Carla DiBello On The Key Strategies To Help You Trust Your Gut
Entrepreneur and celebrity style insider Carla DiBello on techniques for spotting true intuition and trusting your gut
How many times have you heard someone say, ‘Go with your gut’ or ‘Trust your intuition’ as a form of sage life advice? Both are phrases that I’ve been known to repeat regularly myself. I’ve written countless times on every aspect of the matter, from business and career to relationships and our journeys in life. I believe in them thoroughly. But despite these statements being such simple and powerful phrases, putting them into practice can be far more difficult. Tuning into our own intuition is like a muscle; it’s an active practice. And it is easy to misinterpret its message when external factors are chipping away at us on a daily basis, both on a conscious and subconscious level.
When levelling up our lives, there will always be things that will be hard to do, or that we don’t enjoy doing. The trouble happens when this is misinterpreted as intuition telling us not to do it. I believe that our purest intuitions are always right. But that being said, our intuition is still subject to the influence of our thoughts and emotions. And they are often distorted, whether conscious or not. So in order to truly follow our intuition, we need to reduce it to its purest form – which means removing all of the clutter around it.
One of the most widely shared and popular ways to do this is meditation. Even five to 10 minutes in the morning can make such a huge difference when it comes to decluttering the mind of unwanted chatter. I’m not always consistent with it, but whenever I am having trouble connecting with my own intuition, I make a point to bring this practice back into my life with regularity. Doing this just for a few consecutive days truly does lighten the load and rehones the sense of self.
My other strategy is to approach life with fresh eyes. I’m especially fond of using this strategy when I am not quite sure why I’m feeling stuck or confused. I’m a big believer in a change of scenery, not because I believe in escapism, but because it allows us to discard unnecessary details. These often convolute the easiest route. Is something actually hard to do, or is it just hard because you are making it hard to do? And if so, might it just be due to burn-out?
So while we can’t always change the situation, we can always change the way we see it – and therefore, the way we approach it. Get inspired by one of Tim Ferriss’ questions in Tools of Titans – instead of consistently accepting that something is hard and that you will have to double down to get it done, what if we took a step back first and asked ourselves, ‘How do I make this easy?’ I find that this simple question works in a similar way for me to meditation in the sense that it clears the clutter. It makes us look outside the box of how things have always been done and assess what steps might actually be unnecessary. Unnecessary steps are another form of white noise, slowing down the operating system that allows our intuition to function clearly. Eliminating them wherever possible is crucial to gauging a true reading on our gut.
There will always be things that get in the way of our intuition. Fear, trauma, feelings of inadequacy, instant gratification, ego, and pressure to accept other people’s truths as our own, are honestly just a part of the human experience. Actively balancing these aspects of the human experience against our own is how to truly get in touch with our own gut. “
Photography: Aziz Alula