Intuition 101 [Best of WHC] | ep136
If you have been a part of the Wholehearted Coaching community for a while, you know how much I believe in intuition. Intuition is your superpower, love. I believe that you know what is truly best for you better than anyone else does.
As we near the end of the year, this is the best time to talk about trusting yourself and your intuition. This is a time when we can get a little lost and caught up in what everyone else thinks is best for us thinking they know better than we do. They don’t, love. you always know what is best for you. And today, I’m going to remind you of that.
*Before we dive in, I’ve decided to host a surprise Live Manifestation Workshop to get you ready to bring in your biggest dreams in 2023! Click below to learn more.
Welcome to your crash course in Intuition! It’s time to learn how to trust yourself again, love
Whether you’re wondering how to understand your intuition, wanting to create a greater connection to listen to your intuition, or even what intuition feels like, you’re in the right place!
Intuition is one of the key pillars of what I teach. I truly believe that if you lead your life from your intuition and start trusting your inner knowing, that’s when your life will transform and change for the better.
When I learned how to listen to my intuition, trust it, and take action from it — that was when my life became what it is today. So today, I want to help you…
distinguish what intuition sounds like
tell the difference between ego and intuition and
understand if you’re making an impulsive decision or an intuitive decision
We’re going to set off this ripple effect by understanding the difference between the 3 voices of intuition, ego, and impulse.
What Intuition means
Intuition is something many of us feel we disconnected from. We might kinda know we have it. Maybe we’ve had moments where we feel pretty in touch with it. But, when it comes to our daily lives and our big decisions, we feel like we don’t know what it is.
The first thing I want you to understand is that you do have access to your intuition. No matter who you are on the other side of the screen reading this right now.
I know, I know. You may be saying, “Shirin, I just may be the small percentage that just does not have access to my intuition, ok?” Lies, love.
It’s important to first understand what intuition means. There are a lot of different names for intuition — inner voice, highest self, inner knowing. Whatever you choose to call it, intuition is your innate knowledge that’s based on feeling versus reason. We often describe it as “a hunch.” Intuition is the voice or feeling inside you that hints at what’s best for you.
I want you to do a little exercise to really show you that you actually do have access to your intuition.
A quick exercise to connect with your Intuition
Think of the last time that you said to yourself:
“I knew better.”
Go ahead. Think of the last time you said...
I knew I shouldn’t have said "no.”
I knew I shouldn’t have said “yes.”
I knew I shouldn’t have gone on that second date.
Do you have your moment?
Ok, love. There you have it. It’s that simple.
If you have ever uttered that phrase, then it means you have intuition. You do have that innate knowledge. It means you had an intuitive download, but in that moment, you decided not to listen to it. And that’s ok. There are a lot of reasons why we don’t listen to our intuition, but what I want you to understand from this exercise is that you have access to it.
How to listen to your Intuition
Now that you have your moment and you realize what “I knew better” means, you next need to understand what it feels like when you listen to your intuition.
In your “I knew better” situation, how did your intuition communicate with you?
What did your body feel like? Did you hear a voice? Did you dream up an answer? Did you just instinctively know? What were the feelings, sensations, voices, images, downloads that you had in that moment of knowing better?
Now, if those questions feel a little too difficult to tune into, ask yourself this: What did it feel like to NOT listen to my intuition?
After years of doing this work, some of the common answers I hear are:
“I get tension headaches”
“I can’t sleep at night”
“I make constant pro’s and con’s lists”
“I ask everyone for their opinion”
“My belly is in knots”
Once you understand how you feel when your intuition communicates with you, you have some key knowledge available to you. Write down what those sensations, feelings, and downloads are like for you.
Another really important thing you should note about intuition is what its energy feels like. Intuition is really soft. It’s not going to yell at you or force you to do anything. It’s a very nurturing, loving energy. That’s what makes listening to your intuition so tough - it’s the softest voice. It knows that eventually you’re going to have to listen to it.
I like to think of each of these three voices having a catchphrase. If Intuition had a catchphrase, it would be,
“Let’s just see what happens.”
Now, you may be much more familiar with another, much louder voice — the voice of Ego.
Intuition vs Ego
Oftentimes the first voice we hear from is Ego. Ego is that voice of fear. It masks itself as intuition all of the time. If you haven’t been in touch with your intuition for a long time, it becomes really hard to tell the difference.
So, intuition is soft, loving, nurturing, and steady. Intuition is very deeply, peacefully rooted in the present. Intuition expands into possibility, of what could be.
Ego is loud. Ego throws tons of worst case scenarios your way.
