I spent years confusing anxiety for intuition. They are not the same thing.
When my daughter was a toddler, I had to fly to California for a business trip. I was certain something terrible would happen if I left her. My plane would crash, she would choke on a grape, perhaps a meteor would fall on our house,
If a meteor were coming, I didn’t want it to happen while I was gone! I wanted us all to die together! (I know, insane.) The feeling was overwhelming, physical, completely convincing. I was pretty sure that anything I was feeling that strongly was coming from a place of deep, maternal intuition.
I forced myself to go, accepting our fate, thinking about how I would explain to people that my husband and baby were killed by a meteor falling on our house. (side note: this is not a normal level of anxiety, and if you relate to this, you should see a professional as I eventually did).
We were all fine. Nothing happened.
That feeling telling me not to go to California was not intuition; it was anxiety.
Years later, I was in a job that wasn’t working for me. They’d cut my pay while trying to raise another round. The CEO and I weren’t getting along, which was painful because he was a real mentor to me, and the relationship mattered a lot to me. I wanted to leave, but I was scared.
I made a common mistake: I confused fear with a signal. I thought, if I’m this scared to go, it must mean I’m not supposed to. If this were the right decision, it would feel easy.
The loud voice was predicting homelessness, professional exile, and a CEO who would never forgive me.
But when I finally got quiet, really quiet, the calm, persistent voice said: "You have to go. This is not working. You will land on your feet, you always do.”
One of those voices was anxiety. One was intuition. They were not saying the same thing. And only one of them was telling the truth.
(reminds me of the two wolves story…)
Here is what I want you to know if you are sitting with a hard decision right now: do not mistake the loud, insistent voice of anxiety for your intuition.
They might be pointing in the same direction or opposite directions.
That’s almost beside the point.
What matters is that they do not sound the same, and learning to hear the difference might be the most useful skill you ever develop as a leader.
Anxiety and intuition can agree with each other. They can both be pointing you toward the same answer.
But anxiety will get there by calling you an idiot and listing every way you could fail. Intuition will get there by saying, calmly and without drama, “This is not right for you.”
One is yelling. One is whispering It is very, very inconvenient and annoying that the quieter voice is the one you should be tuning into and the louder voice is the one you should be ignoring.
The louder the voice, the more it feels like conviction- this is true in a board room, on a debate stage, and within your own brain.
But true, deep, inner knowing is quieter than that.
I recently had a client who interviewed five development teams for a critical technical product. She talked to references, reviewed portfolios, and asked hard questions. And she kept coming back to the same offshore team, a group with deep expertise in health tech, which was exactly the space her product needed to live in. Her intuition said yes. The fit was real.
Her investor said no. He had a developer, someone he’d worked with before, someone he trusted and had recommended strongly. He put the screws on. Not subtly. This wasn’t a gentle suggestion from someone with more experience. It was pressure, and it came with the unspoken weight that investors carry when they’re not happy.
And so the anxiety moved in. If she went with the offshore team and it went sideways, the investor could say he told her so. But the individual developer hadn’t impressed her.
The product, the company, the relationship with the person holding the money, all of it was on the line.
She started second-guessing the offshore team. Finding small reasons to doubt what she’d seen clearly in the interviews. Wondering if maybe the investor’s instinct was worth more than her own research. The loud voice of anxiety had done its work.
When we talked about it, what became clear was that the anxiety wasn’t about the offshore team. She still believed in the team. The anxiety was about what it would mean to be wrong in front the investor, the power he held, and what he might do with it if she defied him and failed.
The intuition, once she could hear it, hadn’t changed. Five teams. Weeks of research. A clear answer. The quiet voice was still saying the same thing it had been saying all along.
This is how it works with the decisions that actually break people. Most leaders are reasonably good at the analytical ones.
What GTM motion should we use to drive more pipeline?
Should we move upmarket or stay in our current segment?
Do we need to hire a VP of Sales now or in six months?
These can be often be answered with data, with experience, with pattern recognition from people who have been there. You might get them wrong, but when you do, you can usually figure out why and adjust.
The decisions that summon that loud anxiety voice look more like:
Should I stay at this job or leave?
Do I confront my boss about something they really don’t want to hear?
Am I burned out or just in a hard season?
Do I actually want to be CEO anymore?
Should I fire the person I’ve been protecting?
These aren’t GTM questions. They’re identity questions. And identity questions have a way of summoning anxiety like nothing else.
When you get an analytical decision wrong, it’s a business problem. Recoverable, often instructive.
When you get an identity decision wrong, it doesn’t feel like a data point. It feels like evidence about who you are, whether you have what it takes, and whether your judgment can be trusted.
