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“Please see below,” the email from the recruiter read.

It was a last-minute request from a potential employer to reschedule my interview. I was annoyed. This was the second time they had rescheduled and subsequently wanted to change it again.

My intuition gnawed at me, “They don’t respect your time.”

I told the recruiter there was no need to reschedule as I was no longer interested in the job.

He reminded me of the benefits the position offered and the ways in which it was superior to my current job. He reiterated that this was the last meeting before receiving an offer.

I looked at my current work situation. It was a tough environment. There was a lot of gossip. No personal space. No structure to the job description. I thought of the months and months of interviews I had endured to no avail. I was tired of changing into suits in the back of taxi cabs during lunch.

I relented. “Okay, let’s reschedule.”

After all, anything was better than my current job, right? Despite my intuition speaking loud and clear during every phase of the process, I went ahead with the meeting.

Soon, an offer did ensue. I asked everyone under the sun what they thought I should do. I felt I didn’t know. Or rather, I closed off to my intuition’s clear messages because I wanted to get out of my current job situation.

Looking back on this, I can see my intuition rolling its eyes at me. I knew what to do from the first meeting. And then from the second meeting, when the interviewers talked the whole time and I peeped about three words.

“You will never be heard,” my intuition told me.

“They loved you!” The recruiter said to me afterward. I laughed to myself. What exactly did they love? The sound of their own voices, I guess. I was reminded again when I made time for a third and fourth meeting.

Frankly, I didn’t have enough excuses to continue leaving the office to go to these meetings, but they seemed to expect I should be able to. By the fifth rescheduled meeting, my intuition pointed out, “This is how everything will be—an unnecessarily long process.”

And so it was.

I ignored the knocking of my intuition and stepped into the role. For the duration of my tenure, I was repeatedly shown that they felt my time was not as valuable as theirs. There was more than one instance when I felt I had to raise my voice to get a word in. Things continuously would take 7, 10, or 100 steps, when they could have been completed in one or two.

Many times, I asked myself why I didn’t listen to my inner voice from the start. I knew it wasn’t right from the first moment. I felt annoyed with myself for choosing the gratification of leaving an undesirable situation, without regard for the fact I was moving to an even less desirable one.

We learn these lessons early in life to varying degrees, don’t we? Eat all of the candy now, suffer from a stomachache later, so to speak.

I berated myself with questions. “Why did you choose this?” More importantly, “What are you going to do to fix it?”

I tried quieting my mind so I could hear the answers. I began actively working to connect with my intuition and figure out the ever-elusive next step.

Answers come to us all of the time, but we don’t always hear them. This was clearly displayed by blatantly ignoring my gut, in hopes of finding relief by moving to a new role rather than the one I was in.

Limiting beliefs tend to steal the show if you give them the opportunity.

You might not find something better—was one of many limiting beliefs in this case. Those untrue and patterned beliefs can be loud. It takes moving them out of the way and visualizing how we want to live our lives to overpower them.

We can ask ourselves if the situation at hand truly fits into the vision we see. This job didn’t fit, obviously.

Our intuition knows if it does, after all.

Despite a continued effort to find the answers I searched for, I still felt lost trying to figure out how to move to a better work situation.

On the last day of a life-changing trip, I sat in a café in Mexico. The backdrop of enlightened experience, delicious coffee, and huevos rancheros was a nice contrast to what I feeling. But I was confused over what steps to take next in order to improve my work life.

I felt perplexed. Did I really not know what to do?

Minutes later, between clanks of silverware and the animated chatter of patrons enjoying breakfast, I heard the sound of my own voice resigning. It was as if someone (or something) else took control of my vocal cords.

I felt relieved.

Later when I was back at the hotel, the memory of past experiences and limiting beliefs came to rain on my parade. What are you doing? You should have had a plan before you did that! Do you have enough money to make this choice? The devil on my shoulder talked loud and incessantly until it finally ceased, and I heard nothing.

I collected my things to prepare for the final activity of my trip. My heartbeat felt pronounced.

Eventually, nervous pitter-patter wore me out and I sat on the edge of the bed. After some moments of stillness (and a panicked email to my therapist), I heard it.

“Have faith,” my intuition said.

I remembered, at no point did my intuition ever tell me to stay at that job—but it did tell me to go many times.

So, I have faith that I took the next best step in my work life. Because that’s what my intuition told me to do.

This time, I did not ignore it.

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