Learning to Trust From the Neck Down (Jo Moment)

We explore what happens when sharp thinking is no longer enough and how trusting the body can guide braver, cleaner decisions. We share real choices we made using a simple heavy–light check and how strategy and somatic wisdom can work together.

• trusting intelligence and noticing its limits
• the shock of realising the next chapter needs feeling
• why the nervous system won’t be reasoned with
• lineage of non-feeling and learning to feel
• using heavy or light as a practical decision tool
• reshaping a program from evergreen to cohorts
• deleting 10,000 leads to restore alignment
• reconciling rational proof with embodied faith
• expanding where intelligence lives beyond the mind

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And don't forget to subscribe to Balance and Beyond for full episodes and more of these bite sized breakthroughs

The Balance & Beyond Podcast Hosted by Jo Stone, founder of The Balance Institute

For women who are already succeeding, but beginning to wonder if they're willing to keep losing themselves in the process.

We know high achievers, because we are one. This podcast draws on Jo's 20 years in global leadership and thousands of hours coaching executives and ambitious women: the patterns she sees, how to untangle them, and what it actually takes to keep your success without paying for it with yourself.

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Transcript

Trusting Intelligence And Its Limits

A Shock From Kinesiology

Mind Versus Nervous System

Learning To Feel

Building Somatic Trust

Business Decisions By Body Signals

Reconciling Reason And Faith

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Jo Stone (Host) 0:04

Welcome to Balance and Beyond Moments, your weekly dose of insight, wisdom, and mindset shifts, all in 10 minutes or less. Whether it's a powerful truth, a fresh perspective, or a spark of inspiration, this is your space to pause, reflect, and reset. Let's dive in. I've always trusted my intelligence, but I've realized the chapter I'm in now is asking for a different kind of trust. I'm like you in that I've spent most of my life trusting my intelligence because it's always worked for me. It's helped me navigate complexity, pressure, the corporate world, uncertainty again and again. I know how to think things through, analyze, plan, problem solve, work things out. And that cognitive trust has been a huge asset in my life. And if I'm honest, it's likely been responsible for a huge part of my success. I have so much evidence that when I use my brain, things go well. I earn money, I get significance, I get recognition. And yet that trust was disrupted, quite possibly shattered, during a recent kinesiology session when I realized that the next chapter I'm stepping into doesn't require more thinking. It requires something different. And that realization absolutely terrified me. What landed as part of this revelation was that I have this deep faith in my brain. And faith was my word of last year. That was what I was all about. But I don't have as much trust in my nervous system. And that gap has shaped how I make decisions. My instinct is still to intellectualize, to find evidence, to find proof, logic, understand more before I move, even when something in me already knows the answer. And I've seen in the last 12 months as I've really boosted my faith in my thinking, I've needed less validation or input from others. I haven't needed to check anything or what do you think about this or bounce things off people because my brain comes up with it, I know it, and I'm able to move. But this tension that I'm uncovering is that my nervous system doesn't operate on data or explanation, and it can't be reasoned with in the same way that the mind can. It has to be felt. It has to be sensed, experienced, and listened to, which is deeply uncomfortable when you've been rewarded for certainty and clarity. And in fact, I've been down many a rabbit hole trying to understand my nervous system with my brain. The science, what's it made up of? What's made up of the central nervous system? And that's your spinal cord. Instead of actually feeling my nervous system as if comprehension should be enough. We tend to trick ourselves that if I know enough, I'll be okay. And if I'm honest, learning to feel has been one of my greatest lessons and something that has so been so tricky for me because my head is so strong. I come from a very, very long line of non-feelers where emotions were not really accepted, never really spoken about, very rarely expressed. And I am now the bridge with a deeply feeling daughter who has very big feelings. And that's been one of my greatest lessons, one of my greatest teachings. But I am making some progress. And I wanted to share what can unlock when you learn to lean in. Now, some of what I'm gonna share is gonna sound a bit crazy. And that is the part my intellectual brain has had to be okay with. It doesn't need to be justified. Not everything in life has to make sense because there are many other ways that things can make sense. Over the last few months, I've invertently been working on building this trust. I've started noticing how decisions feel in my body. Whether something feels heavy or light, if it feels contracting or if it feels expansive. And I've been able to make some very big business decisions. Yes, looking at strategy, but I've also made a lot of decisions lately that have been because of how it feels. To give you one example, Balance and Beyond, which is our signature program, has been delivering incredible results, changing lives. But it began to feel heavy in me. Not because it wasn't working. It was working fine, but because something in me had moved on and the container hadn't yet caught up with that. So reacting to this feeling of heaviness wasn't a strategic correction. Let's be clear, I still have a brain. So I wasn't going to do something that was going to be completely detrimental to my business. But I was able to make a different strategic decision based on an internal signal that I couldn't ignore anymore. So instead of having this program be evergreen running all the time, it felt really heavy. We're moving to cohorts, which to me, my whole body just lit up with yes. And the more I leant into that, the more I was able to make other decisions based on what felt heavy, what felt light. I culled 10,000 emails from my database because when I logged into my system, it felt heavy. And there's no reason why. Because I paid for a lot of those leads. What am I doing getting rid of them? But the moment I hit delete, my entire system was like, yes, this is the way. I felt so much lighter and I felt so much alignment. This way of operating is still becoming familiar to me. And it's because it asks me to trust something I can't fully explain. Part of me has always wanted to be able to rationalize my decisions. And if someone was to question, well, why did you go and delete 10,000 emails? I could justify it. Maybe that's my corporate background of always being able to justify every decision and show that I've assessed the risks. And saying because my body feels lighter is not something that would necessarily stack up with a board and say, well, Joe feels lighter. Well, let's just ignore all the laws, all the risks, all the financials, and let's do it this way. And my head still wants that control, that reassurance, that certainty, and I can feel it wrestling with the shift. However, at the same time, there's this deeper sense that this is the direction I need to follow. This is my growth edge. Even when I don't have any data to back it up, I'm still learning what faith in my body actually feels like, not just is from a data point perspective. And I certainly don't feel fluent in it yet. It's almost like I'm trying to ride a bike that is my nervous system, and I've got training wheels and spooky wheels. But I'm starting to see that this level of trust isn't about abandoning my intelligence and forsaking my brain and saying that it's now bad. It's about an expansion of where my intelligence lives. I've always been quite well connected to my intuition, but that's often come through my mind. And so if you've always trusted your mind, but feel like something's asking you to listen differently now, that this chapter calls for a different level of wisdom, you're probably not wrong. You're just entering a chapter like me where your head is no longer enough on its own. Thanks for taking this moment for yourself. If this resonated, share it with a friend who needs to hear it today. And don't forget to subscribe to Balance and Beyond for full episodes and more of these bite sized breakthroughs. See you next time.