How to Trust Your Intuition (Even When You Feel Fear)

Have you ever had a gut feeling about a person or decision that you ignored, only to realize later that your intuition was right? In this episode, I break down the science behind intuition, why your fears scream while your intuition whispers, and how your body can pick up on information your conscious mind hasn't processed yet. I'll show you how to quiet the noise, strengthen your intuition, and use both your logic and gut feeling to make better decisions in your life. Freedom Live is a 3-day live experience in Austin designed to help you break through what’s keeping you from your next level. Get $100 off your ticket: https://robdial.short.gy/freedomlive The Mindset Mentor™ podcast is designed for anyone desiring motivation, direction, and focus in life. Past guests of The Mindset Mentor include Tony Robbins, Matthew McConaughey, Jay Shetty, Andrew Huberman, Lewis Howes, Gregg Braden, Rich Roll, and Dr. Steven Gundry. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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  Welcome to today's episode of the Mindset Mentor Podcast. I am your host, Rob Dial. If you have not yet done so, hit that subscribe button so you never miss another episode. And if you're somebody who wants to build yourself into a high performer, but you can't figure out how to stop procrastinating or self-sabotaging, I am running a free live workshop the evening of August 27th to teach you the psychology of high performance. And I'm going to teach you how to break your old fears and limiting beliefs that are limiting your capacity to succeed. Go to 2026workshop.com right now. It is absolutely free. I will be live and I'm going to be doing a Q and A after. So once again, go to 2026workshop.com and I will see you live on the workshop. Welcome to today's video.

• 2:30Speaker 01

  Today I'm going to teach you how to follow your intuition and how to develop your gut feeling. Let's dive into it. You've heard the phrase, "Trust your gut." Trust your gut, right? And gut feeling and intuition, I'm going to use interchangeably today. But you get a gut feeling about something, or you get a gut feeling about someone. And we've heard like, "Trust your gut." And I get it, when you hear like, "Trusting your gut," or "Your intuition," or "Be intuitive." It seems like, it sounds mystical, sounds unscientific. It sounds real woo-woo-y, right? And it doesn't really sound like a great way to make decisions in your life. That's the way I used to think about it too. But there's a whole lot of research that's going into it, and a lot of recent research

• 3:13Speaker 01

  in neuroscience and neurobiology that shows that like, this isn't just a theory. This isn't just some woo-woo-y thing. It's actually a fact to pay attention to that gut feeling, to pay attention to that intuition. In fact, it turns out that your gut, your intuition, may actually be a really powerful tool for you making the right decisions in your life. Especially when it comes to assessing people that you meet, like assessing situations, opportunities, is this right for me? Is this not right for me? Is this relationship right for me? Is it not right for me? Is this, this business path and starting this business is right for me? Is it not, is it not right for me? And so often we're taught in this, this society that we live in to rely solely on intellect,

• 3:55Speaker 01

  like what, what we think about it, and to be rational and to be logic to make our decisions, which those are definitely important. And I've made a lot of decisions based off of logic and being rational and all of that. But very rarely do we think to ourselves, maybe I should trust my gut feeling. Maybe I should trust my emotions. Maybe I should trust my instinct. And the reason why is because you kind of think like, feelings can be unreliable, right? Feelings can't be trusted. A lot of people, when you go up to them and ask about their feelings, they can't attach their feelings to a thought. They can't attach, "Why do you feel this way?" I'm not really sure. There's no logic behind it a lot of times. And there's a phrase that I think is really important that I've kind of lived my life by for a while.

• 4:40Speaker 01

  And the phrase is, "Your fears will scream at you and your intuition will whisper." And so it's like, when you're thinking, and you're thinking, "Oh my gosh, I shouldn't do this. I shouldn't do that. Here's the reason why. What are they going to think of me?" And you start getting all of these fears, you start getting these limiting beliefs, all of these worries. That's your fear. And your fear, which comes from your brain, will scream at you. And the reason why it does that is to keep you in your comfort zone. Your intuition is like this quiet little whisper that's in the background. And it's kind of like that phrase, "The heart knows what the mind cannot understand." And this past week, I've gotten this question around intuition twice in the past three days. Around like, "Hey, how do I know what intuition is? How do I develop my intuition? How do I follow my gut feeling?"

