How to Trust Your Intuition & Rewrite Your Life Story

Ever feel a quiet nudge that makes no sense on paper but won’t let go? That’s the signal Marisa calls the inner ping—and following it changed everything. From childhood moves between Portugal and Canada to mirror-work confidence training in a dance studio, the story builds toward a single leap: selling her things, leaving a stable job, and moving to Montreal on intuition alone. What arrived on the other side wasn’t certainty; it was the next right step, again and again, until a new life took shape—marriage, motherhood, a flight attendant career, and a coaching practice rooted in self-trust.

We break down how to tell intuition from fear: one is calm and clear, the other loud and urgent. You’ll learn why the subconscious often delivers a knowing before logic catches up, and how to reframe choices with a GPS mindset—there are no wrong turns, only reroutes toward the lesson you need. Larissa shares simple, repeatable practices to strengthen your inner compass: walking without headphones, journaling for pattern-spotting, tracking body signals like expansion or tightness, and asking better questions, such as what feels aligned or what would my future self choose.

This conversation is for anyone standing at a crossroads, tired of outsourcing decisions to noise and approval. You’ll leave with practical tools to start small, say yes to the next aligned move, and trust that life meets courage with unexpected openings. If a dream keeps tapping your shoulder, consider this your permission to listen. Subscribe, share with a friend who needs a nudge, and leave a review to help more people lead from within. What’s the next tiny, brave step your inner compass is asking for?

Follo Host on socials (ig/tiktok) @iammarisa.xo 

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https://links.theinnerpurity.com

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Don't forget to spread love like you would nutella. 

