102. Learning to Trust My Gut

Are you second-guessing your gut feelings—or brushing them off in the name of being “nice”? If you’ve ever doubted what you were seeing or feeling in a relationship—whether personal or professional—this episode is for you. In the first episode of the newly rebranded Menopause: Rise and Thrive, I’m opening up about a recent working relationship that challenged me to reconnect with one of the most essential midlife tools: self-trust.

With warmth and vulnerability, I invite you into my journey of learning to trust what’s real, not just what you hope could be. This episode is a tender yet powerful reminder that growth often means letting go—and that your intuition deserves to be honored. 

In this episode:

• Why trusting your gut is harder than it sounds—and how midlife can help sharpen that instinct.
• The subtle ways we override our own discomfort in the name of harmony.
• Personal story of a professional relationship that sparked deep self-reflection.
• How emotional intelligence and self-protection often conflict—and what to do about it.
• The role of caregiving and “being nice” in silencing your own needs.
• A powerful plant analogy you won’t forget—on outgrowing old containers (and relationships).
• Permission to release relationships that no longer align—and embrace discernment as growth.

Connect with me, Dr. Sara Poldmae:

Website: https://risingwomanproject.com

Instagram:  https://www.instagram.com/drsarapoldmae

Join me at my next wellness retreat!   https://risingwomanproject.com/retreats/2025-april/

