One of the key reasons why we struggle to take action in our lives – why we delay making decisions, and fail to find a path forward – is this: we don’t actually know how we feel. Our true feelings about a range of subjects – our partner, our career, our calling – are buried very deep in the recesses of our minds, beyond the easy reach of conscious reasoning.
Instead, we operate with a faulty, surface level framework, dominated by received wisdom and conventional ideas of what we really ‘ought’ to feel. Our partner is a perfectly acceptable candidate on paper – so our nagging doubts about whether we really love them should be ignored. Our job provides an adequate level of safety and security – so our sense of being ‘trapped’ ought to be suppressed…
To stand any chance of finding lasting happiness, we need to bypass our surface-level rationale – and find the courage to pursue and honour our true feelings. To help you, we’ve designed a short exercise – taken from our new book The Confidence Workbook – that we call Gut Instinct.