An Intuitive Decision-Making Model for Getting Unstuck
Listen below or in your favorite podcast app.
Or read the transcript.
Let’s take a journey behind the scenes, where I’ll share my unique intuitive decision-making model, grounded in years of practice with my leadership coaching clients and myself.
When a dear client recently inquired about my intuitive decision-making model for making aligned decisions, I knew it was a great chance to share my personal experiences. I hope these examples will bring more structure, clarity, and ease to your own decision-making journey.
The first step in my intuitive decision-making model–with a personal example
The first step in my intuitive decision-making model is to express all of your feelings, thoughts, and emotions, and to get everything “out on the table.”
At the end of 2022, I began noticing some restless, uncomfortable feelings that I couldn’t quite pinpoint at the time. All I knew was that I needed time and space to figure it out, and so I redesigned my schedule to give myself that space.
At the beginning of 2023, I decided to group my coaching sessions together to create an “on” work week where I was doing lots of coaching, and then I would have an “off” week to follow, which I called a “sabbatical week”.
These sabbatical weeks gave me the time and space to look directly at the mess inside of me—at all the tangled-up thoughts, feelings, desires, and my deeper intuition. And honestly, the process took less time than I expected, which happens often with my clients too.
In fact, I only needed two of those sabbatical weeks, or a month in total, to know what needed to change.
During those sabbatical weeks, I allowed myself to just sit with the blank space, which is crucial for this intuitive decision-making model. And I did lots of writing, journaling, letter writing, talking on the phone with friends, and therapy.
I reached out to various healing practitioners, exploring whatever piqued my curiosity or felt necessary in the moment. Eventually, I expressed everything, laying it all out on the table.
This is often the first step with my clients – allowing emotions, desires, thoughts, and self-criticism to surface without organizing or making sense of them immediately.
The second step in my intuitive decision-making model
The second step is to sift out emotion, logic, and self-criticism.
I, like so many of us, always want to hear my intuition first, but it's often a quieter voice compared to emotions, logic, or self-criticism.
That's why it's helpful to express everything in the first step because the second step involves organizing and identifying each internal voice.
Let’s keep going with the above example: As I was going through those two weeks, I started to have a recurring thought spiral in my head, which was:
“I really want to allow my business to grow. I've been holding it small, constraining it on purpose while I was going through pregnancy and new parenthood, and now I am ready for growth… but I don't want to work more hours.
I don't want to take on more clients and coach more one-on-one sessions. I feel good where I’m at, and it works really well for my energy and for balancing my other desires and responsibilities.”
And then the next group of thoughts to pop into my head would be:
“What you need to do is create resources that don’t require your presence.”
And the next thought:
“But that's never going to lead to business growth because you don't have a big enough online audience.”
My practice has been running on referrals entirely; most of my clients come from word of mouth.
How to separate intuition from your emotions and fears to make more aligned decisions
And here’s where the deeper work begins of sifting through the thought spirals and pinpointing the different “characters” involved.
Consider the movie Inside Out, where various emotions play distinct characters in a little girl's mind. Similarly, the thoughts in your head can be thought of as individual characters.
This is a common exercise I do with my clients: identifying the character behind a thought.
For example, the voice saying, "I want my business to grow. It's time to let it grow," is intuition. I know this because there's very little emotion attached to it – intuition isn't fearful, sad, or excited.
Intuition just is. It points us in the direction of possibility and courage, and it tends to come from a place of self-love.
“What would I do if I really loved myself and accepted myself fully?” That's intuition–and you don't even have to love and accept yourself fully in order to hear your intuition.
You can just ask yourself, “What would I do if I loved and accepted myself fully? If I believed in myself? If I trusted in myself?”
And that’s when I knew: It was time to let this business grow and to share so much of what I've learned.
Over the past six years, I've learned countless lessons from coaching clients and wished to share this knowledge with others. However, a voice in my head suggested that creating resources might be a waste of time due to my small audience.
And you may think that thought sounds like logic or reason, but if you listen a little more closely, it’s actually a bit mean. And this voice essentially blocks us from taking any action to keep us safe.
This critical voice is just trying to do its job. It’s there for a reason: to keep us safe. It makes sure we don't get eaten by a lion, and that we don't cross the road without looking both ways.
This voice is an important part of you, and yet it's also important that it isn't solely in the driver's seat of your life, making all of the decisions. Because if that were the case, you’d never try anything new or do anything differently. You’d stay stuck in place.
Acknowledging this voice's valid concerns, I still wanted my resources to make a difference and reach a wider audience.
To address these conflicting thoughts, I identified and separated the different aspects of myself, treating them as characters engaged in a debate.