xoxo, M

Transcript

Welcome & Purpose Of The Show

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Welcome to the Inner Beacon. I am your host, Larissa. I'm a Canadian girl mama of two, business owner, flight attendant, and a certified self-love coach. You are in the right place if you are ready to lead your life from within. To reconnect with your intuition, trust yourself deeply, and reclaim your power. My goal and intention here is to inspire and empower you. And for fun, I might even add some flight attendant content and travel tips. And I'm so glad you're here. So let's dive into today's episode. Today's gonna be a little bit of a longer episode. We're gonna be talking about intuition, inner compass, inner ping, whatever you want to call it. I'll get into it. Have you ever felt something in your gut that just you couldn't explain, but you knew you had to follow it? That quiet inner nudge, the whisper that says, go this way, almost like your very own GPS or compass. I call it your inner ping. Those who've worked with me will learn all about this in my inner comp inner purity container. And today I want to talk about what happens when you actually listen to it. Because 10 years ago in 2016, I followed that inner ping and it changed the entire trajectory of my life. I'll share my own story example. I've really had time to reflect on this because of the trend that's been going around with everybody on social media sharing the your version of you of 2026 versus now 2026, a decade later. And the amount of changes that have happened are remarkable, and it makes me think like, what would my life have been, or who would I be, had I not taken a chance on myself with a direction that made absolutely no sense to nobody else but me. And I guess with that, I am gonna begin with my story and giving a little bit of a background of my early adolescent and adult life in my journey. And what a journey it has been. Actually, I can even explain a little bit about who I am as I feel like this may be a longer episode for you today, but I feel like I should just bring you into my world and you can get to know me and understand me better as a new listener. I mean, I did start this podcast after all in the hopes of inspiring and adding value and maybe sharing parts of me like this that can help empower you as well. So let me start with who Marisa is, where I came from, my story before getting to those inner pings and 10 years big life changes. Let me tell you from a young age, I knew change is inevitable. The most consistent thing. I was born in BC, Vancouver by my birth parents, who are both Portuguese. They lived in Vancouver as newlyweds, married for four years before they had me, and we lived there until I think well, they lived there and had me and my brother. My brother is three, maybe just a bit a little bit over three years age gap, I believe. They had my brother, and then shortly after that, we actually moved back to Portugal. So my first language reading and writing is Portuguese, and I think it may have been the summer I was eight, turning nine. I'm a July baby. I believe when we moved back to BC Canada again. And I remember having to relearn English, this new language, going to school, walking around as a new kid, no friends, left out. This was part of my journey. Life in Canada was much more different, bigger than what I knew of my small town in Portugal, that's for sure. I remember loving candles and journaling from a young age and playing teacher with my younger cousins. I was the oldest of all the cousins, so in the summer I'd be at my grandmother's helping with all the kids while our parents were at work. It helped me a lot with keeping my Portuguese, translating and helping my grandma, and I do cherish those moments that came with this time in my life. My parents moved several times in those early elementary and high school years, so changing schools and homes was no sweat for me. And I actually, my mom always made it seem very exciting because I got to pick a new room and the decor of my new space that I would spend my adolescent years. She also used to listen to a lot of audiobooks like Abraham Hicks and The Secret. She was into things like meditation and even invited me to join her back in the day with her TM meditations practices. And then I too developed a love for mindset, personal growth from a very young age. I remember when the internet was becoming a thing. I'm that old, I feel like. And my dad would always tell me about how he saw something about people making money online. So that that seed was planted from then. He always encouraged me as well in all things. Both my parents, in my experience, were very open-minded, which I think helped me in my endeavors for sure. They helped me with my spiritual growth and finding tools from a young age to build my sense of energetic protection and learning how to connect with my higher self, which I won't get into today, but I will share on another episode. I always loved dance. Wasn't much of a sports gal. I remember taking lessons, ballroom dancing, at uh Arthur Murray studios at the age of 15. And then following the following year, at age uh 16, my dad actually found this guy who was building his own dance company and wanted instructors, and he was willing to teach us to teach his dance classes. I was the youngest one of the chosen people that he had teaching for him. And I began, I began as a like sub-teacher, secondary teacher in the in the classes before taking on my own classes myself. And I remember having this limiting belief and fears just on, like I was struggling with in that moment with how I would be received by the class because a lot of the students were much older, like in their 20s, 30s, and older. How and keep in mind, I was 16 years old. And I was scared of how they would receive me because they're spending so much money, and like, how are they gonna take me seriously, right? And I remember the owner of the company actually, once I was doing a one-on-one in his dance studio in his home, and he had me do this for some quite some time. He had me look me, look in the mirror, look at my own eyes, at myself in the eyes, in his home. In the dance studio, you're like, you know how like dance studios have a whole wall that's here. So right there, and he was in my ear motivating me with