You know it was always there

Gavin de Becker, speaking on the Diary of a CEO, who has spent his career studying how humans make decisions under pressure, said that the training most of us need isn't to sharpen our intuition. It's to stop arguing with it.

I replayed it three times. There was something about it I couldn't let go off.

I've done good work over the past few years. Work I'm proud of. And still, some of it left me with this quiet aftertaste I couldn't quite name. Projects that looked right on paper. Good clients, interesting briefs, real opportunities. I said yes to all of them. And the work was solid. It just didn't land the way I hoped it would.

The honest thing is, I usually knew. Early. Sometimes in the first conversation. There was a signal, faint and hard to justify, telling me this one isn't quite it. And I'd override it. Because the reasons to say yes were tangible. Cash flow, a cool brand name, a portfolio piece. A feeling doesn't compete well against reason. So reason won, every time.

I don't think I was wrong to take that work. I showed up, I delivered, I cared. But I'm starting to see a pattern. The projects that left me flat were almost always the ones where I talked myself past something I already knew.

De Becker described an experiment with dodgeball players. Shown a frozen image of a game, experienced players made better decisions when they went with their first read. Give them more time to think it through, and accuracy dropped. The thinking got in the way of the knowing.

I recognized that immediately. In client work, something settles into place early. Someone asks for a rebrand and what I'm actually hearing is that they've lost confidence in what they're building. Someone asks for a logo and what's underneath that is a person who hasn't figured out what they actually want to say yet. More often then I might realize, I can feel what they might actually need instead of what they ask for. And for a long time, I treated that as unreliable 'cause it's just a feeling. It's not built on a framework. It's not measurable.

A few weeks ago I had a call with someone who built a real following around plant-based recipes. She was killing it. But she was combining it with a day job, and she wanted to start selling merch so she could eventually leave it. And sitting there, something was clear to me: she was giving away the most valuable thing she had. Hundreds of recipes, years of knowledge, all of it for free. And worse, building a merch line would take even more time away from the thing her audience actually came for. It could quietly kill the very thing that was working.

This time I said it. I told her I didn't think she needed to hire me for what she'd originally asked.

She might not follow the advice. That's okay. What stayed with me was how different it felt to say the true thing instead of the convenient one. Something in that conversation was more solid than months of work I'd taken on out of reasonableness.

We learn early to distrust what we can't explain. A feeling isn't evidence. An instinct isn't a strategy. And so we build layers on top of our own knowing. We add process, frameworks, second opinions. All of it useful. And all of it, sometimes, a way of avoiding the simplest signal we have.

I used to think trusting myself was about confidence. Getting good enough, experienced enough, certain enough to back my own read. But confidence can be performed. You can walk into a room looking sure of yourself and still be at war inside.

What's actually changed for me recently is something quieter than confidence. A kind of peace. The noise dialed down enough that I can hear what was always there. I'm not fighting the signal anymore. I'm just letting it arrive.

I'm paying closer attention now. Not as some mystical force. Just as information I've been discounting because it doesn't come with proof.

What if the thing you've been overthinking is something you already know?