Red Flags and Intuition
Are you Trusting Yours?
Intuition can seem like something mystical, something otherworldly. Yet those messages that come to us, especially those that warn us not to follow a particular path, are often very normal. And in hindsight, they just seem like signs we overlooked.
This idea came to me as I was coaching a former client who had started to doubt her ability to make good, sound judgments. As we were dissecting one of her decisions, the decision for her to accept a job that she later regretted, I saw several red flags as she described her situation. These were things that she saw herself but chose to overlook because she was in a hurry to get a job and a steady paycheck.
I have been guilty of this myself. My very first job out of college is a prime example. In the spring of 1989, I interviewed in the office building which would become my prison for the following nine months. Huge metal desks that almost touched each other filled the space. It felt heavy, burdensome, and resembled the typing pools I’d seen in movies from the 1960s. I noticed the unhappy expressions on the faces of the employees who sat, as if chained, to those desks, but I chose to ignore these signs.
During the interview, I also chose to ignore the idea that the hiring manager was unusually eager to fill the position. He offered me the post, and I accepted it. It turned out to be a horrible first job. I woke up every morning covered in hives because of the stress. Then nine months later, they fired me.
I had ignored those signs, that gut feeling, that told me to run the other way. I accepted it and paid the price. I had been afraid of what would happen if I turned down the job. Would I get another offer? Would I be able to pay my student loans? What would my mother say if I turn down this good-paying job? She had always said, “A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.” A job is better than no job.
Red flags and what our intuition tells us about them and the situations we find ourselves facing, can guide us in all areas of our lives . These signs start out pretty small and we can miss them, perhaps we’re so busy, or maybe we just discount them. But as they get bigger, they become harder and harder to overlook.
These signs show up on our radar as annoyances because they tend to fly in the face of what we’re trying to accomplish. If we listened to what they were telling us, it would thwart (or appear to thwart) our progress. So we plug on, going down the path on which we set out.
As they get bigger and bigger, if we choose to continue to ignore them, they can turn out catastrophic. The small health issue that could have been resolved with medicine or a minor procedure turns into a terminal illness or the marriage that was happy and started to have some cracks and which could have been saved with counseling ends up in divorce. These red flags are our inner knowing noticing for us and trying to get our attention so that we can avoid these pitfalls and avert these disasters.
Do you tend to ignore signs and red flags because they fly in the face of reason? By finally noticing my tendency to do this, and the unfortunate results that followed, I was able to start trusting my intuition and improve my life.
R.D. Laing said, “The range of what we think and do is limited by what we fail to notice, and because we fail to notice that we fail to notice there is little we can do to change; until we notice how failing to notice shapes our thoughts and deeds.”
What red flags are you failing to notice? How is that shaping your life and experiences?
