How might you check in with your head, your heart, and your gut?
Oct 07, 2022
I often notice clients exclusively leaning on their cognitive skills while ignoring their emotional reaction or knowing something intuitively is a bad idea, yet agreeing anyway because intellectually, it seems correct. Your cognition, emotions, and intuition all get to be honored as you move through life. This is a place to practice trusting yourself. I’m not talking about allowing your brain to run down the rabbit hole of conspiracy theories, but I am saying you often know exactly what you want and what you will and won’t do if you listen to some other part of yourself than just your cognitive brain. Science is starting to back up these three ways of knowing. There is a growing body of literature on this head/heart/gut model of “embodied cognition in decision making.”
The head is for reasoning, pattern recognition, and language. The heart is about emotional processing, knowing what’s important to you, and your felt connection with others. The gut is about a “deep and visceral sense of your core self,” protecting yourself, and gutsy courage.
Here’s an exercise to try: The next time you have a big decision to make, take a moment to ask in turn for the opinion of your head, your heart, and then your gut. See what you notice. Often there are powerful and conflicting answers. For example, Yes! from the head and no from the heart or gut. Or green light from the head, but red light from the gut. Of course, this doesn’t mean “follow your gut” without consulting your brain; it just means allowing yourself the gift of knowing that you can’t always think your way into the right answer for matters of the heart and that intuitive hits are based on years of your lived experience and worthy of some respect. Try it and let me know what happens for you!
