Is It Intuition or Overthinking? How to Know the Difference

Trust your gut feeling or rationalize it away? In day four of the Intuition Activation Challenge, Mandi explains how often we dismiss our intuitive thoughts by convincing ourselves they don't matter, but recognizing this pattern is key to breaking it. Through examples, Mandi encourages you to reflect on what happens when you trust yourself. The key takeaway is to assess gut feelings, ask if you're rationalizing them, and take a step towards trusting your intuition.

RESOURCES

🔹 Intuition Quiz – Find out how well you trust and act on your intuition: AwareAndPrepared.life (Scroll to the bottom and click "Take the Quiz")

🔹 Intuition Activation Challenge PDF – You’ll get the Challenge PDF after you receive your quiz results

🔹 Connect with Mandi
📌 LinkedIn: Mandi Pratt
📌 Instagram: @WomenAwareAndPrepared

Transcript

 Hey, brave one. Welcome to another episode of the Aware and Prepared Podcast. I'm your host, Mandy Pratt, a trained domestic violence victim advocate, self-defense teacher, and professional speaker who teaches those feeling vulnerable, how to be street smart and feel safer with more peace, you'll hear true crime stories, but most importantly, how we might prevent crimes happening to us.

Without judgment or shame, of course. You deserve to live in peace and safety. So return each week to learn safety tips and emotional self-defense. So we live empowered with peace. Let's be less naive and leave helplessness and worry behind so we can be safer, savvy, aware, and unprepared. 

Welcome back to day four of the Intuition Challenge. How are you liking the Intuition Activation Challenge? This five part series that we're doing, day one is the first activity, day two is the second activity, and so on and so forth, down to day five.  So each of these steps, I've broken down into a weekly podcast episode for you, and I hope that you're loving it.

If you haven't had a chance yet to go take the quick little quiz and see how you're even doing with the intuition. And then you'll see after you take the quiz where you can download the challenge. Then please go to Aware and Prepared  Life LIFE. I'll drop the link into the show notes, so you can just click there and then.

On aware and prepared life where it says, take the quiz and you can see how you're doing. I hope this is helping you so much. It's what I wish that I would've had when I was a teenager, actually,  and this applies not just to relationships, but really to all areas of life. This can apply to the workplace, right?

This can apply to your business Dealings to family matters to your health. This is applicable to all areas.  All right, so we did day one, day two, day three. Now we're on day four. Do you remember day one was slow down. Day two was listen inward. Day three was journal.  Spread it out or talk it out with a safe friend. 

Day four is we're gonna decide, are we gonna rationalize what we're noticing here, what our gut is trying to tell us? Or are we going to trust this?  This is a skill that you gain over time. As you start to trust yourself more and more and more, and we're not abandoning ourselves anymore because now we know we can trust ourselves again, this is not like a light switch.

Boom, I can do it. Now.  You gotta learn over time, right? So why? Why do we wanna decide if we're gonna rationalize or trust ourselves? We often rationalize away our intuitive thoughts, convincing ourselves that they don't matter. I must be crazy. What? Like, why am I thinking this? That doesn't make any sense, right?

Um, but recognizing this pattern of rationalizing it away is the key to breaking it.  So. I told you in my own instance, I rationalized away the one red flag that I got and I don't beat myself up. And we don't victim blame 'cause we didn't know that. I didn't know that back then. So today, when you notice a gut feeling, ask yourself, am I about to rationalize this or trust it?

So again, set your timer maybe for noon again, just to check in.  If you wanna do it right now, ask yourself, am I about to rationalize this away or trust myself? So the thing that's, that you've noticed that your gut's trying to tell you over the past couple of days,  just look at that and decide.  Am I going to rationalize that away and not look into it?

I mean, I can always look into it and just find the facts right, and then I can decide what I wanna do with it. You can decide what are your next steps.  So  notice when you get that gut feeling and ask yourself, am I about to rationalize this or trust it? Reflect on what happens when you choose to trust your intuition instead. 

So, let me give another example. Let's say that you're at the gas station, you're pumping gas, and a guy starts walking your way and it doesn't feel right. Maybe you're.  Alone there at the gas station, or it's even at the dark, uh, nobody else is with you. And you're standing outside of your car and you don't feel safe, you don't feel comfortable, but somebody's walking up to you.

Um, maybe they look angry or maybe they look unkept or something that sets you off, right? And your intuition goes, Hmm, I don't feel so comfortable with this. Right? So.  Are you gonna rationalize it away and just say, oh, maybe he's gonna walk right by me, or are you gonna trust yourself and say, no, this doesn't feel safe and I need to do something about this?

So in that instance, I would either get right back in my car or lock the door and if I need to start honking the horn best, you can drive away if you're, if the nozzle isn't into your tank still. But, um.  If you have to confront somebody, remember the goal is always to escape and not get into a conflict with somebody that might be dangerous.

So, um, if you have to address the person, you wanna do that way further away than you think because somebody can come upon you pretty quickly. So you wanna make sure that they're way far away from arms distance and just say, stop.  I am not comfortable with you coming any further. Do you need help? You could do something like that.

The less you say, the better. You could even just say, stop. I'm not comfortable with you. Continuing to walk over whatever you wanna say. And I always suggest in my course that I have on learning to live safer with more peace and being aware of your surroundings better. I share that. It's good to come up with a one-liner.

Like, stop. You need to go somewhere else or whatever you wanna come up with. You come up with that one line so you're not flubbing around, flustering around, and you're very firm and you mean what you say. So it's stop. You need to turn around and go the other way,  or stop, I'm not comfortable with you continuing to walk towards me.

Whatever you decide on, you gotta get it down, and that's your one thing that you say. All right, so that's just an example.  And then how good does that feel when you know that you trusted yourself and you did the right thing? Now what if it's a soccer dad coming to throw away trash in the trash can? Well, number one, you probably wouldn't feel weird anyway and have to say anything.

Number two, if you make a mistake, just laugh it off. Ah, sorry. This is a crazy world we live in right now. So you never know. And they'll probably laugh too. Or they'll look at you weird. Who cares? Right? So that's how you learn to trust yourself. You just by doing these different situations. So to wrap up day four,  just remember, notice when you get that gut feeling that you've been working on the past couple days, ask yourself, I am I about to rationalize it or trust it and reflect on what happens if you trust your intuition instead,  again, you can investigate and then not act on it. 

But I encourage you to go a step further.  That wraps up day four.  Thanks for being a fan of the Aware and Prepared Podcast. Show it some love by leaving a review and don't forget to hit follow so you can catch future episodes. To book me to speak and transform your audience, go to my website, aware and prepared life, LIFE to join my VIPs, who get each episode's lessons learned, resource links, and more.

Sent directly to you. Signup is also at my website where you'll find a free gift when you do. The link is in the show notes. I'll talk with you next week. Remember, you're worthy of a safe and peaceful life.