The Real Secret to Intuitive Living (Hint: It's Not What You Think)
I used to watch confident, decisive people make choices and wonder: How do they know? They must be incredibly intelligent, I thought. That must be the secret. So I threw myself into university, exercising those brain cells as much as I could, but I only found myself more lost and unsure. All I could see were endless possibilities—pros and cons swirling without clarity. I longed for that decisive certainty I glimpsed in others.
It wasn't until my mid-twenties, after two relationship breakups instigated by my gut instinct, that I decided listening to my intuition first might be the path to quicker decisions. What I've learned since then has completely transformed my understanding: confidence in following your intuition doesn't come from always knowing the answer, but from trusting the process itself.
The Perfect Connection Myth
There's a critical misconception I need to address about developing intuitive abilities—the idea that once you have a "perfect" connection to your intuition, you'll always "know" what to do. It's simply not true.
If you're like I was—an overthinker searching for that magic bullet to kill the beast of uncertainty—you might be hoping for something that will never come. As a romantic, I dreamed of living in this elevated state of flow, connected to the universe, where I just "knew" what to do. I see this same deluded hope in students sometimes.
Don't get me wrong—a beautiful connection to our higher self and the universe is absolutely possible. But it's not a newsdesk at a radio station giving constant, detailed updates. For the biggest reason of all: we're not meant to know everything.
Sometimes we're not meant to avoid challenges that help us grow, which we might do if we knew about upcoming problems. Other times, we all have karma, and some issues are coming our way whether we like it or not, like a pendulum on its return swing. And frankly, your angels don't need to be involved in deciding which earrings to wear or whether that random love interest will text back (spoiler: when you pull the Tower in Tarot and your spirit guides say no, let it go—he's no good). Sometimes the decisions we get worked up over don't matter ultimately, so our guides just tell us to move on without offering an answer.
Navigating the Shades of Grey
Following your intuition can feel messy. Sometimes it's crystal clear—we get happy tingles for a yes, a gut punch for a hard no. But most of the time, it's shades of grey we're navigating.
Instead of asking "Should I take this course?" and receiving confusing messages, I use a technique where I ask my intuition to rate things on a scale of 10 or 100%. "How useful will this software be?" "How aligned is this mentor?" "How valuable is this book?" This provides me with nuanced guidance, rather than limiting myself to binary yes/no answers.
I remember using my intuition to plan my diary, looking at dates for training sessions. Everything felt like being on a wobbly trampoline—my sense of the year bounced all over the place. I was feeling into potentials that weren't fixed. There was no ONE perfect date because circumstances would shift—people might be ill, more participants might come. So I just picked.
However, there was also the time I planned to travel to London. One day seemed perfect, but my intuition said no. I had no idea why, but I trusted it. Months later, there were train strikes—and guess which day was affected? The very day I'd initially wanted to travel. Working with our intuition is a guide to help us save time and energy, but we don't always see the full picture.
Romantic Dreams vs. Grounded Reality
We don't live in a world of absolutes. Not every book will change your life, nor does it need to—some will be okay but helpful in their own way. I recall reading "The Celestine Prophecy" and attempting to maintain that high state of synchronicity. While I had some interesting moments, it fed into the romantic perfectionist in me, always seeking those peak spiritual experiences.
These days, I take a much more grounded approach, integrating the mystical into the mundane—chatting with people's spirit guides in my practice, doing early morning writing sessions to create content I'm channelling for you, all while keeping my feet firmly planted in the reality of building a business and caring for a family.
We need to check our expectations and know our tendencies. Are we trying to use our intuition to escape life's difficulties, or to navigate them with more ease and grace? It's not a magic bullet, but we can enjoy those peak moments of expansion—in a class or meditation—while knowing they won't be the norm as our conditions change.
Dark nights of the soul are perfect examples of not getting what we expected from the mystical realms. We see images of monks meditating and think they look calm and peaceful. Yet any meditator knows that much of the time, you're listening to your mental playlist of daily complaints, trying to stay awake, or dealing with boredom. Reaching new levels of consciousness can trigger intense, rapid integration that's hard and scary—nothing peaceful about that process.
