Trusting our intuition often saves us from disaster. — Anne Wilson Schaef

Trusting our intuition often saves us from disaster.

Author: Anne Wilson Schaef

Insight: There's a peculiar moment we've all experienced—that small voice telling us something's off about a person, a decision, or a situation, even when we can't quite name why. We usually talk ourselves out of it. We want to be logical, fair, give people the benefit of the doubt. But intuition isn't some mystical sixth sense; it's our brain processing patterns we've picked up on faster than our conscious mind can articulate them. That uneasy feeling about the job offer, the relationship, the investment—it's often drawing on real signals we've absorbed but haven't formally analyzed yet. The tricky part is that intuition can also lie to us, shaped by our fears and biases. So this isn't about blindly following every gut instinct. But it's worth asking: when we ignore a strong intuitive warning to appear more rational or polite, what's really going on? Often we're prioritizing someone else's comfort over our own safety or wellbeing. The people who seem luckiest in life aren't necessarily smarter than everyone else—they just tend to trust that whisper early enough to step back before things fall apart. They treat intuition as information worth investigating, not something to override.