Chapter 8

Treat Your Intuition Like Your New Best Friend

Self-care isn’t just about cultivating good physical habits; you need to pay attention to your emotional life too. That means learning to trust yourself and your instincts so you can feel empowered and confident enough to make important decisions on your own.

Even with some prep work, I still relied heavily on my intuition to help me launch Career Contessa. I didn’t create a fully outlined business plan or raise a round of funding from outside investors. I was trusting my instincts to make my first big moves, which included investing my time, energy, and resources into creating high-quality, consistent content—even though I had no background as a content creator and wasn’t sure how being a media-heavy resource company would benefit us.

My first step was to determine the type of content we would create, and when I spoke to all the “experts,” they recommended I cover lifestyle content and then add in career advice every once in a while because no one had an interest in reading only about careers. And for the first year, I did do that. We wrote about our favorite summer sandals and lunches you could pack for work. But my intuition knew that this wasn’t us. It wasn’t what Career Contessa was about.

Once I stopped producing lifestyle content and focused only on career advice, I saw major growth in our audience. And that same career-specific content is what helps us stand out in a crowded space with a unique offering. Going against the advice of the “experts” can seem almost dangerous at times, until you realize that no one really knows what they are doing.

There’s a reason why most success stories involve shutting down the haters and taking a big freaking risk based on what your gut tells you to do. Actually, science tells us this is true too. In 2008, researchers confirmed that “gut feelings” are based on drawing from past experiences and observations instinctively—so quickly that you may not even sense where you’re getting those feelings from. And so your hunches are acting in your best interests. Sounds great, but how do you get back to trusting yourself and actually listening to that voice inside your head?

In his book Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions, cognitive psychologist Gary Klein outlines how your intuition works, by processing four different kinds of information:

1. Relevant cues: Intuition makes the job of sorting out an unfamiliar situation less strenuous because it narrows down the stimuli you’re receiving, gives you relevant cues, and teaches you what you should focus on.
2. Expectancies: Intuition answers the question: What should I expect? It helps you understand a situation before you even enter it.
3. Plausible goals: Intuition also lets you in on the plausible goals you’ll want to have in any situation, like if you’re unexpectedly in a meeting with someone who has the power to improve your career, your intuition will know and let you in on the goal to impress this person.
4. Typical actions: Finally, intuition suggests actions to you. It’s thinking faster than you; it will tell you what to mention to the person you want to impress.

All of these together help guide you through your life, and by trusting your intuition, you will leave yourself open to take more risks, choose the less conventional path, and go after what you want. It’s like having a bit of a superpower—you just need to get calm and courageous enough to use it because ultimately this is asking you to change your behavior, which is not an easy ask, but these are the actions that help you evolve.

The Mini-Risk Challenge

1. Begin by writing a list of things that give you the most anxiety (e.g., saying no to a pushy coworker or speaking up at a meeting).
2. Next, write down a goal that will help you push through this anxiety (e.g., “I will tell James when he comes by, again, that I can’t chat because I’m on deadline, and I won’t apologize” or “I will volunteer an idea or question in this Tuesday’s team meeting”).
3. From the initial list, choose three risks to take in the next week.

Research shows that our intuition is not some new age fiction, but a real tool that can help us know ourselves better and survive and thrive at work (and in life). When you learn to trust yourself and your instincts, you will feel more empowered and confident enough to make important decisions on your own. By trusting your intuition, you may become open to taking more risks, choosing the less conventional path, and going after what you want most profoundly and fundamentally.