• 5:24Speaker 01

  And this question was popped up, like, "How do I know what my gut feeling is? How do I know my intuition is?" But when you think about this thing of like, "The heart knows what the mind cannot understand," it's kind of like the gut, the intuitive feeling, the pull that we feel towards something. Sometimes we can't fully comprehend in the moment, why we feel a certain way about a person or a situation, or whatever it might be. We're not really 100% sure in that moment. But that feeling is still really important and worthy of our consideration. And that's the important thing, which is logically, it might make sense. Like, we've all done this before, where you meet somebody and you're in front of them, and logically, there's nothing wrong with them. Like, there's not anything, there's not anything off-putting about them.

• 6:09Speaker 01

  They're not saying anything wrong. They're not acting wrong. But you get like a gut feeling of like, something's not right about this person. And we've all done it, where you don't trust your gut feeling because logically, the gut feeling just wasn't making any sense. But it's like, I should trust this person. They're good. They're not showing me that they're going to screw me over. And logically, it makes sense. And then later on down the road, you find out that there was something wrong with that person. They screw you over. They did something that, that, that, you know, was wrong or off-putting, or whatever it might be. And it's like, "Oh my God, I should have trusted my gut." Have you ever had that happen before? Like, "I should have trusted my gut with that person." Logically, doesn't seem to make sense. And your intuitive gut feeling, it ends up being correct later on down the road.

• 6:54Speaker 01

  And so sometimes we can't fully comprehend in the moment, like, why we feel a certain way about somebody or a situation, good or bad. But later on down the road, it makes a lot of sense. Like, for me, when I started this podcast, I had this feeling of like, "I feel like I gotta go all in on this thing. And I need to quit my job. And I need to go all in on the podcast. I need to go all in on my coaching business and grow it and grow myself." It didn't make sense logically, and a lot of people thought I was crazy, to quit my really high-paying job when I was 29 years old, to go and start a podcast when there was no money in podcasts. There wasn't the, there wasn't the Joe Rogan money in podcasting back in 2015. There wasn't the Call Her Daddy money back in 2015. There was like, no money.

• 7:39Speaker 01

  But I had this feeling of like, "I feel like this is what I'm supposed to do with my life." And I, I feel like I should at least follow it. I should at least give it a shot. And now, when you fast forward almost a decade, it's like, "Oh yeah." Looking backwards, it makes so much sense now. Now that we've had over 350 million downloads of the podcast, of course it makes sense. But when you're sitting there at a couple hundred thousand downloads, a couple months into it, you're like, "This doesn't make sense." And so I could have followed my brain and I could be working at a job that I still hate. And maybe I've just done the podcast on the side. But now it makes sense why that intuition was coming through. And it wasn't screaming at me. The fear was screaming at me. I was terrified to quit my job, to follow this thing. That was screaming at me.

• 8:24Speaker 01

  My intuition was like, "Hey, trust yourself. Trust this. This is the way it's supposed to go." And so it can be a good or bad feeling about somebody or a situation, but it can be a good or bad feeling about a circumstance, starting a podcast, growing your business, quitting your job, whatever it might be, getting out of a relationship, getting into a relationship. And we will be right back. I used to take a whole bunch of different supplements every day and honestly, it was a lot to keep track of. Since starting IM8, I've simplified my routine so much, I just have one daily drink and I'm done. The problem with supplements is you think you need a cabinet full of them to feel your best, but you don't. IM8 is the way to simplify your supplement routine once and for all. IM8's Daily Ultimate Essentials

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• 12:00Speaker 01

  kind of put some science to it. And research shows that our gut feeling, or the intuition that we have, is actually rooted in our physical bodies. It's not just out there in the ether somewhere in the universe. Oh my gosh, it's out there on Venus. No, it's not like that. It's actually rooted in a place that's called your ENS. It's the interic nervous system. And it's a network of neurons that's actually located in the walls of your digestive tract. Neurologists refer to the ENS as your gut and your second brain. And the reason why they call it this is because they've actually found that there's 500 million neurons inside of your gut. And so there's actually, they call it the second brain. And this was all

• 12:42Speaker 01

  published originally in the Journal of American Scientists in 1999 by Professor of, his name is Michael Sherhan, if you want to know. He's a professor of anatomy and cell biology of Columbia University. And he found that the gut functions as a separate and independent nervous system from your central nervous system. Which is kind of crazy to think about, right? You've got your central nervous system, and you've got the ENS, which is a separate and independent nervous system from the central nervous system. And that nervous system has over 500 million neurons, and they call it your second brain, and it's located in the walls of your digestive tract. And so this gut feeling, this gut right there, can actually influence our cognitive function and memory. If you want to go down a rabbit hole, check

