YOUR INTUITION IS A GIFT
Losing everything taught me something I did not see coming. It did not just take my business. It took my ability to trust myself.
When my husband and I came back to England in 2008 with no business, no home, and pregnant with our fourth son, I did what I think many of us do after a significant loss. I looked for the cause. I searched within myself for the flaw in my own judgement, my own decisions, my own thinking, certain that somewhere in there was the mistake that had brought everything down.
The trouble was, I could not find a clear answer. And when you cannot find the flaw, but you are convinced it must exist, you begin questioning everything. So I questioned my business instincts. My creative eye. I wondered if I had ever actually known what good design was. I wondered if I had ever truly known how to make the right call. Every decision I was about to make suddenly felt suspect, because what if this was the one that finally proved I had been wrong all along?
I stopped trusting my own judgement. And in its place, I started looking for experts to tell me what to do instead. Now, experts are valuable. There are things that require specialist knowledge, and I will never pretend otherwise. But there is a point where relying on an expert becomes a way of avoiding your own judgement. I crossed that line repeatedly, and I did not even notice I was doing it.
I would hire someone, a designer, a consultant, a strategist, and they would do their best work. And somewhere deep down, I would know that something was not quite right. That it was not quite me. But instead of saying so, I would go ahead with it anyway. Because I did not trust myself enough to push back.
Here is what I noticed over time, though. My original idea never actually left. It would sit there patiently, waiting, while I went round in circles chasing other people’s version of what was right. Months later, sometimes years later, I would come back to that same idea, implement it the way I had first imagined it, and it would work. That told me something important. My ideas had always been valid. I had simply been looking for permission to use them.
Your intuition is a gift, given by God to guide you. Like your fingerprint, it is entirely unique to you, and its purpose is to lead you along the path that belongs to you and no one else. Nobody else has been given your exact intuition, because nobody else is meant to walk your exact path.
Losing my business took my confidence with it. But rebuilding it showed me something I needed to see: everything I had stopped trusting was still there all along. I simply had to find my way back to it.
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