There is a voice that has been speaking to you all year long. You know exactly the one I mean.
It is not the voice of your boss or your family or the culture telling you what you should want. It is softer than all of that. It is the voice that waits for you when the world finally lets you be still. The one that whispers, "This is not right for me. I need something different. Pay attention to this."
It is the inner nudge you have probably been brushing aside. Most of us are experts at this. We push it away because it asks for something our thinking mind is not prepared to say yes to. Or because it invites a shift that might disappoint someone. Or because it reaches toward a dream so delicate we hardly dare to name it.
So we lower its volume. We keep busy. We stack reasons on top of reasons about why this moment is not the right one. Slowly the voice learns to whisper in an even quieter way. Yet here is the thing I have noticed. It does not disappear. It only softens.
This is why December matters. When the world slows. When the chaos of the year finally exhales. When the noise fades long enough for what is true to rise again. Not because the voice changed but because everything around it paused.
I think of this often because I spent years unable to hear my own voice. I was absorbed by what I thought I was meant to pursue. Success in tennis coaching. Recognition. Approval. The path that looked clean and admirable from the outside.
I was so tuned to the expectations around me that when my own voice finally spoke I barely recognized it. It felt like rebellion. Like recklessness. Like I was turning my back on something special. Until I understood the only thing I was abandoning was myself.
The inner nudge speaks through feeling long before it forms words. It shows itself through the way your body responds when someone mentions a possibility that matters to you. It is the daydream you circle back to again and again. It is the thing you would gladly do for free. The thing that erases time while you do it. The ache that arrives when you are not.
The inner nudge rarely arrives like a storm. It is not thunder or lightning. It is a compass. A quiet insistence. This way. Here. Look again.
Sadly most of us have been trained not to trust it.
Instead we trust what we can count. What is safe. What has already proved itself. We trust our thinking over our feeling. Yet the inner nudge is rooted in feeling. It is intuition. It is the part of you that knows long before your mind has the words to explain or even understand.
Consider that trusting your intuitive self is like remembering a language you once knew but were taught to silence.
A woman I work with spent fifteen years in a career that looked ideal on paper. Salary. Status. Security. Yet every time she sat in a meeting she felt a pull toward another way of engaging with people. Deeper. More personal. More real. She kept pressing the feeling away.
That is not realistic. That is not practical. Just be grateful for what you have.
She was so focused on managing her practical life that she stopped hearing what her real life was trying to say.
Then one winter day in the quiet she heard it again. Not louder. Simply heard. It was then that she realized she had listened to everyone else for so long that she forgot she had a voice of her own. The question of trusting your intuitive self is not really a question. It is an invitation. It asks:
- Am I willing to listen to myself?
- Am I willing to honor what I know even when I cannot explain it?
- Am I willing to trust the wisdom of my own body my own feeling, my own knowing, even when it challenges what I thought I should want?
Consider that the voice you hear in the quiet is offering you something you need. Consider that the coming year may be the one in which you finally listen. Consider that every meaningful shift in your life began with a moment when something inside you spoke and you found the courage to say yes.
Consider that your intuitive self is not trying to derail you. It is trying to guide you. To lead you toward what is true for you not what is true for someone else.
Therefore the question is not, is this voice correct?
Pablo Giacopelli
