Your gut keeps the score
A knowing that arrives before logic does.
We’ve all had moments where something needs deciding—a job, a conversation, a direction. And before your mind has assembled its case, something in you has already leaned one way. You can’t cite a source for it. You can’t put it in a spreadsheet. But it’s there, and it’s clear. We call it the gut. It draws from everything: your past experiences, pattern recognition, emotional memory, and signals picked up without you consciously registering them.
“Consider your intuition to be a valid argument.”
The lesson comes from Marlou Cornelissen, 32, from the Netherlands. But it could have come from any of the four people in this week’s newsletter. Each of them, from different parts of the world, arrived at the same understanding through their own experience. Here’s what they found.
Lasse Leponiemi is 37 and from Finland. He creates things for a living, always chasing a need or a gap he sees in the world. The hardest part, he found, isn’t coming up with ideas. It’s knowing whose voice to follow when everyone has an opinion.
“I’m an ideas person, and I’m always driven to create something that serves a need or demand I see around me. It’s important to seek advice, but at the end of the day, you have to make up your own mind. If you start to follow someone else’s values, it’s easy to start going back and forth all the time. That’s why it’s essential to create your own compass to guide your decision-making. With a clear compass, decision-making becomes much easier. You can quickly determine if an opportunity is in the right direction or not.”
Rossana Burgos, popularly known as Mama Bee, speaks four languages. Her husband had a well-established career in market research. When they started making videos online, the people around them had a clear verdict: you’ve lost your minds, you’re wasting your time. They kept going anyway.
“What I’ve learned in forty-three years of life is don’t worry about what people think. Do not base your life on the opinion of others, because when we started making videos, everyone laughed at us. Everyone thought we were crazy. Everyone said we were wasting our time making silly little videos and asked why are you doing this. My husband was very successful in market research. I speak four languages and university educated. We started posting funny videos online, and everyone is like, have you lost your mind? They are not laughing anymore. So ignore everyone’s opinion. Always trust your gut and trust your heart because I truly believe that we all have intuition.”
And then there’s Marlou. She grew up in a home where “just a feeling” was treated as a reason worth hearing. Her parents listened, whether or not she had evidence. Most of us didn’t have that. She thinks it changed everything.
“I’ve always had a strong intuition and I am super grateful that, growing up, my parents always listened to me regardless of whether my arguments were evidence-based or ‘just a feeling’. Because I have trained this muscle from a young age, my intuition has become much stronger over the years and I have learnt to trust it more. Today, it helps me in my leadership as well as in the most important role I carry; motherhood.”
A compass. A missed camp. A comment section full of doubt. A childhood home where feelings were taken seriously. Three very different lives, and the same thread running through all of them.
Think about the last time your gut spoke before your mind caught up. Did you listen? And if you didn’t, what held you back? There’s probably something worth knowing in that answer.
Leaning towards our inner voice,
Team FUEL