The stakes feel existential even when they aren’t, and anxiety moves into that space like it owns the place.
Anxiety wears the same clothes as intuition. It shows up in the body. It has a strong point of view. But there are two flavors of anxiety worth knowing, because the coaching move for each is different.
Anxiety rooted in identity threat. This is what my client was experiencing. The fear wasn’t really about the team she’d chosen. It was about what being wrong in front of her investor would mean about her in terms of her competence, judgment, and right to make the call. This kind of anxiety will dress itself up as discernment every time, because accepting it as fear would require sitting with a much harder question.
Anxiety rooted in old wiring. A previous decision that blew up. A boss who blindsided you. A moment when you trusted your read on something and got burned. Your nervous system catalogued that experience and now it fires the alarm whenever the situation rhymes, regardless of whether the current threat is real. This one is sneakier because there’s actual evidence behind it. Something did go wrong before. The anxiety feels historically justified. But the past situation and the present one are not the same, and your body doesn’t always know that.
Both are loud. Both will drown out the quieter signal if you let them.
I know this because I kept living it, even after I knew better.
When I was deciding whether to leave solid, stable W-2 work and go out on my own as a 1099 about 18 months ago, the anxiety was relentless.
I am a self-supporting single mom. One kid in college, another one about to start.
The voice was not subtle about what was at stake. It told me I would fail. That I would let my family down. That only someone reckless or naive would walk away from a stable income with that much riding on it. My anxiety had a spreadsheet. It had worst-case scenarios. It was very well-prepared.
And underneath all of that, quieter, more patient, unwilling to go away, was a different voice. It didn’t have a spreadsheet but it did have receipts: “you always make it work.” It just kept showing up. Even when I tried to talk myself out of it, even when I let the loud voice run its case, the quiet one was still there when I got still enough to hear it. It said: “you know how to do this. This is the right move.”
Here’s what has helped me discern anxiety from intuition. I sat this as an external processor.
The people who know you. I talked to people who had made a similar leap, founders and coaches and friends who had left stable things and built something on the other side. But the conversations that helped most weren’t the ones where people gave me advice. They were the ones where people asked me questions and let me think out loud. One friend had 100% confdence in me, but another thought I was completely out of my mind. Every time she said so, I felt more certain I wasn’t. I needed that voice too. My coach helped me get practical, to think about how to make the transition responsibly rather than just leap. Different people served different functions, and I needed all of them.
The writing. I journaled through it. Not structured reflection, just writing until something true came out. What surprised me was seeing in black and white just how unhappy I was. The anxiety had been so loud that I’d been treating the status quo as neutral. It wasn’t. The writing made that impossible to ignore.
The bread is still in the oven. My friend Valley and I have a saying we remind each other of when one of us is about to act too fast: the bread is still in the oven. Meaning, if you don’t know what to do, do nothing. Wait until you do. I used that as a kind of rule for myself. I would not act until I could hear something other than fear. It was the hardest part. The anxiety wanted movement, decision, resolution. Sitting still with it felt almost unbearable. But the quiet voice only speaks when you stop filling all the space with noise.
This isn’t exactly a framework, it’s a process that is mostly waiting and listening. I have use it across many decisions, work and personal both. It doesn’t make the anxiety go away. What it does is give the quieter signal a fighting chance.
So here is the question worth sitting with:
Think about the decision you are currently avoiding or circling or returning to without resolution. Ask yourself honestly whether what you are calling your gut feeling is something quiet and persistent, or something loud and urgent and full of arguments.
Anxiety is not the enemy. It is pointing at something real, usually something about identity or old pain or how much is on the line. But it is not the same thing as knowing. And if you have been waiting for the fear to go away before you can hear your intuition clearly, you might be waiting a long time.
The bread might still be in the oven.
Work with Me
I am accepting new GTM advisory clients and new executive coaching/work doula clients.
I also offer a free, hour-long work retreat every month. It’s a chance to pause and reflect through writing (just like I described above), and it works great as a tool to separate signal from noise and anxiety from intuition.
I am not currently taking new clients for fractional and interim marketing and GTM leadership roles, but if you’d like to get on my waiting list for summer 2026, I’d love to chat.
I spent five years wanting to leave corporate before I actually did. Looking back, I gave the risks of leaving far more scrutiny than the cost of staying, as though keeping my salary meant nothing else was being spent. My time, creative energy and freedom to make decisions barely featured in that calculation. I’m less convinced that a thought being quiet makes it trustworthy; I’d rather examine what each option asks me to give up. Having made the move, I can say that staying deserved just as much questioning as leaving.