Is It Your Intuition or Just Anxiety?

This episode kicks off In Between, a four-part miniseries about the quiet, unglamorous moments that shape entrepreneurs far more than the highlight reel ever does. I sat down with Vincent Brathwaite, a longtime friend and fellow founder, to work through a question that trips up nearly everyone I coach: how do you know if what you're feeling is inner wisdom or emotional sabotage wearing its clothes? This post pulls from that conversation and adds a few things we didn't get to on the mic. Note: this post may have affiliate links and we donate 100% of those funds to non-profits and a children's group home🫶🏾 

Anxiety rarely announces itself. It doesn't come in shouting that it's here to ruin your plans. Most of the time it shows up sounding like the smartest, calmest voice in the room, the one telling you to slow down, gather more information, be responsible. Before I built a coaching practice, I trained as a counselor, and the American Counseling Code of Ethics spends real time on exactly this problem: how easily good judgment gets impersonated. Intuition vs anxiety isn't a semantic argument. It's the question underneath almost every stalled decision I've watched a founder make, and it's worth taking apart slowly instead of hoping you'll just know the difference when it matters.

The Lies Anxiety Tells When It Wants to Sound Wise

Vincent broke this down into two categories on the call: preparedness and time. Both get dressed up as caution when they're actually avoidance.

The preparedness lies sound reasonable on their own. You need to know more before you act. If you're not fully ready, you'll fail. Someone else out there is already more qualified, so why bother. Each one borrows the language of prudence, but none of them hold up. Growth happens in motion, not in the waiting room of endless research, and nobody starts a business at full readiness. I'd add one more to Vincent's list, because I hear it constantly in my group coaching cohorts: the conviction that the market is already too crowded, that it's been done. Walk down the water aisle at any grocery store. Dozens of brands are selling the same clear liquid in a bottle, and somehow there's still room for one more, because the thing that's never been done before is you doing it, in your voice, with your specific history behind it.

The time lies hit differently, especially the older you get. You're running out of time. It sounds like motivation. It's actually theft, the kind that convinces you rest is laziness and reflection is delay. Vincent put it plainly: intuition doesn't panic, it speaks in peace, and peace can't be rushed. Anxiety and scarcity are close cousins. They're both obsessed with whether there's enough, enough time, enough readiness, enough proof, and they'll keep the meter running long after the question stopped being useful.

How to Tell the Difference Between Intuition and Anxiety

There's a pattern underneath most of these lies, and once you can name it, it gets easier to catch in real time. Anxiety usually shows up as fear wearing the mask of logic. It tells you asking for feedback is smart when what you're actually doing is outsourcing your own confidence to whoever you talked to last. It tells you following your gut is naive and playing it safe is wisdom, when nothing meaningful has ever been built by the people who kept playing it safe.

So when one of these voices pipes up, don't take it at face value. Ask yourself three things. Is this voice keeping me safe, or is it keeping me small? Is this true inner knowing, or is this my nervous system trying to avoid discomfort at any cost? And what would it feel like to listen past the fear, to whatever's underneath it? Those questions won't resolve every gray area on the spot, but they slow the moment down enough for the real answer to surface, which is often the whole point.

When I Said Yes From the Wrong Place

I want to tell you about a decision I made that looked right from the outside and felt wrong the entire time I was making it. I said yes to a partnership. It was a big one, shiny, promising all the things that are supposed to matter. And underneath the yes, I knew. I said yes because I didn't want to seem difficult, because I didn't want to look uncollaborative or unambitious, because turning it down felt like a risk to my reputation instead of a decision I actually got to make. A few months in, it was a mess. Misaligned values, bad communication, my energy going toward managing the fallout instead of doing work I actually loved.

Here's what I've learned about moments like that, especially as I've gotten older: the goal was never avoiding them entirely. Nobody gets a spotless track record. The goal is how fast I can get honest about what happened and start the repair. When a decision like that lands, you get a choice. You can spiral into self-blame, or you can name it and course-correct. I choose the second one now. It's still uncomfortable every time, but I've done enough spiraling in my life to know exactly where that road goes, and it isn't anywhere useful.