You can often tell you’re deep in the voice of Ego when all you can hear is everything that could go wrong and everything that went wrong in the past. That’s because Ego is really fixated in the past and the future. It wants to remind you how you failed back then and how that’ll happen again.
If Ego had a catchphrase, it would be,
“It’s never going to happen.”
What is the meaning of Impulse
Now, impulse is tricky. It’s connected to both our intuition and ego and it appears after we get a really clear signal from our intuition about what we need to do now.
Impulse is that moment when you realize:
your job isn’t right for you
your partner isn’t “the one”
that you need to have a really courageous conversation
Impulse picks up on what Intuition is saying. Then, it operates from that fearful place of Ego. And it does this because it has seen you ignore your intuition before and it has seen the effects of ignoring your intuition. So, Impulse wants to take action NOW. Before it never gets the chance to ever again.
It’s really important to understand when we’re leading from this place of Impulse. While it’s knowledge and wisdom are wonderful, the way Impulse takes action often is quite harmful.
If Impulse had a catchphrase, it would be,
“If it doesn’t happen now, then it’s never going to happen.”
How to Practice Trusting Your Intuition
When you can really decipher between these three voices of Intuition, Ego, and Impulse, your life will shift and change in incredible ways.
All of us have an area in our lives in which our Intuition is actually super strong. For me, my intuition has always been super strong in the kitchen. When I’m in the kitchen, I’m in the flow and if things go left, I know how to make them go right. In the kitchen, I cannot be questioned!
What is that space in your life, love? What area in life do you really feel connected to your inner knowledge and you really trust it.
I want you to find that thing. Then, write down why you trust yourself in that arena. Then, I want you to see how you can apply that knowledge to another area of your life. Maybe your personal life, your professional life, your romantic life.
This is going to be so incredibly insightful for you.
Until next time, love.
If you feel called to learn how to listen to yourself again, I want to invite you to join me for my FREE 5-day masterclass called Inner Compass Experience from April 10 to April 15. It is hands down one of my favorite masterclasses where you’ll learn how to finally trust yourself again and create a life that is a true reflection of who you are and what you want to do.
I hope you’ll join me, love.
After listening, you’re going to love this episode!
106 | The key to creating your best life
Dive deeper into the reasons why you don’t listen to your intuition. So often we’re moving through life ticking off all the boxes of a dream life checklist. But the thing is, you’ve followed it to a T and now you feel empty. Learn the truth behind what you should do and what you actually need to do to live the life of YOUR dreams, love.
A quote to take with you:
“When you start making decisions that are based in what you truly want — not what your fear wants, not what your mom wants, not what you’re supposed to do — the domino effect of making multiple decisions like this, that’s what changes lives.”
Did you know that each episode comes with free guided journal prompts?
If you want to be in the know and get each Mindset Monday straight to your inbox complete with journal prompts to take you even further, get on my email list.
About your host, Shirin Eskandani
Hi, love! I’m Shirin.
Coach, speaker, writer, and life alchemist.
I teach you how to listen to your intuition again, tune out all the BS, and let your heart lead the way.
Because once you strengthen your inner GPS, decisions become easier, boundaries become clearer, and belly laughs become a daily thing.
A LITTLE BIT ABOUT ME:
I’m a certified life coach (accredited through the International Coach Federation)
My husband and I met on Instagram and we live in Brooklyn, NY with our plant babies
I have a masters degree in Music and was a professional opera singer for twelve years. I worked all over the world singing on stage at Carnegie Hall and the Metropolitan Opera (more on that later…).
I believe in the woo just as much as I do the work (internal and external). No amount of crystals and affirmations will make up for a lack of a healthy mindset and aligned action.
I love all the Real Housewives franchises. Don’t make me choose one… seriously, don’t.
+ Read the episode transcript here
[00:00:00] Welcome to Wholehearted Coaching: The Podcast. If you're looking for more purpose, more passion, more joy in your life, then you have come to the right place.
I am your host, coach and Life Alchemist, Shirin Eskandani. And I have worked with thousands of people showing them how to create their dream lives while also living their dream.
Hi love. Welcome to Wholehearted Coaching: The Podcast. This is where we take a deeper dive into my Mindset Monday post, which you can read on Instagram at @wholeheartedcoaching. Or if you want to go even deeper into this week's episode and get my free weekly journal prompts, sign up for my email list and you'll be able to explore the topics we're talking about in this episode. Even further, you can do that in the show notes or by heading to my website: wholehearted-coaching.com.
And if you're interested in working with me, whether that's one-on-one in one of my group programs or one of my transformational courses, you can head to my website, wholehearted-coaching.com/offerings to find out more. And of course you can also head to the show notes and all of this information. We'll be waiting for you there. All right, love. Welcome to this week’s episode.
