About ten years ago somebody walked onto a trading floor in the City and asked the traders to do something faintly ridiculous.
Sit still. Hands in your lap.
Don’t touch your chest. Don’t take your pulse.
Now count your own heartbeats.
They were given intervals of between twenty-five and fifty seconds. Afterwards, their count was checked against what their heart had actually been doing.
It’s harder than it sounds. Give it thirty seconds sometime and see how you get on.
Two things came out of it.
The traders were better at it than people who don’t trade.
And the ones who were best at it tended to make more money, and had lasted longer in the markets.
Whatever else they had — models, nerve, luck — they could feel what their own bodies were doing.
Now, there is a version of this that can sound rather vague.
Listen to your body.
There’s nothing wrong with it. Nobody argues with it either — which is rather the problem. It goes straight past, and we carry on exactly as we were.
I’m not asking you to become a different sort of person, and I’m not going to suggest you breathe.
What I’m after is narrower, and I think more interesting.
You have spent a long time getting very good at overriding what you feel.
That isn’t a flaw. It’s the skill.
It’s how you got through the year you got through. How you sat in the meeting you didn’t want to be in. Tired — override. Uneasy about the hire — check the numbers again. Something off about the deal — where’s the evidence?
It works. It has worked for decades. It’s a good part of why people bring you things.
Nobody itemises what it costs.
I’ll itemise one of mine.
Eighteen years ago I said yes to a mastermind group. I’d wanted to be in one for a long time. Two facilitators — and one of them was a woman I’d followed for years. She was most of the reason I wanted to be there.
Then the other one asked for a call, and told me that the woman I’d joined for had pulled out.
Entirely upfront about it. No shuffling.
And the feeling turned up. Solar plexus, the way it always does, before there’s anything to point at.
So I did what I always do. I went and got more information. I emailed. I asked more questions. The answers were fine, and I decided it wasn’t a good enough reason.
I joined. It cost a great deal of money. It was a disappointment more or less from the start.
The feeling arrived first. It was right. I treated it as the noise.
That was the last time I paid quite that much to learn something.
I pay attention now. Not because I’ve gone mystical about it — because the feeling was right and the reasoning was wrong, and that has happened often enough since to stop being a coincidence.
It shows up in smaller things too.
Somebody asks you what’s new.
I’ve never much liked that question. Something answers straight away — nothing — and then I spend the next twenty seconds assembling a version that sounds more like news.
The first answer took no time at all. The second one I built.
The trading study doesn’t prove that what arrives first is right. It does make bodily information harder to write off as noise.
There’s nothing to be done about any of this this week. But you might stop throwing it away.
When did you last let something you felt outrank something you’d worked out?
Rosaleen
P.S. May I ask you a favour?
If you’ve ever sat with that decision — the job, the business, the thing you built, and whether to stay in it or stop — I’d like your eyes on something.
It’s a short set of questions written for exactly that position. What I’d particularly like to know is whether I’ve asked the right ones.
Nothing is decided by taking it.
Go here: realradiantlife.co.uk/3am