How To Tell Intuition from Trauma Response
No matter how logical we are, we act out of emotions. It'll change your life if you know what signals to listen to.
Welcome to Evergrowing! I am building a $1m coaching business. I write about what I learned as a coach, entrepreneur, and deep thinker of the human experience.
Before I understood triggers, I walked the world like a victim.
Many things activated me. It was exhausting to fight within myself.
The thing is, it isn’t common to learn about trauma as an adult. We don’t teach it in school. Then we put young adults into the workforce with little support for their mental health.
Here’s the summary of what I learned through years of therapy and training.
Trauma response is urgent and volatile. You will feel like you need to take action right away. You will change your mind.
Intuition is patient and constant. You will feel the same over a long period of time, and feel confident that you can take time.
Understanding these two things is one of the most important foundational skillsets of leadership - whether you’re a coach leading a session, or a leader managing a team.
If you are dysregulated and acting out of fear, it will spread to others around you.
Trauma Response
No matter how we were raised or where we came from, we all have trauma.
Some traumas are Big T trauma - abuse, deaths, war, and other life-altering events.
Some traumas are called Small T trauma - emotional neglect, microaggression, people-pleasing, burnout, and other everyday challenges.
If you have trauma, then you have trauma responses.
The responses are an intelligent way for your nervous system to protect yourself. It is trying to pick up anything that resembles the trauma that you went through.
And it’s trying to save your life.
When I first started working, I was sensitive to criticism. If someone sent me a harsh Slack message, it sent me in a negative spiral for hours or days.
I didn’t have the skills I have now. So I listened to that trauma response.
The trauma response told me: “Try harder. Be perfect. Make others happy above yourself.”
I kept on pushing myself over my limits.
I got myself into cycles and cycles of burnout.
When trauma responses are happening, what do you do?
I found it most effective to engage in physical activities based on somatic experiences. I rock my body or pat myself on the shoulders. Sometimes, I go for a workout or somatic yoga.
The nervous system speaks the language of the body, not the mind.
It’s often counterproductive to argue and make sense of the sporadic thoughts.
Once you feel grounded, you can access your intuition much clearer.
Intuition
Intuition is a core concept of my coaching.
Many leaders come to realize in sessions that they should’ve listened to their gut about a hire, a potential partner, or a specific decision.
In coaching, my main job is to show my clients that they already have all the answers. In a world of overwhelming information, we don’t need more how-tos.
We need to learn to access our internal compass.
Once we know our values and our gut instincts, we can then organize external information to move forward.
Otherwise, we risk creating a Frankenstein life built around others’ expectations.
Armed with an embodied understanding of what intuition feels like, leaders feel confident and calm.
One of my clients, Joseph, led the company from 2 to 150 employees as a founder. He feared he couldn’t scale with the company. So he let other leaders drive the decisions. He was fairly quiet in meetings.
Through our work, Joseph understood his intuition better. He got to see his strength in first-principle thinking. He saw how his intuition is actually a complex process of his life experience and 10 years of hands-on company-building lessons.
He debunked his limiting belief that leaders with pedigrees are more capable than others.
He spoke up more during leadership meetings. He was more bold in testing out his gut sense. With his help, the company revamped the operations team to support $50m more in revenue growth.
The best part? He started to have more fun because he felt more free to be himself.
Intuition is repetitive, calm, and clear.
If you know something you’ve been ignoring, it’ll find its way to your conscious mind over and over again.
How do you cultivate your sense of intuition?
Start documenting what you think and feel after meeting someone. In time, see how it pans out.
The Gray Area
Humans are rarely black and white, so let’s address the gray area.
Trauma response and intuition are sometimes blended.
You may get the “what” right, but the “how” can still feel frantic and urgent.
Either way, you won’t really know if you’re in the gray area until you’ve found a way to calm your nervous system down.
Once you are more grounded, check and see if you have clarity that has been constant for a long time.
If it is, then do something about it!
Conclusion
One thing that sets me apart from other coaches is my ability to hone in on intuition. Many clients tell me they get more clarity in one session with me than in months and years of exploring.
While I still get trauma responses, I became so much better at knowing my truth. Then, I can get a better sense of what intuition feels like in others.
Truth attracts truth.
We’re all craving for an accurate reflection of who we are, what we want, and what we’re capable of.
If you’re interested in this topic, here are some books I’d recommend:
The Myth of Normal
Widen The Window
🍏 About Sabrina Wang
I am a coach, founder, ex-product manager (Headspace), and believe it or not, ex-accountant. Nowadays I run Evergrowth Coaching where I partner with mission-driven entrepreneurs from coaches to Unicorn CEOs.
I get to combine my understanding of consciousness with my operator experience in my work today.
In the past 10 years, I studied under meditation teachers, energy workers, Reiki Masters, and many other wonderful disciplines.
Before starting Evergrowth Coaching, I was the Head of Coaching at Mochary Method, started by Matt Mochary (top CEO coach for Reddit, OpenAI, Coinbase....). I hired, trained, and managed a team that delivered 0 to 3m ARR in under a year. At Headspace for Work, I worked in product management building B2B SaaS products that reached 1 million users.
Want to talk about 1-1 coaching? Reply to this email to find out more.