[00:01:46] Today's episode is all about intuition and I'm telling you there is something for everyone in this episode. If you're looking to strengthen your intuition or create a greater connection to your intuition, or maybe just figure out how to listen to your intuition and what you're even listening to. This is the episode for you.
[00:02:08] If you have been part of this community for a while, you know that intuition is one of the key pillars of what I teach. I truly believe that if all of us, if every single person listening to this podcast started to lead their life from their intuition and started to trust that inner knowing, then that's when our lives transform and change for the better.
[00:02:33] When I learned how to listen to my intuition and not only just how to listen to it, but then trust and take action from my intuition. That is when my life became what it is today. So today's episode is a crash course in intuition. How can you distinguish what intuition sounds like? How can you tell the difference between ego and intuition and how.
[00:02:58] Can you understand if you are making an impulsive decision or an intuitive decision. Now we're talking about all of this, because if you are listening live, you have one more week to sign up for my free week-long masterclass, the inner compass experience in the inner compass experience. We're going to be talking about a lot of the things we're looking at today, but even deeper.
[00:03:23] And we're going to be expanding. The Inner Compass Experience is about you learning how to become your own north star. Again, meaning that you become the guide, the expert of your own damn life. This is a transformative week that you get to spend with me. It's completely free and it runs from April 10th to the 15th.
[00:03:46] And if you can't join us, live for the calls, everything will be recorded for you. So if you want to find out more, if you want to sign. Head to whole at-coaching.com/experience, or you can just go to the show notes. All right. Let's get into today's episode and I am so excited to see what resonates with you from what we're going to talk about.
[00:04:11] Because the ripple effect of what we're going to be learning is going to be so huge love. So there technically isn't a mindset Monday today. If you had to Instagram, you will see a carousel, which means a bunch of different images. And the first image reads know the difference between intuition, ego and impulse.
[00:04:33] That's what we're going to be talking about today. Each one of these voices, what they feel like, how they communicate to us and ultimately what they want us to do when you have this knowledge, love of really understanding how these three different voices manifest in your body, how they talk to you, how they communicate to you and what they ultimately make you do.
[00:04:55] That's when you start making decisions that are based in what you truly want. Not what your fear wants, not what your mom wants, not what you're supposed to do, but what you really, really want. And the domino effect of making multiple decisions like this, right. Decisions of what you truly want. That's what changes lives.
[00:05:15] I will say that today's episode is great to listen to. If you've also listened to last week's episode, now you can listen to this one independent of last week's. But in last week's episode, we go into some of the deeper reasons of why we don't listen to our intuition. So I really recommend listening to that.
[00:05:36] And today we're going to be expanding upon some of the ideas we looked at in last week's episode. Okay. So let's talk about intuition. Now. Intuition is something that many of us feel like we are disconnected. Perhaps we know we have it. Maybe we've had moments where we're in touch with it, but when it comes to our day-to-day lives, our big decisions, we feel like we can't connect to it.
[00:06:00] We don't know what it is. So I want to talk to you about what intuition is, what it feels like. Again, it'll be different for you, but there are some basic things that we can truly understand about it. So the first thing I want us to understand is that all of us have access to our intuition. All of us. I know you may be listening to this and saying, you know what, Shirin, I may be like the small percentage that does not have access to my intuition.
[00:06:26] And to this, I say lies. Okay, we're going to do a little exercise. That's going to prove to you that actually you do have access to your intuition. I want you to think of the last time that you said to yourself. I knew better. Go ahead and think of that last time that you said to yourself. I knew better. I knew I shouldn't have said no.
[00:06:52] I knew I shouldn't have said yes. I knew I shouldn't have gone on that second date. So thinking of a circumstance and it doesn't have to be a recent one, but perhaps a circumstance that you can remember in which you wanted to do something. And you went against that. And later on, you said to yourself, I knew better.
[00:07:14] So low. If you have ever, ever, ever, ever uttered the phrase I knew better, then that means you have intuition. You have innate knowledge. It means that you had an intuitive download, but you decided not to listen to it now. That's okay that you didn't listen to it again. If you want to go deeper into this head to last week's episode.
[00:07:39] There are a lot of reasons why we don't listen to our intuition. But what I want you to understand is that if you've ever said that phrase of, I knew better, that means that you have access to your intuition. What we have to understand is in these moments, what that feeling is, what that knowing is. So if you can think about that memory.
