What if the most important decisions in your life aren’t meant to be calculated?

What if that voice inside you, the one that whispers “this feels right” in the quiet moments, knows something your logical mind doesn’t?

Looking back on my most transformative choices, from moving across the country to starting a new career, none of them made perfect sense on paper. Yet they led me to a life I never could have imagined: calling the Midwest home and doing something for money that doesn’t feel like work at all.

When Logic Takes a Backseat

The thread connecting my biggest life changes isn’t careful planning, it’s the willingness to act when something feels deeply right, even when I can’t explain why.

Take our decision to move to the Midwest. It came suddenly during a relaxing morning in the midst of the pandemic. My wife and I realized that it just made sense to move closer to her family. The insight came very quickly and felt “right,” and within a matter of weeks, we were putting our house on the market and preparing for a move.

While there was a lot of logistics involved with selling a house and moving a family over a thousand miles, the insight and knowing that it was the right move never wavered.

Adventures and ventures I’ve dabbled in, from Ironmans and ultramarathons to travels and relationships, have been equally hard to predict. Even things that require pre-meditation, like completing an all-day endurance events or running workshops for clients, traveling abroad, or moving homes, came about quite spontaneously in hindsight.

Starting Small

Most recently, I was inspired to start running again several months ago. Despite dealing with a plethora of minor injuries and taking a decade away from any sort of distance running, I just started slowly jogging. I was compelled to do so! That was last fall, and I’m now enjoying a daily hour of slow running on most days, and already completed a marathon last month.

Looking back at that day in October when I decided to step out the door and go for a jog, it was a seemingly random choice. It felt right so I did it, even though my chiropractor would have warned me against it (I didn’t tell him!). You could say I was inspired to do it, and it has worked out well so far. Ironically, many of the injuries I’ve been trying to heal from over the past several years have been resolving themselves, almost by magic.

Could the very act of running, which logic says should make the injuries worse, actually be healing me?

Trusting the Process

From a business perspective, there has been a similar approach: doing work without getting too captivated with a desired outcome.

It’s now been well over a decade since I started coaching, and when I first began I didn’t know if I would enjoy it, be good at it, or earn enough to call it a career. While I hoped it would all work out, I never really knew.

So in the face of uncertainty, I just started doing it, and eventually (it took a couple years to become sustainable!) things started to click. I didn’t stick with it because I had a clear sense of what the outcome would look like. I stuck with it because it just felt right to do so.

From a career perspective, there is tremendous power in connecting to and trusting this innate intelligence, what I would call your deepest wisdom and intuition. It doesn’t seem sensible at first, until you realize just how deep and intelligent life is, operating 99% (far more than that actually!) without your conscious involvement.

Two Paths Forward

The implications of all this suggest two possible approaches. One is that you simply give up “trying” and do whatever feels good and convenient, trusting that everything will work out to your liking. This approach, I can safely say, is not very wise at all.

The other approach, and the one I hope to inspire you with in this writing, is to start getting really curious about what is wisdom and what is simply noise. Fourteen billion years of evolution (though scientists think the universe may be much older than that, potentially infinite!) point to the fact there must be some deeper intelligence running the show. Looking in that direction is a worthy exploration.

Experiment

Here’s what I’ve learned: the path from point A to Z is rarely a straight line AND our deepest wisdom often speaks in whispers, not shouts. It shows up in that inexplicable pull toward something that “just feels right,” even when we can’t build a spreadsheet to justify it (trust me I’ve tried!).

The invitation is simple but profound:

Start paying attention to wisdom as it shows up in your life. Notice the difference between the voice of fear (which often disguises itself as logic) and the voice of truth (which often appears as quiet knowing). This isn’t about abandoning reason, it’s about expanding it to include the intelligence that has been guiding life long before we learned to overthink our way out of our own wisdom.

Your inner compass is already calibrated. The question isn’t whether you can trust it, it’s whether you’re careful enough to notice it (like the deer hiding in the grass in the photo to this post!), and then brave enough to follow where it leads.