There's the romantic view, and there's reality. We might have romantic notions of skipping hand-in-hand with the universe, when actually we might need to clear entities, deal with past-life trauma suddenly arising, or have difficult conversations to create healthy boundaries as an act of self-love. It doesn't mean you're doing it wrong—quite the opposite. It means you're really doing it.
The Faith Misconception
Another misconception I had was that living intuitively meant having intense faith and confidence every day, feeling continually guided. I don't. In fact, my biggest personal roadblock right now, according to my spirit team, is my "self-belief."
Living intuitively and listening to my intuition first has instilled great self-confidence in me. However, when I face the next challenge, I don't show up saying "Hell yeah, I can do this." Mostly I hear "I can't do this" as I'm trying to create the next course.
But I don't let those thoughts stop me. Even though I get the intuitive hit about what to focus on next, I still have to deal with myself and my inner voice. I do regular mindset and inner healing work alongside the professional development. Just because I got the intuitive hit doesn't mean I'm infinitely confident about producing it—I'm often uncertain, unsure, clueless. Yet that's the personal growth we have to do alongside the action we're being asked to take.
Luckily, I'm willing to learn and I like a challenge. I look back at what I didn't think I could achieve five years ago and have since accomplished, which makes me more confident that whatever I'm facing will be doable, even if I'm muddling through messily. I'm going to make errors and have failures, but how else do you learn? Imperfect action on the intuitive hits is what's required to make things happen. You're not being asked to have blissful, perfect faith—you can feel uncertain and do it anyway. It's in taking action that your confidence grows.
The Reality of Confident, Intuitive Living
Living intuitively means being confident in knowing the general direction, but not all the details, trusting that these will be filled in along the way. It's like jumping into a river—we can fight the current or let it take us where we need to go. Working with your intuition is trusting in the current, in the flow, but not knowing which part of the shore we'll land on, staying open to that. However, we have to jump into the river in the first place and sense which direction the current is taking us.
It's so human to want answers, to have a neat 5-10 year business plan or detailed map because of the anxiety of not knowing. This is a different way of living. Working confidently with our intuitive intelligence means accepting that we won't know all the answers, yet we'll be told enough, and being okay with that. You're able to embrace the not knowing. The more you do it, the more comfortable you get with not knowing how it will happen but knowing that "it" will happen, because when you trusted all those other times before, it did.
You become more familiar with continuous evolution and see this as part of the journey. You become more accepting of letting go more easily—whether that's projects, people, or places. You know that for growth, it can be required to stay in the flow, and certain things run their course. We listen and trust in this unfolding, day by day, month by month.
I have a client who's a visionary channel and artist who exemplifies this ability to trust the process. Their working practice continues to evolve and unfold—each time they paint, their style develops, they understand more of their own approach through practice, how they want to present the work and what they're communicating. They flow with the fact that they're in "process." They go in with confidence and have a sense that big and exciting things are coming in good time, but right now, they're still learning.
Embracing the Beautiful Mess
This is what confidently living intuitively really looks like—not the pristine, all-knowing existence we might imagine, but a beautiful, messy, deeply human experience of learning to trust the whispers of wisdom that arise from within. It's about developing the courage to act on incomplete information, the grace to make mistakes, and the resilience to keep listening even when the voice seems quiet.
The magic isn't in having all the answers—it's in developing an unshakeable trust in your ability to navigate whatever comes next. It's in learning to dance with uncertainty rather than fighting it, to find solid ground not in knowing everything, but in knowing you can handle anything.
This is the real invitation of intuitive living: not to escape the human experience, but to move through it with more grace, wisdom, and trust in the intelligence that flows through you. It's not about perfection—it's about presence. It's not about knowing—it's about trusting. And in that trust, you'll find a different kind of confidence entirely—one that doesn't need guarantees to take the next step forward.
Ready to understand and strengthen your intuitive gifts? My Intuitive Development Course shows you exactly how to trust and develop your inner knowing Intuitive Development Course.