[00:08:07] Right. If you can take yourself back there, I want you to ask yourself, how did my intuition communicate with me? What did my body feel like? Was it a voice? Did I dream up the answer? Did I just instinctively know thinking of that moment and really queuing. What were the feelings, the sensations, the voices, the images, the downloads that I had in that moment.
[00:08:39] Now this may be difficult for some of you and that's okay for those of you who find this exercise difficult. I want you to think, okay. What did it feel like to not listen to my intuition? This may be an easier. Now years of doing this work, some of the common answers I hear of what does it feel like? Not listening to my intuition are I get tension headaches.
[00:09:04] I can't sleep at night. I make constant pro and con lists. I ask everyone for their opinion, my body hurts. My belly is a knots. So you can either think of this as, what does it feel like when I listen to it? Or what does it feel like when I don't listen to it? This is knowledge. This is key. So for those of you who can really tap into what it feels like to listen to your intuition, amazing, write down what those sensations, those feelings, those downloads are like for you.
[00:09:43] And just take note of that. And for those of you, and I'm in this case, Who can only tap into your intuition by understanding what it feels like to not listen to it, write that down and take note of that. Right? So next time you're making pro and con lists. Next time, your belly feels a certain way, you know, to check in and say, oh, okay.
[00:10:07] It seems like I'm not really listening to myself. I find that the energy of intuition is really soft and stuff. Intuition is not going to yell at us. It's not going to force us to do anything because it knows that eventually we're going to have to listen to it, right. That eventually we're going to get in the same situation again and again and again and again, and that finally, we're going to be like, okay, I'm ready.
[00:10:33] I'm ready to listen to you. And that's what makes it so tough to listen to intuition because it is often the most softest voice. It is a very nurturing energy. It's a very loving energy, right? Whereas ego ego is the first voice. We usually hear ego that voice of fear, ego masks itself as intuition all of the time.
[00:11:03] And that's why it becomes a really hard for us to understand well, which voice is intuition and which voice is. And especially if you haven't been in touch with your intuition for awhile, it's really hard to make this distinction. Right. I often call intuition a mother of two. Uh, mother tongue that we have just kind of lost practice and that's okay if we've lost practice, right?
[00:11:27] Just like with a language, the more and more we use it, the more and more proficient we become in that language. But you have to understand that at the beginning, it's going to be really messy, really messy, trying to make sense of what is going on, right. Again, like a mother tongue, like a language you used to be really good.
[00:11:47] Oh, my goodness. Like I actually, I speak Italian tooting my own horn here, but I used to speak really, really well. And uh, if I hear Italian now, I'm like, what, what you want pasta is that lasagna. They're like not even talking about pasta and lasagna, but I really want to tell you that at first, this work is going to feel really disorienting.
[00:12:09] It's going to feel really. But trust me the more and more you practice, what we're going to talk about today. And if you come to the inner compass experience, what we're really going to delve into deeply there is understanding how to really distinguish these different energies and voices. Right? So intuition, soft, loving, nurturing, it's soft and steady.
[00:12:35] Whereas ego instead is loud. It's. Ego is going to throw tons of worst case scenarios, your way you often know you're in that place of ego and fear, because all you can think about is everything that could go wrong and everything that went wrong in the past. So ego is really fixated on how many times you've failed in the past.
[00:13:00] It's very rooted in that and what could possibly go wrong in the future? It's not about the present. Whereas intuition is just about the present moment and about expansion of what could be. Whereas ego is all about what could go wrong. I find when I'm in a place of ego, I feel an anxiousness. I feel an untetheredness to who I am.
[00:13:29] Whereas intuition is a lot more centered. It's a lot more quiet. It's rooted in who you are. Here's a tough thing. Intuition will often ask us to do things that feel uncomfortable. Things that feel scary for us, things that go against what we have been trying to create. They go against what society tells us we should do.
[00:13:50] They just go against what we believe we're supposed to do. Right? So there is kind of this element of fear with that and not knowing, however, there's also the sense of. This is actually right for me. Like, it doesn't make sense, but this is right for me. Whereas ego is all about this could go wrong. That could go wrong.
[00:14:11] It makes you feel really anxious and not rooted to yourself. So for me, it's really about taking a deep breath in these moments where I'm trying to figure out which voice is which tapping into what it feels like in my body. Tapping into the thoughts that I'm having tapping into, whether I'm fixating on the past or the future or the present and possibility.
[00:14:39] And you can slowly that way start to understand the difference between the two and start to eventually take action from and listen to, and make decisions from that intuitive energy. Okay. So that's kind of a crash course in ego and intuition. Let's now talk about impulse impulsive decisions. Now impulse is tricky because it's connected to both our intuition and ego impulse appears.
