Listen to Your Feelings, but Don’t Follow Them

We often talk about the benefits of listening to your gut.

Thinking and using logic are important, but paying attention to your intuition – or gut – is essential. When things feel right it’s a good sign. When things feel wrong, it’s a time to pause to learn more.

While our feelings are signals, listening to them and following them are two different things.

When we follow our feelings, we can sometimes become overwhelmed. We might start off a little anxious, and work on it in our head until we become paralyzed with fear. If we follow our anxiety, it grows and grows.

When we follow a feeling we are feeding it. We are giving it our attention and energy. The more we stay with our anxiousness, the more anxious we become. It’s self-fulfilling.

The more anxious you feel, the more you draw anxious experiences to you.

The trick is to listen to your feelings and recognize them as something you have and choose how you want to react. Listen to them, but do not fall prey to their allure. 

For example, if you feel anxious, recognize you are anxious and ask why are you feeling this way.

By shifting your focus from being in the feeling to understanding you are having the feeling is empowering all by itself.

If you take time to try to understand where the feeling is coming from, you can start to work on its source.

Your feelings are amazingly helpful. Realize they are signals for you to look deeper and not beacons for you to follow.

Special thanks to Mary Ennis for the inspiration for this post.