My Year of Belief (Part 4 of 6)

How I Stopped Dismissing My Intuition and Started Living Like I'm Guided

Photo by Kirk Cameron on Unsplash

New here? Welcome! This is Part 4 of my 6-part manifesto series—the raw, unfiltered story behind why I created Unshakeable Coaching. If you're just joining, I'd suggest starting with [Part 1]. Each post builds on the last as I share how I dismantled a life built on "shoulds" and learned to trust myself instead.

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I used to think people who "followed their intuition" were either lucky or delusional. I was a facts-and-data woman. I trusted spreadsheets, the Scientific Method—not gut feelings. But after my breakdown on the bathroom floor, I was desperate enough to try anything—even the thing I'd spent my whole life dismissing.

After months of writing every day, getting honest with myself, and sitting through the discomfort of stillness, something began to shift. My logic wasn't gone—it was just no longer the only voice in the room.

I started to sense… something else.

A deeper intelligence. A knowing. A pull I couldn't explain with words.

It didn't speak in bullet points or spreadsheets. It didn't come with a five-step plan or a verified source.

It came with goosebumps. With synchronicities. With moments that made the hair on my arms stand up.

And for the first time since being a child, I let myself entertain the possibility:

What if my intuition isn't something to fix or override?

What if it's a guide? What if my body actually knows something my mind does not?

So when that whisper came—What if it's real?—I was desperate enough to listen.

At first, I only let myself consider the idea for a few seconds at a time. My inner skeptic would jump in almost immediately, voice rising in panic:

Oh please. You sound ridiculous. People will think you've lost it. What about your reputation? Your career? You'll lose all credibility. This is how smart women become irrelevant. Science, remember? Logic? The experts know these things—not your feelings.

The stakes felt enormous. I'd spent my entire life building an identity around being rational, competent, evidence-based. If I was wrong about this—if I started making decisions based on "feelings" and "signs"—I could lose everything I'd worked for. My colleagues would question my judgment. My family might worry I was having some kind of breakdown.

But the idea kept returning. Louder. Clearer.

So I made a deal with myself:

One year.

I would try—just for one year—to live as if it were real.

As if there were a deeper intelligence inside me. As if I was guided. As if I could trust the voice within. As if my imagination and emotions were not distractions, but clues.

I called it my Year of Belief.

The rules were simple: When faced with a decision, I would pause and ask myself what the gentle inner voice suggested, then follow it—even if it didn't make logical sense. I would pay attention to what made my body feel expanded versus contracted. I would treat coincidences as meaningful rather than dismissing them. I would ask for signs when I felt stuck, then stay open to receiving them.

I didn't have to be fully convinced. I just had to try.

And every time my logical mind protested, I'd say:

"Thank you for your input—but we're doing something different now."

I started asking myself:

Is this choice coming from fear—or from trust?

What would I do if I believed I was supported?

What if I acted like this whisper was sacred?

To my surprise, something opened.

I began seeing synchronicities everywhere. A friend would text me the exact phrase I'd just journaled. I'd think about a question and notice the same word or phrase appearing everywhere—on signs, in emails, in random conversations.

One evening, I was struggling with a decision about a new opportunity that felt risky but exciting. My logical mind was spiraling through endless pros and cons lists. Following my new practice, I asked for guidance, then tried to let it go.

Later that night, I was reading to my son before bed—a random book he'd picked from the library. I opened to a page I'd never noticed before, and there was a passage that spoke directly to my exact situation. My heart skipped as I read words that felt like they'd been written just for me. I'd stopped looking for the answer, and it had found me.

The old me would have called it coincidence. The new me paid attention.

At first, I thought maybe I was losing it.

But then I thought… maybe I was finally finding it.

My imagination returned like an old friend. I'd sit on the couch for 30 minutes and say, "Okay, imagination—take me wherever you want."

The most terrifying part wasn't the possibility that I was wrong—it was the possibility that I was right. If this voice was real, if I was actually guided, then I'd have to completely restructure how I moved through the world. I'd have to trust something I couldn't control or fully understand. For a recovering perfectionist, this felt like jumping off a cliff without a parachute.

But nothing could have prepared me for what happened next.

One day, something extraordinary happened.