affirmations, and he would always tell me, feel the fear and do it anyways, which is something I really adopted for years to come because I started to understand that there was a high of pride that came from stepping into fear, resistance, and so much growth that would come from it too. But this was a muscle that needed to be trained as well. And as he would be making me look in my own eyes with these affirmations, he would be saying in my ears things like, You don't believe it, say it again, until he started to see my conviction, my tone, and my stare. The thing is, your mind truly does not know what is real and what isn't. And your frame of thought creates your beliefs and that creates your reality. And it is a muscle that like you do have to play with. Like your mind is incredible, you guys. So from high school, I wasn't sure what exactly I wanted to pursue, but I knew I didn't want to do nothing. And having several people in my family in the beauty industry, even my mom in her early years, it felt natural to just kind of go into it as well. So in my early adult years, I studied makeup artistry and aesthetics, worked for beauty lines like Elizabeth Arden at the managing the counter at the bay, living on my own across the water from my family. I actually lived in Victoria. If you're familiar with BC, it's you have to take a ferry to get there. And my my whole family that I have in Canada. The only family I have in Canada is in BC, British Columbia. Um, but on the main line, the land. So yeah, I I went to Vancouver Island, that's where I study my aesthetics. I worked at several beauty bars and salons. I even played with the idea of doing aesthetics from home when I moved back to the mainland, and I lived with my dad and his wife at the time, my stepmom, before they decided to move to Costa Rica. And then my dad planted the idea in my head to apply for this job that he had found online as a downtown ambassador for Vancouver, which was more of a tourism-based role at the time. And I felt more alive. I wasn't happy working in the beauty industry, and he knew it. So I applied and I got the job on the spot. I actually worked there for some time and got promoted to supervisor of the program. At one point, I even helped develop a training manual and helped hire and train new ambassadors. But from there, I knew I wanted to pursue tourism further. I am a socialite. I love using my perk Portuguese and broken Spanish to help others in their travels, especially when they were coming off of like the SkyTrain, looking for their hotels, like as an ambassador. Like that was my my favorite, is like, you know, going into foreign country and not knowing the language and kind of, you know, being lost. I know what that's like. So being able to conversate with them and make them feel comfortable and welcomed here was my favorite thing about the job. Yeah, the ambassador program started to veer from tourism though, in into more of like a security-based program. And I was uh near the end of my working there, and I was looking into jobs in either boat cruises or in flight, and I remember specifically getting a call from one of my really good friends out west, Canada, on my birthday. She lives in Montreal. And she said, Well, Riz, if you aren't happy in BC, you are always welcome to Montreal. Come stay with me and my family, learn French and see if the change, if it's the change you need. And if she could have said that to anybody, it would have had to be me to be like, okay. I took her up on that offer. I at this point too, like I've been applying for flight attending for a while, and I thought maybe I'm not getting it because I don't speak French because we live in Canada. Yada yada yada. So I went in with the intention of potentially learning French and continuing on my pursuit for in-flight. I took her up on that offer within months and saved money, saved money, sold my things, put things in storage, quit my job with no real plans, and decided to move across the country by myself. Like I said, I don't know if my friend planted the idea in my head and expected me to actually take her up on it or not. But if it was anyone, it would have been me to be like, yeah, okay, because change doesn't scare me. Yes, it kind of excites me, if anything. And I just had an inner knowing that I would be led and it would somehow work out, however however it was meant to be. I just felt this pull. I trusted my intuition. Yes, there were fears, yes, there were doubts, and lots of uncomfortable moments. But you guys, that decision happened 10 years ago, and it changed the trajectory of my life. Like I said before. I initially actually went and I had applied for some French classes for my first little bit there. And honestly, like I did learn by the end, I I stayed in Montreal for six months, and by the end I was starting to get it, but it was also really confusing because there's some words in like French that are masculine or feminine or whatever that aren't the same as Spanish or Portuguese. For example, la banque is feminine, which is means bank, but in both Spanish and Portuguese, banku is masculine. Anyways, let's not get into that. If you know, you know. But a lot of people back home didn't necessarily agree with my decision to leave. They thought I would be making a mistake, quitting a secure job because I'd been there for years now, and leaving. I had family making bets on how fast I'd come back. But the only person who knew I wasn't coming back was my brother. I guess he's the only one who really knows me. And I I didn't have a roadmap. I journaled and I even did some sharing the adventure and life updates on my YouTube to share with my friends and family back home. So I was documenting and journaling everything and moving with where life took me. Just my inner compass guiding me. That's often how intuition works. It doesn't give you the entire picture, just the next aligned move. The difference between intuition and fear, so intuition usually feels calm, quiet, clear. It's also often doesn't make any sense in the mundane, but serves a greater purpose. We don't always see it until later though. While fear feels loud, urgent, and full of what ifs that keep us stuck. You'll see this a lot when you when you want something, but you start to feel resistance to it and start making excuses as to why you