Trust Your Spidey Sense
…or, stop gaslighting yourself.
CEOs and leaders come to me with stories that always start the same way:
“I knew it.”
They knew the person they hired wasn’t right, even in the interview.
They knew that a top employee was halfway out the door.
They knew the customer wasn’t going to renew, no matter what the Customer Success team said.
But they didn’t trust themselves.
They second-guessed.
They deferred to the group.
They didn’t want to come in “too hot” and get feedback about “too much micromanaging”
And then it played out exactly the way they feared.
Here’s the thing: that spidey sense? That gut feeling? It’s not magic.
It’s real. It’s earned. And it’s almost always right.
You’ve likey been in more meetings, seen more hiring cycles, watched more customer journeys. You’ve had the hard conversations, the good exits, the disastrous ones. You’ve heard every excuse and reason. You’ve been burned. You’ve been surprised. You’ve seen the patterns—and your brain has stored all of it.
That’s what gut instinct is.
Not some mystical sixth sense. It’s pattern recognition.
It’s a fast, subconscious sorting of all the data you’ve picked up over time—too complex or subtle to always articulate, but real nonetheless.
There’s academic backing for this, too. Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman, in Thinking, Fast and Slow, breaks down the two systems of thinking:
• System 1 is fast, intuitive, emotional.
• System 2 is slower, deliberate, logical.
We tend to elevate System 2—because it feels more rigorous. But when you’re experienced, System 1 becomes incredibly powerful. That fast gut check is often the result of hundreds of System 2 decisions baked into instinct.
Gary Klein, a cognitive psychologist who studied how firefighters and ER doctors make split-second decisions, calls it recognition-primed decision making. The most experienced people make the best calls in high-stakes moments—not because they stop and run the numbers, but because they’ve seen this before.
Your gut is not to be ignored. It’s not infallible, but it’s not woo-woo either.
It’s a competitive advantage.
Yes, you should ask questions.
Yes, you should listen to your team.
Yes, you should stay open to being wrong.
But don’t gaslight yourself.
When your spidey sense tingles, lean in. Name it. Pressure-test it. Talk about it. Don’t bury it because it makes other people uncomfortable.
That instinct may be the exact thing that saves you from the next bad hire, customer loss, or team departure.
You’ve earned your gut.
It’s time to trust it.
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P.S. If it made you think, feel, or nod your head—please share it with someone else who’d get value from it.
And if you’ve got thoughts or a story of your own, I’d love to hear it. Just hit reply.