The role of emotions in the intuitive decision-making model
At the time, I felt somewhat depressed, thinking that my situation seemed hopeless.
I wanted to grow but had a small audience, leaving me feeling stuck and without a clear path forward.
I've had this internal conversation before over the past six years, but it was usually short-lived as my intuition would tell me that one-on-one coaching was incredibly fulfilling and exactly what I needed in my work.
However, this new thought spiral became increasingly intense, causing me to feel more depressed and unable to ignore those emotions. These emotions were begging me to pay attention.
Recognizing the need for space to sort out these conflicting thoughts, I identified the different characters within myself.
Then, I applied compassionate, generative constraints to address the daunting challenge of growing my business and serving more people.
How using constraints can help with the intuitive decision-making process
Constraints can be incredibly helpful for reducing overwhelm around the intuitive decision-making process. And time is often the easiest constraint to start with.
When I'm working with my clients, I am normally coaching them every two weeks, and so we break everything down into two-week experiments.
And going back to my example, I was doing those alternating two-week periods of work weeks and sabbatical weeks. I created a two-week personal sprint for experimentation and testing hypotheses.
To make the idea of growing my practice less overwhelming, I set a clear time frame to focus on: the first half of 2023. During this period, I would challenge the notion that growth isn't possible due to a small audience. I planned to work on alternating weeks, dedicating the in-between weeks to progressing in some way.
One constraint I set was defining my intentions for this growth. Instead of focusing on practical steps, I considered the guiding principles that would ensure my approach was suitable for this stage in my life and something I could be proud of and learn from.
In this phase of my life, my intention was to allow myself to be supported, instead of doing everything on my own–a tendency I often lean into due to my love for independence and control. While this approach has served me well in the past, it just doesn’t work for me now that I’m a parent of a toddler.
As someone who provides nurturing and support to others, particularly my toddler and clients, I need to ensure that my own well-being is replenished. Taking on a new growth project where I do everything by myself is not feasible. Instead, I recognized the value of learning from collaborators who can support me in this stage of my life.
This realization led me to create another constraint, which also opened up possibilities. I decided to allocate a budget for getting help during this period. I chose a specific amount from my savings that felt both courageous and meaningful to me, signifying its potential to make a difference.
The chosen amount was not too risky or financially destructive, so even if the investment in my business didn't yield the desired results within a certain time frame, it wouldn't create financial hardship or emotional distress for me. With a set time frame (the first half of the year) and a designated budget, I was ready to move forward.
How to use the intuitive decision-making model when creating goals
I set an intention for moving forward, which was to allow myself to be supported. I also established three clear goals:
Improve the lives of more people than I can coach one-on-one by creating self-guided resources.
Grow my online audience without relying on social media as the primary foundation.
Increase my income without working additional hours or scheduling more calls per week.
Once I had these anchors and perspectives in place, things became easier. The process involved giving myself space to answer questions and understand the different parts of myself. This approach unblocked me and led to clarity, confidence, and the ability to make decisions with ease.
January was mainly a time of discernment, while February involved reaching out to potential collaborators and making decisions about whom to work with and how to prioritize my budget.
From March to May, I focused on co-creating with my collaborators and overcoming any obstacles that arose.
Whenever I felt stuck or faced challenges, I would return to my goals and intentions. These anchors not only helped me at the beginning but also served as reminders throughout the journey, allowing me to maintain focus and continue moving forward.
How to get unstuck using an intuitive decision-making model
In summary, to cultivate your own intuitive decision-making process, I recommend:
Paying attention to new emotions–they are the sign to slow down and explore.
Giving yourself the time and space to get everything out on the table. Allow yourself to explore your thoughts, feelings, and emotions fully.
Sifting through those thoughts, feelings, and emotions to determine “who” is saying what; is it your intuition, your fears, your inner critic? Remember: Your intuition typically has very little emotion attached.
Create constraints around time and capacity for yourself.
Set goals that are anchored around your bigger intentions and constraints.
I hope my example of finding ease in this process has been helpful, resonant, or inspiring for you in your own journey to overcome obstacles and achieve your goals.
The important thing to remember is that our intuition can provide us with a very valuable perspective for how to live in more alignment, but we first must slow down enough to listen and learn from it.
Need more help connecting with your intuition?
Download this free Guide to Intuitive Decision Making so you can move forward with clarity and confidence.
What to expect
Structure to help make intuitive decision-making easier
Prompts to help you get clear
Exercises you can return to anytime you’re stuck
Everything in a Notion template (duplicate it in Notion or copy it into any doc)
Plus, my guided visualization for accessing your intuition
If you loved this post, be sure you check out:
Intuition or anxiety? How to trust your intuition when you have anxiety