can't, because it feels unsafe. The tricky part is that when intuition asks us to grow, spread our wings, fear often shows up too. I get a lot of people saying, Wow, you're so brave, but the truth is courage is not the absence of fear. It's just feeling the fear, moving through, and choosing to move anyways. Common reasons why we often ignore our inner compass is fear of change, fear of judgment, conditioning to seek external approval, wanting certainty before action, and believing that we need permission. We are often taught to trust logic before trusting ourselves. But your intuition is one of the most intelligent systems you have. Our subconscious processes far more information than our conscious mind, which is why intuitive signals can feel like a knowing without knowing. It's your GPS. And much like the GPS you may be using to navigate directions in your car, if you take a quote unquote wrong turn while driving, what happens? It automatically starts to recalculate the route to your destination. So there isn't really ever a wrong decision. Every direction leads us somewhere we are meant to be with the experiences that we are meant to have. It prepares us for what's coming. It's just perspective, growth, and lessons from there. I truly believe that when something is planted in your heart repeatedly, a dream, a pull, an idea, a change, it's often there for a reason. Not every idea is meant to become your life path, but the ones that keep returning are worth listening to. Your inner compass isn't random, it's guidance. The vehicle andor routes you take along the way are all part of the bigger purpose. And I can attest to that. In today's world where we are so connected to so much that is outside of ourselves, this is why I feel purpose in sharing and doing this work because we need guidance to connect back within from the distractions that pull us away from listening to our intuition or our inner compass. If you've heard now, you'll notice that journaling and reflection through my years have helped me stay connected even in times I've lost myself. This is my invitation to you to create ways to start listening to your inner pings. Quiet the outside world and truly start listening, walking without headphones. Actually looking and admiring your surroundings, for example. Journaling and gratitude practices for small and big things. Notice body signals. Anxiety that shows up in your body is also often intuition. It's just your body's trying to tell you something. So it's really important to get to know your energetic body. Also, something we talk about in inner purity. Intuition often shows up in the body as lightness, excitement, tightness, or contractions, or like I said before, calm and clarity. So when you're sensing when you're sensing these, ask yourself why. Navigate them and search for answers within yourself. Again, journaling is a great practice. Tell your body it's safe to move through that exploration. Your body knows when it's time for shifts before your mind does. So instead of asking what should I do, try asking what feels aligned, what feels expansive, what would my future self choose? You don't need to make massive life changes immediately. Practice intuition questions with things like where to go, what to say yes or no to, and how you spend your energy. Then trust the next step, not the whole path. Things don't usually play the way we plan, and that should be something that excites you because they often turn out better. And when it feels hard, give yourself grace and ask in the moment, what can I learn from this situation to navigate from here and trust that there is a greater purpose always. Your inner compass has been there your entire life. Sometimes we just forget how to listen. But the more that you trust it, the stronger it becomes. If ten years ago I didn't make the decision to move myself all on my own across the country, I wouldn't have met my now husband and become a mom of two beautiful girls. I wouldn't have had the amazing growth travel experience and potentially not even pursue a career as a flight attendant or do the work that I'm doing right now, because I had to go through so much growth, hard times, good times to get to this place. All of it has made me into who I am and continue to be. If something keeps calling you, if there is a direction that keeps pulling at your heart, you know that it's not random. There is a future version of you probably already living it, just waiting for you to step back into your power and listen. Maybe you've been guided to hear this right now for a reason. Nothing's a coincidence, and that's something I've learned along the way. It was in my heart to want a partnership that allowed me to be me and give me the space to always be able to connect within, to build a life and a business with someone who pushed me, which we have. I want to be a flight at I wanted to be a flight attendant, and the pursuit to that took years and a lot of turbulence, haha, which at the time didn't make sense, but it led me to my current and every redirect on the GPS led me exactly where I am. It happened how it was meant to. I stayed consistent, true to myself along the way. The path is definitely never really a straight line, but keep faith and believe in the redirects and keep threading the needle in the meantime. I guess another piece of advice I can give you on this one is that if you want to do something, don't go for advice about it from someone who isn't currently living the life that you want to pursue. You want to learn from those who have. And that way it also strengthens your belief muscle. And if I had stayed back living where I didn't feel like I was meant to stay, working a job that I wasn't that just wasn't fulfilling me anymore, I wouldn't be the same person. Live for you and take chances on yourself and listen to those inner pings. Thank you for spending this time with me here on the Inner Beacon. If you're not already following me, you can find me on Instagram at immarisa.xo. And if this episode resonates, spread the love like you would Nutella by sharing this podcast and tagging me so that I can personally thank you. And if you are feeling extra loving, leaving a review helps light up another beautiful soul and supports the growth of this space. I am so glad you're here. I'll meet you on the next episode.