Over the last few weeks, I’ve made some mistakes. Fortunately, none of these mistakes were serious, but they did make my life more difficult. In most of these cases, something just didn’t feel right to me and I ignored my gut. Had I just gone with my instincts, I would have avoided some problems.
My gut has always been guiding me, and as I look back, I can’t think of time when going with my instincts turned out to be a bad choice. I never put much thought into it until recently and now I’m starting to realize that men also possess intuition.
When I was looking to buy my first house, I was so desperate to get out of my apartment that I was willing to buy almost anything. My wife and I found a small house in an okay neighborhood at the right price, so we put an offer on it. A little history about the situation: we had spent over a year searching for a house with each successive house costing more and meeting our needs less — real estate was a seller’s market and most houses went for well over their asking price. So when this particular house (which we had seen before and was the best in recent memory) came back on the market, we jumped on it.
I felt a sinking feeling in my stomach after we made the offer. I started to see all the problems with the house: how it was too small and there wasn’t room to entertain, let alone start a family. I felt like we had just thrown our deposit away because I knew there was no way we’d like the house. I could hardly sleep all night because I knew the house wasn’t the right one for us, so I decided to call the real estate agent the following morning to pull the offer and see if she could recover our deposit. She ended up calling me first to tell us we didn’t get the house — I was so relieved.
The house we ended up getting felt completely different. I liked the house and neighborhood just from driving up to it. I could barely sleep the night after we put in the offer on this house as well — but this time it was because I was nervous we wouldn’t get it. When we got the call that we got it, it felt right and I was excited. We had a lot of great years in that house before it was time to move on.
So try listening to your gut, there’s often a good reason why it tries to warn us.
James Feudo owns the Boston Web Design Agency JVF Solutions and loves blogging about personal development and communication in his spare time.