Thanking ourselves

A few months ago a friend came to me with a dilemma. She felt she should resign from a position she held with a local organisation as she believed she was carrying professional risk by being associated with this organisation.

The decision to do so was difficult. It was an organisation she believed in, but something in her gut kept telling her there was something wrong. She came to me for advice and kept mentioning that although she didn’t know of any wrongdoing by the organisation or it’s members, she felt she had to resign. It just didn’t FEEL right to her. I told her that every time I followed my intuition, it had steered me right.

She followed her intuition and resigned. Last week she rang to tell me that the organisation is being completely restructured and if she had stayed, her position there would have been very difficult. She was happy she had followed her intuition and resigned when she did. It made her life much easier now.

As we hung up, I suggested she do something nice for herself. “Why?”, she asked in a perplexed voice. “Because if someone else had done something that made you feel this good, wouldn’t you be thanking them?” I said. She thought for a moment and agreed.

Why do we so often thank other people when they help us but we forget to thank ourselves when what we do for ourselves turns out to be exactly what we need? Instead, we are so quick to criticise ourselves or get down when we make a wrong choice or something doesn’t go the way we wanted.

I’ve watched my own inner critic be harsher on me than anyone else for years. I’m now trying to turn that around and offer myself gratitude and compassion instead of judgement as I navigate this life.

We are the only ones who truly know what’s best for us. Others can provide advice or judgement or shame or approval, but really none of that matters. We all have an internal GPS that tells us right from wrong. And the more I follow mine, and thank it for guiding me right, the stronger it gets.

Others might not understand my decisions. They might think my decisions are crazy. And more than once in my life, my “women’s intuition” has been pooh-poohed. Women don’t have intuition any more than men. We all have it. We just have to use it and learn to tune into it. To anyone looking at the situation with my friend a few months ago, there was nothing outward saying she should resign. It was just her gut feel. She honoured it. And it paid off for her.

Sometimes it can be difficult. I get that. It’s easier for me to write about my intuition than listen to it sometimes. But it always steers me right. And I find myself thanking it over and over for that fact.