Over the years I have noticed something interesting about many of the women who eventually find their way to work with me.

They are thoughtful women. Intelligent. Perceptive. Often deeply intuitive in their own way — even though they might never think of themselves as “intuitive”.

And yet, somewhere along the path of their life, many of them have gradually stopped trusting themselves as much as they once did.

Not completely of course. The inner knowing is still there. It never truly disappears.

But it becomes hidden… or forgotten about and they begin to believe that they don’t know what to do next.

Sometimes this happens because of life experience — often beginning as far back as childhood — but in any case we all accumulate moments where our judgement has been questioned, dismissed or overridden by the people around us and unconsciously that begins to change us.

Over time those experiences can slowly erode the confidence we once had in our own perceptions and inner knowing.

For other people, the move away from listening to our inner voice happens more gradually, as louder external voices begin to take up more space in our thoughts.

We begin listening more and more to external voices — experts, teachers, coaches, spiritual authorities — all offering their own interpretations of the meaning of life, how it should be lived and what we should be doing next.

Or sometimes we turn to friends and family and ask them what they think we should do. The difficulty with that is that very often they either have no experience of the thing we’re asking about, or they have their own vested interest in what happens next, and that can cloud any guidance they offer.

At first it can feel helpful to ask others. Learning from different perspectives is part of how we expand our understanding of the world.

But there often comes a point where something begins to shift.

Instead of using those perspectives as reference points, people start relying on them.

They begin looking outside themselves for answers that once came naturally from within.

They ask other people what they should do, what their purpose might be, what their next step should be… and gradually, almost without noticing it, the quiet inner voice that once guided them becomes harder to hear.

Just yesterday somebody messaged me and asked if I had “any recommendations of who they could listen to who has the highest truth information”!

And in that moment I was reminded again how easily we begin looking outside ourselves for something that was never meant to come from outside in the first place.

Years ago I noticed that people would often come to me wanting a psychic reading so that I could tell them what to do next.

But I could never quite work that way, because it always felt to me that doing so would take their power away.

Instead, I preferred to guide them to find the answers within themselves.

Despite people saying that they “didn’t know what to do” or that they had “lost their inner voice”, I found that those who were willing to explore that with me were always able to reconnect with themselves again.

Their inner voice had never been lost at all.

It had simply been drowned out by external noise.

And without fail, once that noise begins to fade, the knowing that has always been there begins to return.  Often it returns even more strongly than before.

This inner voice is not something that only some of us have.  We all carry it within us.

It is something we must allow ourselves to remember

And sometimes remembering the magnificence of who we are is the beginning of everything.