Transcript

Sara Poldmae: 0:01

Sarah, welcome to menopause. Rise and thrive. I am Dr Sarah poulme, and this podcast is your go to guide for navigating perimenopause and menopause. If you are feeling a little overwhelmed, trust me, you are in great company. Each week, I'll bring you expert advice, raw, honest conversations and simple tips to help you stay grounded and maybe even find some humor in the process. Let's rise, thrive and tackle this wild ride together. Hey there, beautiful ladies, welcome back. Today's episode is the first episode with my new rebrand, we have a new name, menopause, rise and thrive. And you may notice some image tweaks as well. And I just basically felt it was time to freshen things up. But we will still be talking all things menopause, perimenopause, midlife transitions, and especially the powerful shifts that come with this season of our lives. So I am so glad you're here, and today I want to open up about something that's been sitting kind of heavy on my heart. I feel like I just had a major epiphany A while back, it was something pretty personal, but I think it touches on something that so many of us wrestle with, which is trusting what we see, really trusting ourselves and learning to recognize when our desire to believe the best in people or in situations starts to cloud what is really in front of us, and this just really hit home for me in a way that is so crystal clear now that I have to be honest, it took me a really a long time to write this episode and finally, to sit down and record it. I've been conflicted about whether to share it or not, because, like most of us, I don't I'm not out to hurt anybody's feelings, and I tend to shy away from making any of these episodes too much about me, but I'm sharing it today in hopes that it resonates with you in some way, and that it might help you too to trust what's right in front of you, even when it's hard again, this episode is not to throw anybody under the bus. It's more to share this trusting myself lesson that really just showed up for me, and I'm so grateful for it, and I've been looking at so many things in my life with just a little bit of a different lens, and some of it's making me feel a little bit icky. Some of it is, you know, making me question life choices. But guess what? This is part of this time of our lives, like we get to accept things in a different way or not accept them. So here goes sharing time. Not long ago, I found myself in a working relationship that at first felt super engaged, super exciting, aligned with my values, and just full of like so much potential, really high vibes. I had high hopes, and like I often do, I wanted to believe that everyone involved in this project shared the same intentions, the same standard of care, the same respect and professionalism. I kind of walked into it just thinking everything was going to be amazing, and a lot of ways it was. But early on, like really early on in this in this project, something fell off, like even in the development stages, and all the while, I remained hopeful that I was wrong. As this relationship developed, this project developed, it seemed like everything was okay on the surface, but my gut was telling me something differently. I think I was able to ignore my gut telling myself it wasn't a huge work project. So the worst that could happen is, once it was over, I would gain some valuable knowledge and insights and basically move on. But I think the turning point for me when things started to become more clear was witnessing a friend being treated poorly by a person on this project that I was working with, and instead of letting that moment really land for me and really like process what was going on, I rationalized it and told myself maybe I just misunderstood, or maybe I'm being too sensitive. I think part of why I didn't fully take in what I was seeing and hearing, why I softened it is because I was honestly still in shock. I watched this person mistreat someone for no good reason, and instead of letting it really land, I just froze a lot. At all I felt out of alignment with what I expected and with what I wanted to believe, and that my mind just kind of like short circuited. I couldn't quite absorb what I was hearing and what I was seeing. But even then, something in my gut like I felt it, ladies, in that low, quiet way that your gut sometimes speaks to you before your mind can catch up, and your gut always does speak to you. The truth is, I had already started to feel that something wasn't quite right way before that moment with my friend, there was like this low hum, a little vibration, I couldn't quite name yet. I noticed the small ways that this person just kind of didn't make space for me to be a process. Part of the process in this project, kind of kept her distance. It was subtle, but it was there, and possibly from the very beginning of working together. I felt like she had kind of, I don't know, she just didn't pull me in. I was just sitting there kind of on the periphery, and I still kept just brushing it off. And I told myself I was probably overthinking it being too sensitive, reading too much into the dynamics. And I think as as women, we do that a lot, right? We just kind of take it in and don't say anything, and maybe our throat, throat chakras are a little bit blocked. And what's interesting is I've done a lot of work around all of this, so I was proud of the way that I behaved by like not losing my cool or saying anything and just staying grounded in myself, I was like, Okay, great. But when I saw how she had treated someone else, someone that was totally innocent, that's when I realized that this just it wasn't just about me. I hadn't imagined it the way that I'd been feeling, that shrinking sideline sense it was real, and it was a part of a lot larger pattern that I just hadn't wanted to see. And still, even then, my instinct was to kind of make excuses. I felt sorry for this person. I knew that she was super nervous. I could see how far outside her comfort zone she was, and I was used to holding a bigger platform. So part of me just wanted to give her all of the grace in the world, and I did, and maybe more than I should have, because in some ways, I made her feelings more important than my own. I focused so much on her anxiety, her needs, her emotional experience that I completely minimized my own. I told myself to stay grounded, to not take it personally, to be the bigger person. And then something in me started to kind of quietly shut down, and I became strangely detached from the whole thing, like if I wasn't going to be invited in, and I didn't really love the way I felt around this person. I didn't want it. I backed away from any sense of investment in the project or any ownership, and I pulled back my energy, not out of clarity necessarily, or out of empowerment, but more just out of self protection. I was just like, I am done. I stopped reaching towards this project and and just was like, Okay, I'll just do what I need to do, go through the motions, engage where I feel strong, and that's it. And it's wild. How fast that can happen, how quickly we can shrink ourselves in response to being shut out. But here's the thing I'm realizing now, and it's been powerful for me. It's been taking me, like, weeks and weeks, months, to really digest all of this. I wasn't overreacting. I was responding, and somewhere deep down, I already knew what was happening. I just didn't want to admit it. Yet, this is the part that's been really hard for me to like, sit with, because I realized I was bending over backwards to give the benefit of the doubt. I was talking myself out of what I was actually seeing what I was feeling in my gut, what was like right in front of me. I mean, it was so crystal clear looking back on it now, but it took like a while to come back to it and kind of recall everything that happened. And here's the truth that I'm living