When Good Advice Sends You in the Wrong Direction [E81]

[00:00:00] when you override what you think, when you stop trusting yourself, when you stop trusting your intuition, you lose trust in yourself, not in the short term. You lose trust in yourself in the long term. you're gonna be frustrated, and then you're gonna end up in the same place three years later, and you're gonna wonder why you did it. Welcome back to Clear Signal. At the beginning of the last episode, I read off a bit of praise, and I received that testimonial on LinkedIn the same day that I recorded the episode you are about to hear. When you listen to what she said and what I'm about to say here, it'll blow your mind. And that, my friends, is alignment.

This is what it looks like. Speaking of alignment, I recently was a guest on a podcast known as Tapped In Conversations on Substack. You have heard from Danielle before. She is episode 50, and she'll be on this platform. The link to Substack is below. It's a fabulous conversation.

It's video. It will be up here eventually. It'll be [00:01:00] clipped everywhere eventually. And what's really great is I was quickly reviewing the clips she sent me, and one of them stopped me in my tracks. It was titled The Cost of Not Trusting Your Vision. And that's haunting because that is actually what I'm talking about here, not in such a dramatic way, but it's a story that I alluded to on her podcast, which is why I think AI came up with that title.

And it's a story you're gonna hear before the end of 2026, through an interview that somebody did on this platform. She interviewed me. So this episode was about trusting yourself. And then Ariel's comment and that title of that reel and the upcoming conversation you're gonna hear with somebody named Laurie,

that is [00:02:00] the cost of not trusting yourself

hopefully you enjoyed the last episode about AEO, a very different feel than the episode prior to that when we talked about shedding and transformation. That shedding and transformation episode was talking about society, and that's what we're doing in business as well. I'm just talking about it in a way that nobody else is talking about it, or not even seeing it yet. Very important. And part of it is the energetic soup that we're swimming in. Why? Because last episode I talked about the spectrum of business. There is the artist, what lights me up, and then there's a what makes sense, the rules. This is how you gotta do it. And there's very few things that are cut and dry, but a couple of them are accounting and search. I can't stand search engine optimization. I know it's important. I will be hiring someone to deal with the website. I have a website for this. There is a reason why. Podcasts being found through a player is a very [00:03:00] specific game that I don't wanna play, so if I don't wanna play that game, I gotta play a different game.

The game of podcasting is changing. YouTube, Substack, all of that, that has changed the game. Even AEO has changed the game, it made me think about something which is the opposite of fact, which is a different kind of signal.

We talked about outbound signal last time, outbound signal from a positioning perspective, but specifically the signal you are sending so the robot can send people to you in theory. In theory. Being found doesn't mean that you've made yourself stand out, but you are found, yes What about your internal signal?

What about the stuff that we've talked about in the first part of the podcast this notion of intuition, this notion of gut, this notion of sacral. I've said on this platform that the sacral response in Human Design, which is something you don't need to understand, and if you wanna understand it, you can listen to episodes in season one.

If you don't understand it, it's this notion of what lights you up, what energizes you, what are you building, and are you on track? [00:04:00] And that your body is really gonna talk to you and tell you that, but you don't wanna listen to it because it goes against sunken cost, it goes against what you've already invested, it goes against what is rational, and it goes against what people have told you.

Now, if you're attracted to me you've already listened to your sacral response because a lot of people have hired me when they didn't know who I was. They're just like, "Uh, I think that you're it."

That might not be the case in the future when I market this, but at the time, I didn't have marketing, so that had to be all signal That's sacral. And I've said, and this is my hypothesis, that intuition is different. Intuition is longer term. Intuition is 10 steps ahead of you, 20 steps ahead of you. Next year, the move you make today, that you don't have the checkbox that you're doing the right thing, but it knows you better than you know yourself. It knows your long-term plan better than you do That's a theory. That's my hypothesis. That's how I live my life. So how do those two go together? Well, the sacral what feels draining, what feels like a no.

You don't know why, but it feels like a no. [00:05:00] And then the intuition is this, I'm gonna do this thing. It may not be an action you take, it may be a place you go to, it may be somebody you call, it may be an investment you do. It's not quite an outlay of energy per se, but you can see in business how the two go together.

And you also can see why it's very important to decouple them, which I did a lot in season one for a reason the thing about the sacral response is it's very subtle. Some people are wicked tuned in. They're like, "I get a yes. I feel bubbly. I feel energized. I'm just gonna go." And for me, it's not that.

For me, I just start doing the thing, particularly with content. But when it comes to taking actions or building things, I don't have this immediate yes or this immediate no that is conscious to me.

I just kinda do the thing But since we're talking about SEO, and since we're talking about body signal, and since we're talking about the opposite of fact and logic and linear things, one of the things that I did a couple of [00:06:00] months ago for this podcast is I changed all the titles to be in line with best practice SEO.

Just to test it, and also because that's what someone said I should do, and titles are easy to change, so doing that is no skin off my nose. You might lose a little bit in the Google juice, but you're not doing something you can't undo, and you're not investing money in that.

So I did it, and my downloads spiked. That's a good thing, right? In theory. Downloads mean nothing in a podcast, depending on your goals. Being found in SEO or AEO means nothing, depending on your goals. But it checks a box, and people can say, "I did this." So I did it, and guess what happened? I felt angry. I felt whatever you'd call frustrated is.

And the reason I share that is because it was a very immediate no, a very immediate no. I'm emphasizing it, because that's rare for me. I can't remember another time I felt that. [00:07:00] You have intuitive nudges of, "Mm, I don't really like this place. I'm gonna get out of here. I don't feel safe here. I'm not really gonna go to the store today.

