You know that feeling, don't you? That subtle unease in your gut when something doesn't quite add up. The person you're dating ticks all the boxes on paper, but there's something underneath you can't quite name. Your career path looks impressive to everyone else, but you feel disconnected, like you're playing a role that doesn't fit anymore. The relationship that presents beautifully on the surface, yet you're constantly explaining away the small moments that make you feel unseen. That’s the red flags you’re dismissing. With valid reason. We’ve been conditioned to believe that we have to keep going and ignore what you have felt in the past. What's really happening here is that you're seeing and feeling two completely different things. And somewhere along the way, you learned to trust what you see over what you feel. And now it’s time you know about why that’s costing you.
The Disconnect That's Costing You Everything
We've become masters at dismissing our intuition. Someone shows up looking like everything we thought we wanted, so we override that quiet voice whispering, "Something's not right here." We tell ourselves we're being too picky, too sensitive, overthinking it. We explain away the red flags like “they probably didn't mean it that way”, “maybe I'm reading too much into this”, “everyone says they're amazing, so it must be me”. But what you already know deep down is that you're not actually overthinking it. What you’re feeling is incredibly accurate. And that intuition, that sixth sense, that soul sense is your internal compass.
It's been with you since birth, designed to help you navigate your way through life. You’ve already got the skills. It’s your inside in voice. Yet we've learned to abandon it in favour of external validation. Your outside in voice. The voice that belongs to others and that gives us a sense of belonging when we’re disconnected from ourselves. That’s what gets your attention. And so, we wait for someone else to confirm what we already know before we trust ourselves. We take their priorities and opinions as truth. We need this permission to feel what we're feeling when the red flags you’re dismissing have gone unacknowledged.
The Real Cost of Self-Doubt
When you dismiss your knowing, you're not just ignoring a feeling. You're abandoning yourself and your patterns are keeping you stuck. That abandonment comes at a cost. The journey becomes longer, more painful, more emotionally traumatic. You stay in situations that don't serve you, hoping they'll change. Hoping you'll feel differently, hoping that uncomfortable feeling will just go away. It doesn't.
Week after week those feelings are there. Those dismissed feelings anchor deeper into your body. They become evidence to your body that you’re not listening. Those red flags you're dismissing are costing you. The unease becomes exhaustion. The niggling doubt becomes anxiety. The subtle disconnection becomes a full-blown identity crisis. And eventually, life delivers what I call a "life bomb". That moment when everything you've been ignoring comes crashing down, and you're left saying, "I knew it. I so remember feeling that." You absolutely did. And you your knowing was on point.
It’s not your fault. These survival patterns were laid down long ago. Through unfair treatment, times where you didn’t feel there was an appropriate response, where you had an adverse reaction by someone you loved to what you said or were doing. Your concerns were left unheard by them. Now there’s hesitation to listen. Now, you’re simply following those patterns.
Coming Back to Your Knowing
The shift starts with validating yourself instead of waiting for life, or someone else, to validate you, your feelings and your experiences. It begins with you taking the time to tune into how you feel. Not just what you think you should feel.
Start here:
- Notice the first feeling, that first instinct. Before you talk yourself out of it, before you explain it away, before you dismiss it as "probably nothing", just pause.
- Ask yourself, *What is this feeling telling me? What does this mean for me? Your intuition isn't there to make you paranoid or hypervigilant. It's there to keep you connected to your truth, to your path, to what genuinely serves your highest self.
Please know that you don't need to be perfect at this. You just need to be willing to stop abandoning yourself in favour of fitting in, being liked, or keeping the peace. Because when you trust your knowing, you stop needing life to go perfectly to feel safe. You become the one you can rely on, and that's the ultimate freedom.
Here's what I want you to take away from this
The red flags you're dismissing aren't just costing you time or energy. They're costing you, you. Every time you override your intuition, you're teaching yourself that your truth doesn't matter. And that pattern keeps you stuck in a cycle of seeking outside in external validation instead of trusting the wisdom that's already within you. The beautiful part about all of this? You can change this right now. Start with honouring what you feel instead of explaining it away. Choose to trust yourself first, even when it's uncomfortable. Even when it goes against what everyone else thinks you should do.
Because at the end of the day, you're the one who has to live with your choices. And when you finally stop with those red flags you’re dismissing and start trusting your knowing, you'll discover something profound. You’ll realise you've always had the answers. You just needed permission to believe yourself. And that permission? It starts with you.
