It’s Time to Believe in Your Conscience: A Step-by-Step Assessment with Listening
How often do you have a moment of deep insight before deciding not to listen to yourself?
It can be as simple as telling yourself you don’t need that umbrella for the day, even though you had already picked it up on the way out the door.
Or saying, “I will deal with that tomorrow”, even though a voice in your head is warning you just to get it done because you have a sudden feeling that your plans will be interrupted?
Why do you stop yourself from taking that advice?
The best leaders stand out in what they do because they know how to connect with their conscience and trust that it knows what’s best for them.
Whether these thoughts come from the experiences you gained throughout the years or insights that come from your level of awareness—your conscience is something to nurture and build a stronger relationship with, even if your mind is refusing to listen to the advice and deciding that it knows best.
If you’ve found yourself held back by fear in your life, it’s likely that such fears are also restricting you from listening to your conscience.
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And this can be incredibly destructive to a leader. Once you stop believing in your conscience, you stop listening to it. When you stop listening, you cut yourself off from your collected life experiences and knowledge and leave yourself exposed to the possibility of making mistakes and errors.
Many people, leaders included, hold themselves back from listening to their conscience without even knowing it. And because they’ve cut themselves off from it, they don’t see the value in following their conscience when it finally breaks through the walls, they have built around it.
The first thing you must do to overcome this problem is to start to listen.
To do this, you must give yourself permission to experiment.
Experiment
Here is a fun experiment to get you back in touch with your conscience and learn to trust it again:
Break Down the Barriers and Open Yourself Up to Your Conscience
The First Week
- For the next five to seven days, listen and follow everything your conscience says.
- Write down your findings to ‘prove’ whether your conscience was right or not.
- What happened when you listened? Did you avoid catastrophes? Did your conscience guide you in the right direction?
- At the end of the week, count how many times your conscience has spoken up. Did you find you heard it more when you were actively listening to it? How many times was it right?
- Keep all your notes for comparison after the end of Week 2.
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The Second Week
- For the next five to seven days, listen to your conscience and actively IGNORE what it tells you (within reason).
- Write down what happened afterward.
- Did your conscience tell you to drive another route home?
- What happened when you went the same way?
- Did you hit traffic and were late for a meeting?
- Mark down how many times you have heard your conscience this week. Was it more than last week?
- Did you find that you stopped listening to your conscience before making decisions?
- Did you find yourself uncomfortable when you actively ignored your conscience? How many times did you listen to it anyway, even though you were supposed to be ignoring it?
- Did you trust your conscience more than you did before you started the experiment?
This experiment is a terrific way to open yourself up to your conscience again and actively listen for it, even if we’ve covered it up with inhibition.
When coaching, I work to help clients overcome those challenges effortlessly and get in touch with their conscience again as a way to help them move forward and transform their lives.
What I’ve learned throughout my work with leaders is that taking the time to first listen to that conscience for a period of time creates a new habit. In the second week of the experiment, you begin to recognize how vital that voice is, how to trust that conscience when it speaks up, and how uncomfortable it can feel when you avoid listening to it and work against your own intuition.
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If you gave yourself permission to experiment and opened yourself up to your conscience again, I’d love to hear about your experiences and your results. Please come back and leave a comment or send a direct message to [email protected] to share your story with me!
If you find this experiment helpful, please feel free to share it with others.