Your Gut Already Knows.

You Just Keep Overruling It.

Hey friend!

There’s a number that sits in my craw.

$50,000.

That’s what it cost me — the first time — to learn one of the most important lessons of my business life.

I created a business called Sercy. It was a good business, genuinely. But it was the wrong business model for us at that stage. I had that low-grade hum of this isn’t right running in the background the whole time. But I pushed through it. I rationalized. I built. I invested. And eventually, I learned the hard way what my gut had been trying to tell me from the beginning.

It wasn’t the last time I’d have to learn that lesson.

Fast forward a few years. Two separate business opportunities landed on the table at RSG Sales. Both were outside our core business model. Both made my stomach drop the second I heard them. I knew — not thought, not suspected, knew — that they were wrong moves. I had the scar tissue. I had the receipts. I had literally already made these mistakes.

Josh felt the polar opposite in every cell of his body.

And so, against my better judgment — against my gut, against my experience, against that very loud voice in my head that was practically screaming — I let it go. Both times.

If I’m being really honest? I didn’t trust myself because I didn’t want Josh to think I was on a power trip.

There it is. That’s the real reason. Not because I genuinely thought I was wrong. Not because his instincts were more valid than mine. But because I was so busy managing his perception of me that I overruled the most experienced voice in the room — my own.

The first opportunity exploded. Massively. $50K gone, plus months of Josh’s time and the team’s bandwidth poured into something that was never going to work. A disaster by any honest measure.

The second one? Josh started down the same road — but something shifted. Instead of pushing through the red flags, he stopped. Pulled back. Called it.

He’d learned it the hard way, but he’d learned it.

We joke about it now. We each have our $50K mistakes.

But here’s what I keep coming back to: I knew. Both times. And instead of holding the line, I shrank. Not because I lacked confidence — but because I’d been conditioned to make sure I never came across as too much. Too controlling. Too powerful. We do this constantly. We sit in meetings and don’t say the thing we’re thinking. We green-light projects our gut is waving a red flag at. We defer, we hedge, we “let’s wait and see.” We spend entire careers second-guessing the most reliable data source we have access to — ourselves — because somewhere along the way we learned that a woman who trusts herself too loudly makes people uncomfortable.

And yet.

Think about the last time your kid was sick and you knew something was off before a single doctor confirmed it. Think about the time you insisted on a second opinion. The time you kept pushing because your instincts wouldn’t let you rest. As a mother, we don’t apologize for that. We don’t preface it with “I could be wrong, but...” We act on it. We protect our kids with a certainty we rarely extend to ourselves.

Why is it that we trust our gut completely when it comes to the people we love most — and then abandon it the second we walk into a conference room?

Your intuition isn’t less valid at work. It’s actually more informed there. It’s drawing on years of experience, pattern recognition, and hard-won wisdom that no spreadsheet can fully capture. When your gut says this isn’t right — that’s not fear talking. That’s data.

And the next time you go quiet because you’re worried about how you’ll come across? I need you to ask yourself whose $50,000 that silence is going to cost.

Stop waiting for everyone else to agree before you believe what you already know.

Your gut has been right this whole time. It’s just been waiting for you to catch up.

xx, Heather