• 13:26Speaker 01

  out how much the biology of your gut will influence your thoughts, influence your brain, and the bacteria in your gut will actually make you make decisions. If you really want to go down a rabbit hole, I just don't have time to cover it today. But your gut is this really complex system that's capable of influencing both your physiological and your psychological processes. And this communication between the ENS and the brain is what they call bidirectional, which means that your gut can influence your brain, and your brain can influence your gut. So they kind of go back and forth between the two. And this is why, and this is why it's really important, that you often experience physical sensations in your stomach when you're nervous, or anxious, or excited. So when you have butterflies

• 14:11Speaker 01

  in your stomach, that is actually your gut, your second brain, 500 million neurons that are actually communicating with you in some sort of way. And so we could be like, oh, I've got butterflies, that's so nice. And not pay attention to it. It could be like, oh, I've got butterflies, what's this trying to tell me? And so what's interesting about the gut is that the gut is also connected to the amygdala. And if you know anything about the brain, if you've heard me talk about it before, the amygdala is the main part of your brain that processes fear. And this part of the brain that processes emotions and also plays a really key role in your fight or flight response. This means that our gut feeling is not just some vague sense of uncertainty, or nervousness, or unease,

• 14:54Speaker 01

  but it's actually a real and physical response to a perceived threat or opportunity, which means that your body is always trying to talk to you at some point in time. The question is, are you listening to it? Are you taking a step back? Are you being quiet? Are you giving yourself a moment to process like, okay, how do I feel about this, this situation? How do I feel about this person? And actually, when we get a gut feeling about someone or something, we should pay attention to it. Because it may be our body's way of alerting us to a potential danger, or to a potential opportunity. And it's alerting us to it because our conscious mind hasn't registered it yet. And so it's really important to use

• 15:39Speaker 01

  your logic when making decisions, of course, your brain, but it's also really important to use your feelings and your emotions when making decisions. And studies have actually shown that people who trust their gut instincts often have a better opportunity of predicting outcomes and making more accurate judgments, even though they don't have all of the information. It's pretty wild to think about it. There's studies that have shown that people who trust their gut instincts are better able to predict outcomes and make accurate judgments. That's pretty crazy if you think about it. So there's studies that have been showing that if you trust their gut, they make better outcomes, they make better decisions, they make more accurate judgments, even though they don't have all the information, which is like, can

• 16:23Speaker 01

  your gut kind of see into the, is your body like Nostradamus? Is it kind of seeing into the future? And we should pay attention to it more? No, I want you to say like, this is not saying that we should just blindly follow our gut instincts and not have any analysis or any critical thinking. What I'm saying is, we should give both our brain and our body and our gut, and those feelings that come from our gut, the exact same weight as we would rational analysis and logical decision-making. And so we can use both of them to make decisions. I think both of them are important. And this is something we can train ourselves to get better at. So for me, it's not something that I meant to do over time, but as I started meditating more, as I started getting more quiet, as I started

• 17:07Speaker 01

  to trust myself a little bit more, what's interesting is that I actually started getting really good at making intuitive decisions. And even my wife, like if you ask her, she said it to me many times, she's like, yeah, like you have, you have a really strong gut feeling. And if, she's even said, if you get a really strong gut feeling about something, and it doesn't make sense, I will trust you with it because it's been shown over and over again in our relationship, like this gut feeling actually is something that kind of seems to predict the future. And we do that with each other, where she has a really strong gut feeling, where I'm like, hey, what does your gut say about this? What does your body say about this? And she's like, it feels like this. I'm like, okay, I can trust that. I can trust that. And we can see how it goes. So it's something that we can train ourselves to be better at. Our gut feelings can be honed, they can be refined through practice, through self-awareness, and by paying attention to how our body responds

• 17:52Speaker 01

  to different situations and different people. And so, even the other day, our, you know, like, we had something that happened with the baby, and Lauren started getting really worried. And I was like, hold on, let me check in real quick. Let me just, let me get quiet. And I got quiet. And I was like, I don't feel any fear. I don't feel, and I feel, I don't feel like there's anything that's going to come of this. And she was really worried about the situation, and I wasn't. And, you know, weeks down the road, and it being nothing. But I'd like checked in with my body, and I was like, is this something I really need to be hardcore and worry about? And obviously, I get it. Like, that sounds kind of weird and woo-woo-y. Like, this is, it wasn't like a massive safety thing for our child, that would have been different. But it was like, I feel like this is safe. I feel like this is okay. I feel like there's nothing wrong here. I feel like we're going to be okay.