[00:15:09] After we get a really clear signal from our intuition about what we need to do now. Right. It's that moment when you realize that your job isn't for you, your partner, isn't the one, or that you need to have a really courageous conversation or send that email. These are all really great insights. But what happens with impulse is that it picks up on what your intuition is saying, but then it operates from that fearful place of your ego.
[00:15:39] So, this is when you send that email at like 12:59 AM and the next day you're like, oh, why did I do that? And even though you needed to express the things in that email, perhaps they could have been expressed better. Maybe they could have been set in a different way or a different time. Right. That is impulse.
[00:16:00] So impulse does this because impulse has seen you ignore your intuition before. And it seen the effects of you ignoring your intuition and it wants you to take action now. And so it convinces you that if you don't do this now, you're never going to do it. Which to be fair to impulse has probably happened before in your life.
[00:16:23] I also call impulse the burn, this bitch down mentality, right? It's all about forging ahead. Not thinking of the ramifications of your actions. Impulse makes you fixate on timelines, comparisons, and worst case scenarios. That's how it creates so much urgency for us. When we lead with impulse often, what ends up happening is that we put our own wellbeing at risk, right?
[00:16:51] We make a financial decision that makes us, you know, face financial hardship, or we have a conversation with someone perhaps in a way that isn't so compassionate or kind of. So intuition is going to ask you to do uncomfortable things, but it's never going to put your wellbeing at risk. Instead it asks you to do things in service of your well being.
[00:17:17] So it's really important to also understand when we are leading from this place of impulse, because while impulses, knowledge and wisdom, Is wonderful and amazing the way it takes action. Often isn't, it's often quite harmful for us and we see impulse happening a lot in the world of wellness, a lot in the world of self-growth for me, with a lot of my clients who want to quit their job, I'm always like, wait a second.
[00:17:46] Let's work through it. Let's see what your intuition truly, truly wants. And some of my clients end up quitting their jobs and some of them. But impulse is all about this place is terrible for you. This place is making you sick. You got to get out now, listen, you should get out, but maybe not now, maybe it's about waiting.
[00:18:07] So when we are leading from impulse, we are going off of wisdom, but there is an anxious, overwhelming, urgent energy to all. I like to say that if each one of these voices, intuition, ego and impulse had a catchphrase intuitions, catchphrase would be, let's just see what happens, right. An invitation to possibly.
[00:18:34] Ego would be, it's never going to happen. Right? Ego is making you look at the past and the future and it's like, listen, this is not going to happen. Just don't do it. An impulse impulses catchphrases. If this doesn't happen now, then it's never going to happen. Right. So understanding that with impulse, it's all.
[00:18:58] You got to do this now, or you're never going to ever do it. When you can start to really decipher between these three voices, these three different energies I'm telling you your life will shift and change in incredible ways. So as we're nearing the end of the podcast, I have some homework for you, but I'm not going to call it homework because homework is just a terrible word.
[00:19:23] What we're going to call it as home growth home. So all of us have an area in our lives in which our intuition is actually super, super strong. So for me, my intuition has always been super strong in the kitchen. When I'm in the kitchen, I just feel like I know what I'm doing. I'm in the flow. If things go left, I know how to make them go.
[00:19:47] Right? Like in the kitchen, I cannot be questioned or I will never question myself. So I want you to think of that space in your life, that area in your life, when you really feel like you are connected to your inner knowledge, your inner wisdom, and you really trust it. I want you to find that thing. And then I want you to take note, like really write it down of why you trust yourself in this arena.
[00:20:19] Why you listen to your intuition. What are the factors, the things that make you really feel like you can listen to yourself in this area, and then just taking that knowledge and seeing if you can apply it to other areas in which you don't feel that connection to your intuition, whether that is your personal life, your professional life, your romantic life, whatever it means for you.
[00:20:47] I'm telling you this is going to be really incredibly insightful. So this my love was a crash course in intuition. If you want to go deeper with me, I really invite you to join me for the inner compass experience. If you're listening live, you have one more week to sign up. Before we begin on April 10th, you can head to whole hearted-coaching.com/experience to find out more, or just go to the show notes.
[00:21:21] So before we say goodbye, I want you to think of one thing that's really resonating with you from today's podcast. And as you think of that thing, we're going to take a deep breath in and out holding onto that reflection. So breathing in
[00:21:39] and out. Until next week. Love, I will talk to you then. Thank you so much for joining me this week. If you liked this episode, please share it with a friend subscribe or follow where you love listening most. And if you haven't yet leave a review, you can do this on apple podcasts. Castbox pod chaser, or podcast addict until next week, Love.