Have you ever agonized over making a decision only to find yourself afterwards agonizing whether you made the right choice? I’ve found a fail proof compass to point me in the right direction, a golden nugget of wisdom from best-selling author Tim Ferriss in a guest appearance at one of my mastermind gatherings: Everything is either a ‘No’ or a ‘Hell, Yes!’
Wow. That separates the chaff from the wheat better than a grain thresher and brings welcome clarity to any situation.
This connects exquisitely to the awareness I’ve recently shared about our bodies. If we tune out our heads and tune into our hearts, the deep intuition that every one of us possesses, we can feel in our very bodies whether a choice is aligned before the mind even processes the decision at hand. We almost immediately start feeling ‘Hell, Yes!’ or ‘No’ from internalization of the possible choices while the brain still is busy synthesizing information.
I learned in my yoga teacher training that if we take longer than nine seconds to make a decision, we’ve handed the reins over from our intuition to our rational mind. This is when we literally start getting into our head, which perpetuates the subjective quandary of “good vs. bad” and paralyzes us from making a decision, let alone the best one.
I crave those less-than-nine-second moments, when I’m seemingly struck with clarity that I refer to as Divine intervention. The intervention actually comes from within, from within each of us as a divine being walking this Earth who innately knows what is best for ourselves.
It might seem as though we don’t even have to think in such moments because we aren’t thinking; we’re acting from the intuition with a loud and clear, ‘Hell, Yes!’ or ‘No’ that doesn’t require much thought.
There have been countless times when a gut feeling told me to do one thing, and against my own wisdom, I took the opposite path only to lament it later. That gut feeling was my body talking to me, telling me what to do in not so many words. I just didn’t have the awareness to listen and take heed.
From here on out, my mantra is any choice that isn’t an automatic ‘Hell, Yes!’ is a ‘No.’ It’s as beautifully simplistic as that.
I want my life to be one big ‘Hell, Yes!’ Whether it’s people with whom I spend time, the mentors with whom I study and grow, a new dress that caught my eye or what to eat for dinner, I’m taking cue from how I feel in my infinitely wise body and following her lead on ‘Hell, Yes!’ or ‘No.’
Life is much too precious to be filled with people, experiences or things that don’t give us more life. Hell, Yes, to that!