into sometimes it's not about my ego. Sometimes what I am seeing is real. It's not a story that I'm telling myself. It's not an overreaction. It's simply what is. What made it all click for me when I realized that others were noticing it too, that moment, that confirmation from. Others hit hard, but it made me realize that I'd been so wrapped up in trying to understand and try and be understanding that I wasn't being honest with myself, and then realizing that I needed that confirmation, even though everything was crystal clear and right in front of me, it kind of pissed me off, like, why at 52 years old, did I not need other people to confirm what I was seeing with my own eyes? So again, I sat with it, and what this experience has taught me, and I hope is somehow helpful for you, is that trusting ourselves is a practice, and for many of us, especially those of us who've been caregivers, peacemakers, nurturers, it's one that takes time to really reclaim, because, again, sitting here in my 50s, I thought, God, I'm like, I'm good at this. I don't take things personally, you know, I let things roll off my shoulders, and that is a good quality, but there's a downside to it, because sometimes we get so good at not taking things personally that we don't see things that are crystal clear right in front of us. So I'm learning to see things more as they are, and not just as I hope that they could be, and I'm learning that people don't always show up with the same integrity and professionalism and kindness that I strive to bring to the table, and that's not a reflection of me, that's a reflection of them. And that doesn't mean that they're not doing their best. That doesn't mean that they're not a beautiful person, but it doesn't mean that we have to accept those behaviors. It doesn't mean that I have to harden myself. It doesn't mean that I have to stop believing in people, but it does mean that I need to stop silencing my intuition in the name of being nice. I'm going to repeat that because I really love that little piece there. I need to stop silencing my intuition in the name of being nice. And perhaps you may need to stop silencing your intuition in the name of being nice. What's really wild and like a little bit humbling, is how clearly I can see now that this wasn't a one time thing, that this just wasn't it just wasn't like about this one working relationship in my life. The truth is, I've done this time and time again in other parts of my life. I've kept people in my professional world far longer than was healthy or productive. It's really hard to fire someone even if they're not doing their job. It's also really hard to let someone go in the workplace environment if stuff needs to get done, because sometimes it's just rocking the boat and making my job harder. But mostly it's harder to let people go if I keep hoping that they'll show up differently next time by stuffing down some of the things that maybe weren't acceptable, I've ignored my pit in my stomach feeling when emails went unanswered by employees or by colleagues, when boundaries were crossed, when the energy just didn't feel reciprocal. I knew in my gut that something was off, but I chalk it up to being like too busy or miscommunication or anything, but the thing I knew deep down that things were just not aligned. And it is not always been in work, but it's also been in friendships, the ones where I wanted to, you know, really believe that it was an equal friendship, and I found that I was doing more of the reaching out, the emotional heavy lifting. You know, even in romantic relationships, I think we can all resonate to this as women, where I've, like, clung desperately to the idea of the potential, rather than what was right in front of me. I waited for the version of a man that I believed that they could be, rather than facing who they actually were in the moment. But that's not what I'm going to do now, at this moment, I am trying to really tune my life to match the truth of what I see and feel, and not just the the idea of wish I what I wish it could be. And that kind of clarity is painful sometimes, but it's also such a gift. You know, learning to trust yourself and really like honor what your gut is telling you is huge. So confession time, I'm going to give a little bit of analogy here. I am not a plant person. I love house plants. I want to be a plant person. I want house plants in my house to thrive. But I swear I have the opposite of a green thumb. I have had house plants that I. Baby that moved them to sunnier spots, whispered apologies as I watered them, Googled things like, why is my peace lily so sad? And still they just sit there and look droopy, and eventually, like, fade away and die. And that makes me so, so sad, but eventually I've realized that the problem wasn't the sunlight or the watering schedule. The truth is, there were just a lot of them that were root bound. They had outgrown their pots a long time ago, and no matter what I did, they would not thrive until they were in a bigger container. And so it's, it's harder than I'd like to admit, because it's, it's similar to friendships that have gone kind of dry, relationships that die. I've done the same thing. I've kept tending to friendships and relationships that weren't actually working, and adjusting myself over and over again, trying to revive what was never going to grow anyway. And you know, the difference now is that I'm learning not to see that as a failure. I don't think the working relationship that I was speaking to was a failure. I've learned an amazing lesson from this working relationship, and that lesson is what I see in front of me is real, and sometimes things and people belong in your life for a season, and when that season shifts, it's okay to let them go. It's not dramatic. It's not mean. It's just part of growing. Sometimes you have to put yourself in a new pot, so to speak. So if you're listening and you've ever been in a situation where something felt off, but you doubted yourself, I want to say gently, trust that feeling. You are not imagining it. You are not being dramatic. You are not being mean. You are allowed to see what's real, even if it's uncomfortable, even when it changes how you move forward with someone or something, and that's not negativity, that's growth, that's discernment, that's self trust. And in this chapter of our lives, we've earned the right to fully lean into it. And you know, it was so tempting to skip over this episode. I again, don't love to share, but it is just so eye opening to me, and I am still in shock of what I've learned about myself through that short work project. And I again, think that midlife and going through the change, these are the times when we see these things and we think, Oh God, what a shame that we're learning this in our 40s or in our 50s. But guess what, when you learn it, it was the exact time that you were supposed to learn it, not a minute before, not a minute later. So maybe if you want to do a little bit of mind body work with me, maybe take a moment and take a deep breath right now, and Let's inhale to the count of four, and take a nice long exhale and go ahead and take another and think about a time or a place in your life when something just felt off. What would it look like to stop trying to fix it and just see it for exactly what it is, and just sit with it. I think it's really valuable to trust ourselves in a way that we maybe couldn't do in our 20s and 30s. And I really want to thank you for being with me today. I I hope that some of these reflections, although they're tender for me to share, I do think that when we share, we create space for each other to be honest, to be human and to keep growing, to support each other as women and until next time, please take care of yourself. Trust your gut and know that you are worthy of respectful, honest and especially aligned relationships always see you next time you