Grow your Business by Completely Ignoring your Inner Wisdom

Sorry, folks! Couldn’t resist the headline. I have a few new subscribers ’round here these days, too… I bet you’re wondering if you just signed up for a new feed written by some crazed mom with multiple personality disorder… Wonder no more and read on, dear new friends!

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 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 again. It was the Tower. Goosebumps. And that nagging feeling in my stomach just about knocked me over. Did I listen? No.

I wanted to move to San Francisco, and I was going no matter what card I pulled, no matter what my intuition said, no matter what inner wisdom told me about simply letting go of this idea 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 gut, 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. But do you want to know why that is? 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 flipping 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. But I have found that these aren’t just business decisions, or even life decisions. For the entrepreneur, business and life are one. We start our businesses because we have a driving desire within us to pursue a dream - and that dream is part of why we are here on this planet in the first place.

So bringing intuitive decisions to business aren’t just for the corner psychic. It’s crucial to our success. And I have a few success stories to share on that topic as well… again, another post, another time

But wait, you say! What happened in San Francisco?! Well, I moved out there, of course. I 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 that had a penchant for manipulation. 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.