I was sitting quietly, eyes closed, when I suddenly felt the presence of my grandfather—my mom's dad, who I had always been close to. I could smell the familiar scent of my grandparents' old home—Old Spice cologne mixed with coffee and the faint mustiness of well-worn books. I could feel him standing beside me, his hand resting gently on my shoulder with the same warm weight I remembered from childhood.

I felt this warm wave of love move through me.

In my mind, I heard him say:

"You don't need to be scared. It's okay to trust yourself. What you're doing is brave. You are making us so proud."

Tears welled up. Not just because of the message, but because of how real it felt—how my senses seemed to recognize something my mind couldn't quite compute.

It was beautiful. And it was terrifying.

I didn't tell anyone. I was afraid of sounding crazy. I wasn't even sure what I believed myself.

The next day, something told me to pull out an old scrapbook my mom had given me months earlier after their move from Texas to Louisiana. It had belonged to my grandfather. I hadn't looked at it yet, but I felt drawn to open it.

The book felt heavier than I expected as I lifted it from the shelf, its burgundy leather cover soft with age. I settled into my reading chair and opened it slowly, the binding creaking softly. The smell of old paper and faded ink filled the air.

I flipped through newspaper clippings, old photos, handwritten notes—some things that seemed meaningful, others I couldn't quite understand why he would save. Pictures of me and my cousins on family beach vacations, at school events, soccer games. He had saved all the newspaper clippings my sisters and I had been featured in for sports accomplishments. He had saved cards he'd received from my mom and aunts and uncles.

Page after page, I felt him with me in a way that I hadn't in years. I felt his eyes staring through the photos into my soul.

Toward the back of the yellowed scrapbook pages, I came to a church bulletin from Easter Sunday, 2001. My hands trembled slightly as I lifted the fragile paper.

The front of the bulletin was covered in flowers I had drawn and my name written in all kinds of fonts that I'd been testing at the time. It took me back to the days when we would all sit together in the pews. But on the back, something caught my eye.

As usual for Easter, the sermon that day had been about Jesus's resurrection—how he died and came back again. I must have been thinking about that in my 10-year-old mind when I scribbled:

"Did Jesus really die and come back?"

In his careful cursive, he had responded:

"I believe so."

Then I'd written:

"Will you come back when you die?"

He had scribbled back:

"Do you want me to?"

"Yes."

And in his unmistakable hand, right beneath it:

"Ok. Keep your eyes open—I'll find a way to say hi."

A smiley face beside it.

My breath caught. The bulletin slipped from my fingers and fluttered to the floor. I felt my knees go soft, my throat tightened, and tears spilled down my cheeks.

After everything that had just happened the day before—the feeling of his presence, the smell, the gentle words I heard in my mind—this felt like more than a coincidence.

It felt like a promise kept.

That moment changed me. Not in a fireworks-and-angels kind of way. But in the quiet, unshakable kind of way that leaves a mark on your soul.

It made me wonder:

How many moments like this had I missed over the years?

How many little winks from life had I written off as coincidence or imagination?

What if my intuition had been speaking all along—and I'd just forgotten how to listen?

I couldn't un-know what I now knew.

I couldn't keep pretending that the only real things in this world were the ones I could measure, monetize, or prove.

What if there's a kind of truth that lives in the body? In dreams? In imagination? In emotion?

What if we've dismissed ways of knowing that could actually bring us back to ourselves?

Ancient wisdom has always pointed here. But we modern achievers are often too busy, too skeptical, or too scared to listen.

Not me. Not anymore.

I started listening closer. Not just to intuition—but to frequency. To how things felt.

I paid attention to the tightness in my chest. The lightness in my belly. The buzzing in my hands when I spoke certain truths out loud.

My emotions became data. My imagination became sacred. My inner voice—the one I had spent years silencing—became a guide.

This was the shift that changed everything.

It was no longer just about slowing down. It was about tuning in. It was about learning to trust what I couldn't always explain.

And slowly, piece by piece, belief began to bloom. Not because someone told me to. Not because I found it in a book. But because I started paying attention to what was already alive inside me.

I was no longer the woman who needed external proof to trust herself. I had become someone who could hold mystery and meaning in the same breath, who could follow wisdom that didn't come with citations or credentials.

This Year of Belief had taught me the most important lesson of my life: the answers I'd been searching for weren't out there waiting to be discovered.

They were in me all along, waiting to be remembered.

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