Rebuild Faith in Your Intuition
Reawaken a drowned-out inner voice by cataloguing when it was right
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Time to result
- ~weeks to results
- Steps
- 5
- Confidence
- 63%
Sutcliffe frames authenticity and confidence as a feedback loop: the more you follow your inner impulses the more confidence you gain in them, and the less you follow them the more lost you become. For clients who feel disconnected from that inner voice, he gives an exercise: list the times in your life when you had an intuition, acted on it, and it worked out. People are surprised how long the list is, and it rebuilds the faith that following intuition requires. He pairs this with reflective practices like meditation, which he likens to staring into a fire until your own unconscious is reflected back, and with a habit of asking for signs before big decisions and then watching for them to appear.
Origin
An exercise Sutcliffe uses with clients: 'this happens with my clients all the time and I give them an exercise' to reconnect them with vindicated past intuitions.
Core principles
- 01Authenticity and confidence form a feedback loop that spirals up or down
- 02The more you follow your intuition the more confidence you have in it
- 03Everyone has a longer list of vindicated intuitions than they expect
- 04Rebuilding trust in intuition requires deliberate faith, not proof
- 05Reflective practices surface your own unconscious knowing
How to run it
- 1
Catalogue your vindicated intuitions
List concrete moments where you had an intuition, acted on it, and it worked out. Keep going; the list is usually longer than you expect.
Pro tip The length of the list is itself the intervention, showing you your instincts have a track record.
- 2
Choose faith over proof
Accept that following intuition requires a deep faith you cannot fully justify in advance. Use the list to lend that faith some evidence.
- 3
Adopt a reflective practice
Use meditation or a similar practice to reach a state where your own unconscious surfaces, the way staring into a fire long enough projects your inner knowing back at you.
- 4
Ask for signs on big decisions
When you have a strong intuition about a major move, ask for signs and then pay attention to what shows up over the following days.
Pro tip Sutcliffe used this when deciding to move to Mexico and found the three people he knew there came up in conversation with strangers that same week.
- 5
Stand alone and act
At the decision point, follow your own gut rather than asking everyone whether it's okay. Successful people, he argues, eventually stood alone and backed their own instinct.
Watch out Endlessly seeking others' reflection erodes your ability to hear your own voice.
In the wild
Contemplating a move to Mexico, a country whose language he doesn't speak, Sutcliffe felt the leap was enormous but the intuition was strong. So he did what he always does with a strong intuition: he asked for signs. The week after he asked, the three people he knew in Mexico all came up in separate conversations with strangers, to the point where he kept realising he had a mutual friend. He can't explain the mechanism, but treats the recurring signs as confirmation of an instinct he already had.
→ The signs gave him the faith to back a major, seemingly irrational life move.
Common mistakes
Polling everyone for approval
Constantly asking others whether a choice is okay drowns out your own inner knowing and erodes the confidence intuition needs.
Waiting for certainty before acting
Intuition requires faith you cannot prove in advance; demanding certainty first means you never follow it and the voice fades.
Is it for you?
Best for
People who have lived out of alignment for a long time and no longer know what authenticity feels like.
Not ideal for
High-stakes decisions that call for rigorous analysis rather than gut instinct alone.
From the transcript
“I give them an exercise and I have them list like things in their life where they had an intuition and they did it and…”
“when I have a strong intuition I ask for signs and almost always I get them”
“the more you do the more confidence you you have in it... the less you do it the more I think lost you become”
From the episode
How To Stop Betraying Yourself & Be More Authentic - David Sutcliffe - #888
David Sutcliffe