Why I Stopped Following my Gut 4 Years Ago

First of all: Happy New Year!

image: twosmiles.com

If you need help with new year resolutions, I'll be glad to help. For a fee of course. I plan to do less unpaid activities this year.

So back to my post: Why I stopped following my gut feeling for 4 years now.

There was a year I took the whole gut feeling to an extreme. Rather than reason and act, I would be waiting for a gut feeling. Hmm, what seat should I sit in. What cloth does my gut feeling want me to wear. I feel it in my spirit. My mind does not deceive me. I felt something was wrong as I walked in.

Then one day, I thought hard about it all. Sometimes, my gut has been completely right and occasionally, amazingly right. So right I would want it to pick a wife for me. Then there had been times it was wrong, dead wrong. So wrong I felt ashamed afterwards. But whenever I made a decision based solely on my own critical reasoning (with prayers too), I never feel ashamed of the outcome -- wrong or right. In fact, when I'm wrong I end up learning a verifiable and repeatable way to not be wrong again in a similar matter. But with my gut feeling, I never learn anything. It's same old -- be quiet and try to figure out what my gut is saying.

Now I strictly ignore my gut feeling, even if it's screaming and I could feel the danger it's warning me about. And that's one of my weaknesses. I don't know how to follow a path partially. I will either follow my gut all the time or none of the time. I don't know how to do the sometimes magic (it's almost like magic to me). I can't say one is better than the other, though I feel the sometimes should be the best option. So every time I'm faced with a decision and I can hear my gut saying something, I simply think of the best course of action to take and take it. Regardless of it's correlation to the suggestion by my gut feeling. 

I stopped following my gut because it sometimes make me look stupid. I prefer following the voice of my reasoning; I can always defend it. I know it's not always right. But it's more like a choice between to imperfects; I go with the less imperfect.

Happy New Year once again!