There's a rule I try to hold myself to that I think about constantly: be careful how you talk to yourself, because you're the one listening. The way we let our own minds speak to us is often something we'd never accept from another person. A bad decision doesn't make you a bad leader. It makes you a human one.

Trusting Yourself Isn't Reckless. It's a Leadership Asset.

Vincent said something on this call that I haven't stopped thinking about since we recorded it. He wished someone had told him early on that trusting yourself isn't reckless, that it's a superpower. That gut feeling isn't some mystical extra sense. It's the direct product of your lived experience, your values, your specific vantage point on the world, and no one else has access to exactly that combination. Trusting it doesn't mean you're closed off to feedback or immune to being wrong. It means you stop abandoning yourself every time uncertainty shows up.

I'd add a correction to something I believed for a long time, which is that trusting myself was supposed to feel like certainty. I thought there'd be a point where I'd know, beyond any doubt, that a move was right. When that certainty never showed up and I felt fear or doubt instead, I assumed it meant I wasn't ready, that I needed another course, another book, more proof before I could act. What I understand now is that trusting yourself was never about the absence of doubt. It's about choosing to listen to your own voice while the doubt is still loud, deciding to move forward anyway. That won't always feel peaceful. Sometimes it feels like building the plane on the way down, which is a much worse feeling than building it on the way up, and it's still not a reason to stay on the ground.

The Toolbox: What Actually Helps You Filter the Noise

None of this is about willing yourself into perfect discernment every time. It's about having a few real tools you reach for when the noise gets loud, and neither Vincent nor I are talking about anything fancy.

Vincent doesn't make high-stakes, emotional decisions on the clock. If something feels big and personal, he waits, at minimum a few hours, sometimes longer, and he tells the people involved that's exactly what he's doing. He also leans on mentors, the kind who ask better questions instead of handing over easy answers, people whose job isn't to tell him what to do but to reflect his own values back to him when his emotions have blurred them. And he talks to himself out loud, recording voice memos, because naming the real fear underneath an urgent feeling is what lets him lead from intention instead of reaction. His other rituals are simpler than they sound: standing in his backyard with no phone and no music, just birds and the sound of trees. Walking with no destination, letting his body move the energy around instead of his head. Morning prayer, because it reminds him he's not carrying leadership alone. Laughter, which his aunt used to say was the difference between a day lived and a day wasted.

My own toolbox looks different, because I feel things at a volume that doesn't respond well to a two-hour cooldown. I have to sleep on it, genuinely, and deal with the decision fresh in the morning. I have two best friends I've known for sixteen and seventeen years who know exactly how I sabotage myself and call it out before I can talk myself into something. I have a therapist I've worked with long enough that I'm down to sessions every three or four weeks now, which felt impossible to imagine back in early 2023, the hardest season of my life, when I needed her every single week just to function. And I have a coach whose whole job is getting curious with me about what's underneath the urgency instead of just cheering me toward the goal.

There isn't a universal answer here. What creates space between the emotion and the action is going to look different depending on who you are. Some of you need to run ten miles. I will never be one of those people. Figure out what actually works for your nervous system and give yourself permission to use it, even if it looks nothing like what worked for the person who taught it to you.

We recorded this conversation on my birthday. June 30th, which has always been my version of a reflection day, sitting right in the middle of the year the way it does. If you're in a season of deep confusion right now, unsure what to trust, I don't think the answer is untangling the whole thing before you move. Clarity isn't something that shows up before you act. It's what meets you once you're already moving. So don't try to solve the whole path today. Ask yourself what's one small, honest next step, not the perfect one, not the forever one, just the next one, and let that be enough for now.

Your way forward isn't waiting on you to think harder. It's waiting on you to try.

If you're circling a decision like this right now and the thing missing isn't clarity but momentum, From Stuck to Starting is a free five-part email course built for exactly that gap between feeling the pull and actually acting on it. Start it here.

Originally aired as Episode 23 on the Choose Courage Inc. podcast.