You made the decision three weeks ago. Not in any meeting. Not at your desk. Your body made it before your mind caught up.
There is a study that coaches rarely mention. Damasio's Iowa Gambling Task. Participants chose cards from four decks, two safe and two risky. Skin conductance readings showed physiological stress responses to the risky decks by around card ten. The participants could not consciously articulate which decks were risky until around card eighty.
Seventy cards of body knowing, before the conscious mind caught up. Most of us have not taken this seriously enough.
The sensation you keep brushing aside. The tightness that shows up every time a certain name appears in your calendar. The restlessness that will not quiet when you are honest with yourself about a direction you keep saying is fine. These are not distractions from your thinking.
They are your thinking. The faster, older, more integrated form of it. We have been trained to treat the body as something to manage around decision making. Breathwork for the anxiety. Sleep for the fog. Exercise for the energy. As if the body is support staff for the real intelligence upstairs. It is not.
The body processes information the analytical mind cannot yet name. By the time your conscious reasoning produces a neat pros and cons list, your nervous system has already registered an answer in the tension you cannot quite explain.
The question worth sitting with this week is not what should I do. It is this. What has my body already been telling me, that I have been too busy to hear?
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