I'm gonna go tomorrow," and you look in the news, and there was a pileup, or the flight was delayed anyway, or whatever. That's intuition, but that body feeling of like, "No, absolutely not," that's rare for me, and it was noticeable and palpable, and I wanted to share it because it's relevant to this podcast, and it's a bit of a payoff on some of the things I shared in season one.

So I went back and changed it. And I decided I'm playing a different game with my SEO, because just because I'm not playing the SEO game on the podcast players doesn't mean I can't play an SEO in the website. You got more nuance. You got more things to work with. No different than a 30-second reel on social media has its place, but it's no substitute for someone who can get on a mic saying something of value.

They're both useful for different reasons, and you have to decide in that what game are you playing and what is going to leverage what you want to build. What I decided in that [00:08:00] moment is that even though SEO is telling me that I should follow what it was telling me to do, my body was saying fuck to the no, and I listened to that.

Why? Because there's something about what I'm building that my body knows the answer to that I don't have the answer to right now. I have to trust it. I have to trust it's telling me, "You're going the wrong direction And I have to go in the face of logic that says that that is stubborn, or you're not following best practices, or you don't know what you're doing And that's what we have to do sometimes.

We have to take other people's advice, we have to take best practices, we have to take industry whatever, and then we have to decide what works for us. That's a theoretical statement that people are gonna say, I wanna give you a visceral real example [00:09:00] that's true, and recent, and plays off some of the stuff I did.

That's why I built the foundation of season one and season two, so I could reference that. What is a foundation? If you don't build it, you gotta rebuild it. That's what I do in Founder Architecture. That's what I do in all my offers. That's why I set people up to win for life.

It is bedrock. Because without Founder Architecture, without building a business that is a representation of you, and positioning is part of that, signal is part of that your platforms are part of that, your customer targeting is part of that. You still need strategy, but you're building a strategy off of a foundational architecture.

You're building a strategy of something that's not a foundational architecture, it's not gonna work. It's not gonna work. You're gonna come back, you're gonna waste money, you're gonna spin your wheels, you're gonna be frustrated, and then you're gonna end up in the same place three years later, and you're gonna wonder why you did it.

Then you're not gonna trust yourself, then you're gonna run out of money. It's gonna be frustrating And that's what no one's gonna tell you because it's not sexy, because nobody drives by a house and says, "Wow, that's a pretty foundation." [00:10:00] No, they look at the paint job. They look at the $10 wreath from Target on the door that looks pretty But that foundation is built like shit. There are gonna be structural cracks, there's gonna be leaks, there's gonna be problems, and it's gonna be a pain in the butt And that is real talk. When it comes to me and what I'm building, I do know that when I'm going the wrong direction, I listen And it's not gonna be a logical statement.

It's not gonna be a rational thought. It's not gonna make sense to other people. And why have I talked about trusting yourself? Why have I talked about intuition? Why have I talked about Human Design? Why have I talked about understanding the soup you're swimming in? Because when you understand where you're influenced, when you understand conditioning, you can say, "Okay, you know what?

That's great, and I'm gonna continue to do this." And what's the worst? I change my mind later? I decide in six months I wanna play that game, and I change my titles? Okay. But Just like the AI [00:11:00] conversation, the mind likes things that look tidy and neat. You change your titles, you get a bunch of downloads.

You're like, "Oh, I'm doing a good job. Check. I'm gonna go with this. Check." And guess what? You're building the wrong thing. You've rationalized it yourself, and you overrode what you thought, when you override what you think, when you stop trusting yourself, when you stop trusting your intuition, you lose trust in yourself, not in the short term.

You lose trust in yourself in the long term. But when you gain trust in yourself because you listen to yourself, you don't just gain trust in yourself for this decision, you gain trust in yourself for every decision

And that's what an entrepreneur needs. That's what a founder needs. That's what someone building something different needs because it's not gonna be one decision. . It's a decision tomorrow. It's somebody else telling you something in two years.

And you build that muscle where you trust yourself so that when you do ask for advice, when you do hire people, when you do get guidance, it's from an educated place. It's from a grounded place. It's from a place of [00:12:00] self-trust. In theory then, you're building something.

True, and you're gonna make mistakes. You're gonna waste money. You're gonna fuck up. You're gonna waste time. You're gonna go in circles. It's part of the process. But if you can say, "I trust myself because I did this, and it was the best decision at the time, and looking back, I probably shouldn't have done it," but if it's your decision, you're gonna feel okay about it.

You're gonna look at it as a lesson. You're gonna look at it as a teacher. I said treat your business like a game. Treat your business like a teacher. You're gonna be like, "Oh, yeah. Okay. Well, I learned. Okay. Well, oops, I guess I gotta go back down to level two of the video game because level three I thought I should do this."

But if you listen to other people and you override that self-trust, that's gonna hurt you. That's gonna make you doubt yourself. That's gonna erode at your confidence in ways that are sinister because you're not gonna understand it at the time. It's under the hood

i'm not saying SEO isn't important. But the way I was doing [00:13:00] it and the signal I was sending out by doing it wasn't it. And the only thing that told me it wasn't it was my body. Not fact, not best practice, not a pat on the back, not a checkbox, not knowledge that I'm going the right way, not a gold star, my body. That's it. That's it. And that's what you gotta start becoming comfortable with as we start to navigate these uncertain waters of 2027 and beyond in business, learning to trust yourself, learning to trust intuition, navigating that signal in a sea of noise, in a sea of information, so that when you take in- information, it's the right information for you. I'll see you on the next one

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