Although we may be tempted to make the rational decision and go with the “safe” choice, is it really so safe?
We live in a culture that prizes the rational above all else. Everyone has been warned away from making a “rash” decision at one time or another. People tell us we need to think things through, especially when it comes to making the big decisions in our lives, but is that really true?
Why should we care about what our heart has to tell us?
According to a recent study conducted at the University of Otago in New Zealand, you might be better off making decisions with your heart. The study asked two groups of participants to rate sports or predict the outcome of a game. Those who did so quickly, using only their intuition, did so with significantly better accuracy than those who were asked to use guidelines and statistics.
The same can be said of almost all aspects of our life. Although we may be tempted to make the rational decision and go with the “safe” choice, is it really so safe? We might end up getting a steady paycheck to do a job we hate. Or we could end up with the nice guy who just isn’t right for us.
Life is made up of constant changes, and those changes can often leave us feeling lost. We don’t know how we got here or where to go next. The truth is we probably do know where to go next, we’re just afraid to admit it.
We often find ourselves stuck because we spent too much time listening to our heads and not enough time listening to our hearts. We can become confused or disoriented when things don’t go the way we thought they would, but that’s when it’s more important than ever to listen to your heart.
Our hearts always knows what we should do next. We just have to listen to them.
But listening to our hearts can be hard when there are a million voices clamoring for us to do the “sensible” thing. Many of us have been taught from a very young age to make choices based on reason, rather than emotions. Undoing all that work isn’t always easy, but it can reap rewards we could never attain by listening to your head.
Retraining ourselves to prioritize our heart over our head can be very scary. The heart encourages us to take risks, which, by definition, have the potential to turn out very badly. But the heart also knows that if we never take risks, we’ll never reach our truest potential and find out what could be.
It’s never too late to let go of bad habits and follow our dreams. Regardless of our current career, relationship status, or whether we have kids, there’s always time for us to live the life we always wanted.
I work with my clients to help them realize what it is they truly want to get out of life and how they can get there. By letting go of our fear and the pull to do what we “should” do, we can open ourselves to the fulfilling lives we were always meant to have. If you’re ready to let go of what isn’t working, check out my “Language of the Heart” workshop, where I teach in a group setting how to open up to what their heart is trying to tell them.
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