What Is Your Body Trying to Tell You?
I almost walked right past these.
Learning to notice the information beneath your overthinking
“I don’t know what I want…”
…is something I consistently hear from my incredibly bright, extremely intellectually gifted clients, who do not struggle to think things through. Quite the opposite. Just like me, many of them can spend hours turning a question over, following every possible implication, trying to reason their way toward the answer.
I’ve learned that thinking hard often becomes thinking in circles when the real drivers are fear and a lack of self-trust and confidence.
The intellect is enormously useful, but it has never been our only source of information. Our bodies are continuously registering our experience, often before we have language for it.
Becoming more aware of our physical sensations can give us much-needed insight and clarity when the thinking doesn’t help us move forward or feel better.
A tightening across the chest. A jaw that has been clenched for the better part of the day. A stomach that seems to know Sunday afternoon has arrived before you consciously remember tomorrow is Monday.
This ability to be aware of the inner state of our bodies is called interoception. It’s a constant stream of sensory information, much of it passing beneath conscious awareness, in part because if we felt it all, we’d be overwhelmed, and also to our culture’s focus on intellect over everything.
This means there is an enormous amount of data moving through us that many of us have become surprisingly adept at missing.
Before meaning comes noticing
We’re often encouraged to listen to our bodies when something feels off or a decision feels difficult. It’s good advice, though it assumes we’ve learned how to hear the information in the first place.
This kind of listening requires perception of the signals, and a trust that they are useful and actionable. If we’ve spent years moving through our lives with little awareness of these signals, we can’t expect to suddenly understand what they mean when a consequential decision appears. It’s tempting to move immediately toward interpretation. We want to know what the signal means, and ideally, what we should do about it. But discernment asks for something more fundamental first: the ability to notice what’s actually there.
Before interpretation comes your ability to perceive and be in touch with your embodied self-awareness. This isn’t you thinking about you (conceptual self-awareness), this is you experiencing yourself in real-time, in your body and all that it brings.
The 5-minute practice below is an opportunity to begin there. I’ll guide your attention through the body without asking you to interpret what you find. For these few minutes, the practice is simply to notice what has been there all along.
What did you notice?
Perhaps something became perceptible that wasn't 5 minutes ago.
That’s enough.
Over time, these observations begin to accumulate into a more intimate knowledge of your own internal landscape. You recognize sensations you've encountered before and become more attuned to what changes as you move through your life.
Then, when you find yourself wrestling with a difficult decision, your intellect has access to information it may previously have overlooked.
The point isn’t to defer to the body as the final authority. It’s to stop excluding it from the conversation. Good discernment draws on the fullest possible picture of our experience, including what we sense before we can make intellectual sense of it.
Learning to notice is where that becomes possible.
1:1 Career Coaching & Leadership Development for High-Achieving Professionals
The practice above offers a small window into how I work with clients through my Embodied Intelligence Method.
When you’re navigating a consequential career decision, thinking is part of the work. So is learning to recognize the information you’ve become accustomed to overriding.
In our work together, we develop the discernment to work with both, so you can make decisions with a deeper understanding of yourself and greater trust in what you know.
If you’re at an inflection point in your career, you can learn more about working with me here.
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