People Pleasers: Why following your intuition feels so triggering
When it comes to learning to listen to and hear your intuition, for some this can be an emotionally triggering experience.
If you're a people pleaser or highly sensitive person, you might have noticed something uncomfortable happening when you try to tune into your inner voice. Maybe you've attended workshops on intuition, read all the books, tried the meditation practices—and instead of feeling empowered, you feel... anxious. Unsettled. Even a bit panicked.
You're not broken. And your intuition isn't missing.
What's actually happening is that listening to your intuition requires you to do something you've spent years, maybe decades, avoiding: being honest about what you actually want.
The Realisation That Changes Everything
Learning to listen to your intuition means starting to realise things you've been avoiding:
Where your energy is actually going
What your true capacity is (not the superhuman capacity you wish you had)
Where you actually want to put your time and energy
What's draining you, even if it looks good on paper
What you're saying yes to out of obligation rather than genuine desire
For people pleasers, these realisations can feel like the ground shifting beneath your feet.
The Uncomfortable Truth About Saying No
Here's what makes intuition so triggering: it asks you to say no in the moment to say yes to something bigger.
Your intuition might whisper that you need to skip that event, decline that request, or stop showing up for something that everyone expects you to do. And that moment of saying no? It's deeply uncomfortable. There's disconnection. There's the fear of disappointing someone. There's the guilt.
But what you're actually doing is saying yes to yourself. Yes to more capacity. Yes to deeper, more authentic connections. Yes to a life that actually fits you.
I have a client who's been confronted with this directly. After experiencing burnout and going through a profound spiritual transformation, her body simply stopped letting her ignore its signals. She's had to transition out of her career, stop working completely for a period, and manage her time and energy as though her life depends on it—because it does.
She's leaving training sessions early when her body says enough, saying no to arranged meet-ups with friends when it suddenly feels too much, lying on the grass to connect with the earth because that's what her body is demanding. The intense physical experience she's moving through dictates that she change her patterns and listen.
This kind of awakening can also happen to women during perimenopause and menopause, when their tolerance on all levels shifts dramatically.
She's relearning who she's becoming, renegotiating her boundaries, and her needs are speaking so loudly now that she has no choice but to listen. She's creating new, healthy boundaries—not as a luxury, but as a necessity.
When You Have No Sense of Self
If you've spent most of your life focused on what other people want, need, and expect, you might have realised something painful: you don't actually know what you want.
You don't know your dreams. You might not even be able to name your desires. You've been so busy reading other people—monitoring for conflict, managing their emotions, maintaining boundaries that protect them but not you—that you've lost touch with yourself.
And then someone tells you to "listen to your intuition," and you think: What intuition? I don't have it.
But you do. You've just been ignoring and denying it for so long that the connection feels severed.
I worked with a client recently who hated her job and had completely lost her sense of direction. "What am I meant to be doing?" she kept asking.
When I tuned into her energy and began channelling, the answer appeared crystal clear. "Food," I said. "You're passionate about food. You love cooking. You have a natural connection to the energy of vegetables and herbs. You love the community and family connections around food. I can see a whole business waiting for you to birth it—different strands, all woven together."
Immediately, she knew. "Of course!" she said.
Yet she'd been so stuck in the dynamics of her working relationships, so consumed with looking after the family, that she'd completely lost touch with this knowing within her. She'd forgotten what she needed and wanted, what was an authentic expression of her passion in the world.
The next step was dealing with the discomfort of making space for her passion—to breathe life into it, to take it seriously. To tell her husband. To grow her ideas. To change her hours and make time for the work. To set boundaries that would take a dream and make it reality.
At first, it was uncomfortable. Easy to procrastinate around. But then she started taking the steps.
We have to first listen to hear the intuitive guidance—but then we have to take action to make it happen. That requires setting new boundaries around our time, focus, and energy. This is the uncomfortable hurdle we need to jump.
The Fear Underneath It All
Let's be honest about what's really scary about listening to your intuition:
You're scared of upsetting people. You're scared that if you stop doing what others want, they'll leave. You're scared that your authentic self isn't as lovable as the mask you've been wearing.
You have no faith in yourself to handle the discomfort of someone being disappointed in you.
And your intuition knows all of this. It knows where you're spending your time and energy out of fear rather than choice. It knows which relationships are one-sided. It knows what you're tolerating that you shouldn't be.
That's a lot to face.
I have another client who's been doing deep trauma work while transitioning out of their current work situation to set up a business. Along this journey, they've had to confront how and where they keep themselves small in relationships—because they need to be able to take up space.
This has required facing the discomfort of rage towards an aging parent—rage that had been buried underneath all the understanding and compassion for his history of emotional neglect. It also meant making the painful decision to separate from a long-term partner who simply couldn't tolerate her experiencing or expressing any feelings that weren't pleasant or understanding. No anger. No messiness. No real humanity.
Sometimes, following the soul's calling as it's expressed through our intuition asks us to integrate aspects of ourselves we've denied or suppressed. The anger we kept hidden, for instance, was trying to tell her: This is not okay. I'm not being allowed to take up space in this relationship.
Intuition can lead to dramatic decision-making. Part of us knows this deep down, so we keep our intuitive knowing hidden to avoid uncomfortable and challenging changes—even when those changes are for the highest good of everyone involved.
What It Actually Takes
Listening to your intuition isn't just about meditation or getting quiet. It's about learning to create boundaries. Real ones. The kind that protect your time, energy, and emotional capacity.
It means learning to act on your intuitive hits, even when—especially when—they require you to say no to people and opportunities that look good from the outside.
It means getting honest about your wants and needs, perhaps for the first time in your life. This takes courage, and often it takes support.
And yes, it means sitting with the discomfort of other people's reactions when you stop contorting yourself to meet their expectations.
The Gift on the Other Side
But here's what I want you to know: the discomfort is temporary. The freedom is permanent.
When you learn to listen to yourself—really listen—you create space for what actually matters. You build capacity instead of constantly operating in depletion. You form connections based on who you actually are, not who you think you need to be.
You stop abandoning yourself to keep everyone else comfortable.
And that? That's worth every uncomfortable conversation, every disappointed face, every moment of guilt that comes with choosing yourself.
Your intuition has been waiting for you. It's been trying to get your attention. And yes, what it has to say might be triggering at first.
But it's also the path home to yourself.
What has your experience been with listening to your intuition? Does it feel triggering or freeing? I'd love to hear your thoughts.
Further reading
Six reasons you're struggling to make intuitive life decisions
Why you lack confidence in your intuitive voice and how to grow it
