Is It Your Gut or Just Anxiety? Navigating Career Decisions with Intuition
It happens almost every week. One of my clients will ask me, with a look thats kinda concerned about how I’m gonna answer, "But how do I know if it's my gut or just my anxiety talking? Everyone talks about 'trusting my gut' about this job opportunity, but what if my gut is just... broken?"
Of course, even though I hear the question often it’s always an important, and honestly despite my familiarity with this feeling, I ask myself the same thing more often than I'd like to admit.
That tension between intuition and anxiety becomes especially apparent in moments of career transition. When the stakes feel high and the path forward unclear, how do we distinguish between the wisdom of intuition and the protective warnings of fear?
The Tug-of-War Between Anxiety and Intuition
There's something fascinating about how emotions live in our bodies. When I work with clients on building awareness, we often map where different feelings physically manifest. Anxiety tends to constrict the chest, accelerate thoughts, and create that familiar tightness in the shoulders and neck. It's chatty, insistent, and relentless – filling our minds with "what-ifs" and worst-case scenarios.
Intuition, on the other hand, often lives lower in the body – what I like to call "living near our belly button area." It's quieter, calmer, and rarely demands attention. It doesn't shout with urgent warnings; it simply knows.
The challenge? Sometimes fear also resides in that same gut space. Remember that fluttery, unsettled feeling before a big presentation? That's not intuition warning you against public speaking – it's fear taking up residence in your digestive system.
For high-achieving women especially (even when we often don’t think our achievements are ‘enough’), this distinction becomes increasingly blurry. We've built successful careers through disciplined thought, careful analysis, and meticulous planning. We've learned to trust our critical thinking above all else. While these analytical skills serve us brilliantly in many contexts, they can also disconnect us from the wisdom of our bodies and our deeper knowing.
Excellence, Achievement, and the Cost of Certainty
I see this pattern repeatedly with my clients who've invested blood, sweat, and tears into developing a super successful linear path to excellence. Building remarkable careers requires determination, discipline, focus, and a willingness to tolerate discomfort. These aren't easy qualities to cultivate, and I deeply respect the work it takes to develop them.
But excellence can become a double-edged sword. The same framework that helps us achieve can also narrow our perspective. When our identity becomes intertwined with being "really, really good" in one specific domain, we can lose touch with our whole selves.
The metrics for success in professional settings are often external – promotions, recognition, compensation, influence. We learn to calibrate ourselves against these external measures rather than internal signals. We become experts at taking "social stock" and developing the critical eye that asks, "What would make this better?"
This skill serves us well in professional contexts (I even use it with AI tools – asking for critiques rather than just compliments), but it can become a harsh internal voice that drowns out gentler forms of self-guidance. Without practices of self-compassion alongside our pursuit of excellence, we risk losing access to our intuition entirely.
What Intuitive Eating Can Teach Us About Career Decisions
When I think about intuitive career decision-making, I often draw parallels to intuitive eating. If you're not familiar with this framework, it centers on attuning to your body's natural hunger and fullness cues rather than following external rules about when, what, and how much to eat.
For people who've spent years following diet rules, the question "How hungry are you?" can feel strangely confronting. As one client put it, "You're asking me how hungry I am? It feels like the answer should always be, well, I shouldn’t be hungry.”
That response reveals so much about how disconnected we can become from our basic needs and desires. We layer shoulds, should-nots, rules, and fears on top of our natural signals until we can no longer recognize them.
The career space isn't all that different. We commit so many hours to work, yet when I ask someone what they truly want next in their career, the question often lands like a foreign concept. They've been so focused on following the rules, climbing the predefined ladder, and meeting external expectations that connecting with their authentic desires feels disorienting.
Just as intuitive eating invites us to push against diet culture and honor our body's signals, intuitive career navigation asks us to question the "shoulds" of professional advancement and attune to our inner compass.
Practices That Help You Hear Your Gut (and Not Just Your Fear)
Distinguishing between anxiety and intuition takes practice. Here are some approaches I've found helpful both personally and with clients:
Create space for somatic awareness. Our bodies often know before our minds do, but we need quiet to hear these signals. Yoga, walking meditations, or simply pausing to scan your body during decision-making can reveal intuitive hints that your analytical mind might miss.
Explore through creativity. Sometimes our intuition speaks most clearly through non-linear means. Writing poetry, listening to music, or making art about a career decision can bypass the rational "pros and cons" framework and reveal deeper knowing.
Journal with gentle curiosity. Rather than forcing a decision, approach your journal with questions like: "What would I do if I knew I couldn't fail?" or "When have I felt most alive in my work?" The answers might surprise you.
Vocalize with a trusted person. Something shifts when we speak our thoughts aloud to someone who listens without judgment. Often, I'll hear clients say, "I didn't know I felt that way until I just said it."
Notice what makes you expand versus contract. Our bodies subtly respond to different options – some possibilities create an opening, a sense of expansion in the chest and shoulders. Others cause us to constrict, even imperceptibly. Tracking these physical responses can illuminate your intuitive preferences.
Remember that anxiety typically intensifies when you contemplate following your intuition. As one client humorously observed, "Anxiety is gonna be pretty pissed at me asking myself these questions." That's normal – anxiety's job is to keep you safe and predictable. When you venture toward growth, it will protest loudly.
Try the Experiment Anyway
Perhaps the most powerful approach is simply taking small experiments without knowing definitively whether you're following fear or intuition. I often say, “Let’s get our metaphorical Field Notes book out and conduct our experiment of the day.” Choose a direction that feels right – or at least interesting – for reasons you might not fully understand.
Maybe you accept the coffee meeting with a professional in an adjacent field. Perhaps you volunteer for the project that seems slightly beyond your comfort zone. Or you might simply voice the unconventional idea in the meeting rather than keeping it to yourself.
Then reflect. What came of this small step? What did you learn? How did it feel?
With each experiment, you gather data about your unique internal guidance system. You build confidence in reading your signals accurately. And gradually, the distinction between anxiety and intuition becomes clearer – not because they feel dramatically different, but because you've developed fluency in your body's language.
It's not about the perfect decision – it's about learning to listen.
It's not about certainty – it's about trust.
It's not about the destination – it's about attuning to your own compass.
We build careers by performing. We rebuild them by attuning.
"It's not actually ever easy to know the difference between anxiety and intuition," I told my client as she set down her coffee mug, "but it's a process, and it gets clearer with practice and patience."
When was the last time you trusted your gut about something important in your work? What happened? What would you do differently in your career if you weren't afraid of being 'wrong'?
If you're navigating a career transition and finding it challenging to hear your own wisdom through the noise of shoulds and fears, I'm here to help. Together, we can explore what's truly calling you forward – no perfect answers, just deeper attunement to the wisdom that already lives within you.
