IN BUSINESS, FOLLOWING YOUR INSTINCT IS PARAMOUNT

How to Follow Your Gut

It’s scary trying to convince yourself and your team to follow you based on a “feeling.” But sometimes that’s the best thing to do.

The most frustrating advice I ever received came from a mentor who told me, “Just follow your gut.”

I had no idea what that meant nor how to do it. He made it sound as if my gut would suddenly appear in front of me and gesture for me to follow it.

Want to know why it’s so hard to follow your gut? Because it requires you to stop giving a damn about what everyone else thinks.

Entrepreneurs spend so much of their lives comparing themselves to others and measuring their progress by some impossible ideal. Covers of magazines show 20-something who became billionaires off their brilliant ideas. Your bank account, meanwhile, looks more than a little pathetic. (I know mine does.) You start to feel that, whatever success is supposed to look like, you’re not achieving it as well as the person next door.

So you worry that you’re going to make a flop out of this thing called life. And that gut you’re supposed to follow? It gets buried in the fear and envy and self-loathing. So, you pick up every self-help book you can find and seek out best practices. But you don’t get it right. You just keep stumbling. Until one day you wake up and say, “What have I got to lose?” That’s the day you dig our gut out and let it beckon us in the right direction.

But it’s a cycle. And your gut will lead you astray again. (Sometimes badly astray.)

My gut plagues me constantly. I have advisors and investors and consultants and cofounders and most of the time, not a single one of them agrees with my gut. It takes a great deal of effort to convince dozens of smart people that you should go in a direction because you “feel” you should. There’s no evidence. Just an instinct.

Continue reading this article at INC.com after the break!