• 18:36Speaker 01

  And we just learn to kind of trust that. If my body's like, there's something wrong, there's something wrong, then I'm going to trust that as well. And so we can learn over time, like this is something I've been trying to hone and trying to develop for, you know, 12 years at this point. We can learn to kind of recognize patterns and signals that, that kind of say, hey, you're safe, or hey, you're not safe. And Those signals may not be apparent to the conscious mind immediately. And so it's the exact same example I was giving at the beginning, which is like, you might have somebody that they come into your life, they seem like the perfect business partner. They seem like they're really good with money. It seems like they're really good with marketing. And they're like the perfect fit to your business. You know, like, I need to bring them on to my business partner. And then six years later down the road, they leave with all the money in the business.

• 19:21Speaker 01

  You're like, damn it, I knew it because I had that feeling when I first met him like, I feel like there's something wrong with them, but logically it didn't make any sense. It's the exact same thing for like what I was saying with the podcast. It didn't make any sense, but now it makes sense. And so what I really want you to understand is like, don't dismiss it as irrational or unscientific. Instead, like, try to really take a step back and consider it as a piece of information that can help you make better decisions. You can use your brain and your gut to make better decisions. And so remember that your gut feeling is not some random emotion or anything like that. It's a physical response that's deeply rooted in our bodies and our minds. Your mind is picking up on something.

• 20:00Speaker 01

  Your mind is getting something from somewhere. I don't know, from another person's body that's sending the saying, yes, this is good. Or from the other person's body saying, no, this is not good. And it's something's in resonance or it's not in resonance. And so the thing that's that's super important about it is that, like I said, a lot of time it doesn't make a lot of sense. But usually it makes sense later on down the road. Later on, it makes sense down the road more than anything else. And so the question I always get from people is how do I develop my intuition? How do I get better at finding my gut feeling? How do I get better at it? And I think the most important way to do it is to shut up, right? Like do less, be quiet more, give yourself some more space.

• 20:41Speaker 01

  Because if it if it is true, if your fears scream at you, but your intuition whispers, well, then I need to get myself to be quiet. I need to meditate more. I need to do more breath work. I need to give myself more moments of silence. I need to give myself 45 minutes in the morning to drink my coffee and stare outside and just start to think about life and see if maybe there's a little bit of a whisper that comes through, a little bit of an idea. My best ideas come when I'm doing nothing. That's why a lot of people's best ideas come when they're in the shower. Not even when they're on the toilet anymore, because people on their phones were on the toilet. But your best ideas come in the shower? Why? Because you're quiet, because you're sitting there. You don't have your phone with you. You're not talking to anybody. You're not at your computer. But it's like you give yourself those moments, those little gaps of space.

• 21:26Speaker 01

  And that's usually, that's where I believe those the in silence is where God or the universe or your higher self, whatever you want to call it, communicates with you through feelings, through a little bit of an idea that pops into your head. And so I want you to think about this, like, think about, like, really hone this in in your in your own brain, your own body. When's the time when you didn't listen to your gut feeling and it backfired? Can you think of one time? And then when's the time when you did listen to your gut feeling and you end up being, ended up being right? And so I want you to understand, like, there's a lot of science that's starting to show. And I believe over the next few years, there's going to be more and more and more science that's going to show this. But when you want to make a big decision, I think it's really important to check in with your logic, with your brain, and check in with your gut and your feelings and your emotions.

• 22:09Speaker 01

  And use both of those two to make the best possible decision that you can for yourself. So that's what I got for you for today's episode. If you love this episode, you'll definitely love being on my workshop that's coming up on the psychology of high performance. You can go to 2026workshop.com. I'm going to teach you how to break past your old fears, your old limiting beliefs and your old identities that are capping your success. So once again, go to 2026workshop.com to register for free. I will be live and I will see you there. And with that, I'm going to leave you the same way I leave you every single episode. Make it your mission to make somebody else's day better. I appreciate you and I hope that you have an amazing day.

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