181. Intuition vs. Inertia 

Erin Aquin:

Welcome to the Love and Success Podcast. You are listening to Episode 181, Intuition Versus Inertia.

Hello there lovers. Today I want to talk about something that has been coming up for me personally in the last couple of weeks, and for a lot of my clients. So where I live right now, days are getting shorter, fall is in the air, it's cold. I love fall, actually. 

But as a former Chinese medicine practitioner, I know that this time of the year is really nature's way of releasing what needs to be let go of and turning inwards to conserve energy for the winter. We see that in the trees like letting go of all of their leaves. This is something that trees do for survival. And it's something that I think a lot of us humans want to cozy up, I've been knitting more. And even though in my business traditionally, this is the time of year where I would really be ramping up for the holiday season. And I would be really thinking about January and helping people figure out what they're going to do for the next calendar year. 

I've also noticed this inertia, this energy of it being a little harder to get started. And it's really interesting, one of my friends and I were talking who had been on the retreat in Italy. There's also just a natural ebb and flow. We had such an amazing week, it was like a natural high to be in that space for the week with my coaching friends, all of these very successful business women, and just basking in the energy of that place along the Amalfi Coast in Italy. So right now I'm really feeling like I'm on the high and then came home and just recalibrated to this time zone and to the natural energy that's happening here with fall with autumn. And what it's brought up is really starting to remember how to make the distinction between intuition and inertia. 

At the heart of so much of the work that I do as a coach is really about teaching people how to trust themselves at the deepest level. Because I work with so many entrepreneurs we are often working off of our gut sense, our intuition, we're feeling something come up, we're getting an idea, and we are believing in it. Long before we ever have evidence that it was the “right thing to do.” So entrepreneurs kind of live in the land of intuition. 

But if, like many of us, you have been raised to look to other people, look to the expert, to always take the opinion, outside opinions into consideration when making decisions. It can really fuck up your intuition. 

Now, I don't think there's anything wrong necessarily with listening to opinions of people that you respect. And people who've gone before you I certainly get coached by experts in my field, I talk to friends who have done the things that I'm trying to do, I get their opinions and advice on what I'm up to. But at the end of the day, as an entrepreneur, if you want to maintain and sustain success, you have to learn how to trust your intuition and trust that even if the thing you are trying to do it doesn't work out exactly as you had planned, which almost never does, by the way, but you have to trust that there will be some lesson in that there will be a what I call a teaching moment you will hear the cash register going off in your mind as you figure out the solution to a problem that probably millions of people share. And the more that we can learn how to articulate solutions for our audience for our clients. The more results we get, the more money we make, the more success we have. 

So, I don't know if I've ever said it on the podcast, but the best business coaching that I've ever received was doing the work around self worth. It had nothing to do with business. I did this work with some of my peers. I did this work on my own. I worked almost exclusively on self worth for six months, every single day. And that was a turning point not only in my life and with my own competence, and my skill as a coach, but it was the turning point in my business. Your relationship with yourself is something that I think most people think it's a luxury to work on. It's not a priority. I've talked to many people over the years on consultations who know that it's something that they probably need to do. But they don't, they haven't done it. Because it doesn't seem like it would yield such tangible results. 

So I'm here to say, first of all, working on your self worth is so good, not only for your life, but for your bank account. And the one we do that is learning how to trust intuition. But here's the tricky part. Sometimes, it's hard to make the distinction between an intuitive sense that you need to slow down, that you need to rest and just straight up inertia. 

I talked about this on Instagram the other day, I had this really simple business example. But I had a meeting with my team. And they coached me to this place that I talked about last week on the show. But then I suddenly had like three or four tasks that were going to probably take me an hour or two, that they were asking me if I could, you know, make time to do it. And normally I take one full day a week off, I call it CEO, Friday, or whatever day it could be good. Sometimes we shift around a little bit. But I have my CEO day and I was like, “Oh, this is the day I don't work.” And I wanted to almost robotically stick to that, because I was also feeling a little tired. Feeling a little bit underpowered, not really feeling super inspired. 

I did not want to do my hair, or put on makeup that I always do. But I just was not feeling it. It was a gray day and I was feeling that Autumn energy. And I had this question “Is this inertia? Or is this intuition?” Here's how I figured it out. And this is the way I would suggest that you play with this, if you're not sure if you have not made that distinction for yourself, or sometimes it just feels a little muddled like it was for me, the way to know is if it's intuition, telling you to slow down telling you to save this particular project for another day, to go back to bed, you have to know that that self investment of that time and of that energy is worth more than the result that you're trying to create. 

