging little feeling that I was on the wrong track started creeping into my stomach. For a few weeks, I just plain ignored it. But it grew. So, good little hippie that I was back then, I did a Tarot card reading to determine my fate. I pulled the Tower card as my outcome. All I remember about tarot cards today was that this card meant certain disaster.

I didn’t like that outcome. So I did it again!

In one of those weird moments when you start to question the universe around you, I looked at my outcome card and it was the Tower again. Goosebumps. And that nagging feeling in my stomach just about knocked me over. Did I listen? Nope.

I was going to move to San Francisco, no matter what card I pulled, no matter what my intuition said, no matter what inner wisdom told me about simply letting go and changing my plans.

Now before I tell you what happened in San Francisco, I want to tell you the lesson I learned from going to San Francisco has stuck with me to this day, in more ways than one. I learned to listen to that damn inner wisdom, that’s for sure.

Sometimes I get asked about “following the heart”. So many people don’t understand what this means. How do we know when we are following our hearts? How do we know what part of ourselves to listen to when we have conflicting emotions? How do we know what direction to take our business in when there is a fork in the road?

For me, at this point, it’s second nature. Why? I wasn’t born super consciously connected to the powers above. I wasn’t some high achiever who seemed divinely guided (Oh, FAR from it! That’s another post in and of itself!!) And I certainly floundered in business before.

The true key to my ‘listen-to-my-heart-success’ has been hindsight; experiencing the pain and consequences of NOT listening when it was surely blatant that I should have freaking listened to myself. Like the time I took on a huge database project as a designer and outsourced the coding. But didn’t know the first thing about what I was doing, nor what they were doing. I had a feeling I shouldn’t do it, but the money was so darn good… the entire project blew up in my face, and made some people look really bad (myself most of all).

Yes, you CAN grow your business by completely ignoring your inner wisdom. But ONLY if you take the painful and valuable lessons from your experiences and make better choices moving forward.

So being an intuitive decision maker in business isn’t just for the corner psychic. It’s crucial to our success.

But wait, you say! What happened in San Francisco?! Well, I moved out there, lived in my friends’ living room, and got a job in an ice cream shop. I significantly cut my earnings from my Chicago job and doubled my rent. And it turned out that the friends I moved in with weren’t very good friends. They were heroin junkies. Seven weeks later, I climbed on an Amtrak train, penniless except for the money my dad had sent. I’ll never forget that train ride in the fall through the Rockies. It was one of the happiest moments of my life as I finally listened to my inner wisdom and was on the way home.