Clients often come to me in the middle of a big decision: whether or not to pursue a career change, stay in a relationship, start trying for a family.
I encourage you to destroy the idea that you will ever "know" with 100% certainty what you should do next, or that there is one "right" direction at all. However, there are decisions and lives that will feel more fulfilling, authentic, and satisfying than others, and there are many different ways of tapping the information and intelligence that will guide you closer to them.
We call these different ways of knowing.
So, what are they?
The first you're probably the most familiar with: logic. Our left-brain, rational, cognitive processing powerhouses that are great at making pro-con lists and writing everything down on paper. Many of us grew up strengthening our cognitive decision-making chops because of the ways in which we were taught to think throughout school, our career, our political decisions, and more.
The problem is, many of us have become over-reliant on this single way of knowing, and find ourselves all too often saying that it looks perfect on paper, but still doesn't feel right. Well, turns out it's because we've totally ignored our feelings throughout the decision-making process!
Cue other ways of knowing: emotional knowing, intuitive knowing, physical knowing, spiritual knowing, communal knowing, experiential knowing...
These are actually highly sophisticated tools we constantly underutilize. Think about it - in a split second your brain can consolidate all the memories, information, and data points it has swirling around from years of experience and spit it out in one simple sensation we call a "gut feeling." Or an emotion like fear, frustration, joy, or excitement.
I often like to think of this a bit like a food processor - we have to keep feeding the top with things like additional information, experiments and experiences for the output to become more and more valuable. But the biggest step we often miss is allowing the space to receive the output at all.
This is where dedicated practices to listen to your other ways of knowing come in. Meditation, for example, is a wonderful way to allow all the back and forth spinning around in your brain to settle for a bit, and to see what answers are already gently resting right beneath the surface. Prayer is another beautiful practice I often recommend, whether you believe in a higher power or not. For some, it's a way to tap specifically into a "higher" intelligence and practice a more spiritual way of knowing. But even for the most atheistic, prayer can be a great way to take a break from the act of answering and simply practice the art of listening. Ask your question and then shut up. You just might be surprised by what comes up.
A final practice I'll share is "acting as if." Try your decision on for size by imaging you've already made it. You don't have to tell anyone, but see how if feels to live in your new reality for a day, or even a week. Then try the alternative. You may find that feeling into your decision experientially can go far beyond what intellectualization can alone!
Now, none of this is meant to imply that we should drop our cognitive ways of knowing all together. How many times have you had a gut reaction that was wrong? The heuristics our brains use can still be misleading and often fail to address our existing biases. The point is not to make decisions solely using one way of knowing or another, but to be able to flex different approaches when appropriate, to be discerning about each's strengths and limitations, and to balance and integrate them and the different information they provide.
To begin strengthening your other intelligences, consider picking up a regular practice - be it yoga, meditation, or art, or more. At the end of the day, it's not just about changing how we answer our questions, but changing our relationship with them, too.
I'll leave you with a final quote:
"Sit amicably with confusion, and clarity will come. Sometimes the only thing standing between the two is time." - Unknown