If you just do what's on your calendar, or you do the thing that you said you would do. So in that instance, to kind of make it a little clearer, I had to record some videos. And at that moment, I was like, “Oh, the result of getting this done at this moment is more important to me than like going and laying in my bed and probably watching Netflix.” You know the result of that, knowing that these videos could be helpful to someone, they're going to be helpful to my team, they're probably going to be helpful for me to articulate this particular thing that I've been trying to work on and think about. 

And the failsafe or the sort of net that I always give myself and this isn't an act of true self compassion is I will commit to doing something for 15 minutes. And if I'm still not feeling it, or I don't like the results I'm creating, I'll put it away. So it's a little negotiation with myself. But I promise you, the times when it's been intuition telling me to slow down, I will fumble through something for 15 minutes, not be feeling the results, not be loving what I'm creating. And I'll say okay, I tested it out. I played with this. And now it's very clear to me that my intuition is speaking, and I need to go do something restorative. 

Now, of course what happened the other day was I started working on it and 15 minutes went by, I didn't even notice I got so into what I was doing. The creative Muse picked me up and got me through the whole thing. And you know, it wasn't perfect material. But it was so much better to have done it. I felt very accomplished. I was really proud of myself. I was so happy to give it to my team. I felt like I was really being the leader in my business and not making them wait on me. So there were so many benefits for my business and my clients. And that result was definitely really worth testing it out. 

This is something I think that's really important when we're talking about intuition. And another way you can think about intuition is self trust. So, if you are really trusting yourself, I just want to also point out that it doesn't mean that you always know what the end result is going to be. Sometimes you have to trust yourself enough to know, when you don't know the difference between intuition and inertia, when you don't know if you are just feeling a little tired, but the next thing is going to re-engage you and motivate you. That's okay. I think too many of us get very rigid around this idea. It's like, if I was really intuitive, or I was really trusting myself, I would always be right. And I would always no, I don't think it works that way. I think sometimes our intuition is just a utensil of possibility. And you can listen to it. And you can play with it. And you can test things out. Trusting that you will always know as soon as you know, I could have gone 15 minutes into this project. And if it wasn't clicking for me, if I wasn't into it, then I would have known. And I wouldn't have said, "Oh tisk tisk I did not listen to my intuition. And now we've wasted 15 minutes."

“No,” I would have said, “Oh, now it's abundantly clear. And I'm so glad I trusted myself to be open to the possibility that maybe it was just inertia, telling me to go to bed and non intuition.” This is why I think having a deeper relationship with yourself is so powerful. Most people that I know do not talk to themselves in a way that is supportive and loving. And they are kind of mean to themselves, like a lot of my clients subtly dismiss or not so subtly dismiss their accomplishments. They dismiss all the beautiful things that they have created. And they focus only on the issues and the upsets and the problems. 

When you have a relationship with yourself at a deep level, you can be willing to be wrong. And know that you're totally safe. Because you're never going to turn on yourself, you're never going to think well that was stupid, I just wasted 15 minutes. Or if you choose to just go lay down and you're laying there and you're like, you know, I'm really not tired. I think this might have just been inertia, to not beat yourself up for getting out of bed to go and do the thing that is going to move things forward for you and make you feel aligned. 

When we are working on figuring out how to build an online business. When we have to also take into consideration the fact that most of us have listened to the voices and opinions of other people for our entire lives. And so it's going to take some time for you to differentiate between things like inertia and intuition. And sometimes you're going to do it wrong. Sometimes you're going to find out halfway through something that this was not for you. That's not a problem. As long as you're listening, it's never a problem and you always have a U-turn available to you. 

So I hope that this has been helpful for you. Let me know and if you're also feeling a little bit more inertia pulling at you this fall, try the 15 Minute Rule, test it out, see how it goes, listen and trust yourself. And I will talk to you again next week. 

Things are changing over here in the love and success universe but for a limited time I am offering the how to get what you want relationship masterclass completely free, you can head over to https://courses.revitalizeyourrelationship.com/get-what-you-want-masterclass-lp or click the link here in the show notes to get my latest masterclass completely free. This skill is essential to having more love and success and I hope you enjoy it. Take care.