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Your next level growth is hiding in the body cues you’ve been trained to override.

As a busy entrepreneur, can you think of a time when something went sideways either in your personal life or in your business? Did you even stop to notice what you felt right before it happened: 

• The tightness in your chest before a bad decision? 
• That tiny flicker of “this doesn’t feel right” shows up, and in the very next breath, you steamroll past it. 
• The hunched shoulders you selectively ignored before saying yes to the wrong client. 
• What about the exhaustion you explain away as “just a busy season?”

That was your body’s highway communication system giving you data. And you, me, and all of us have been trained to delete it before it ever reaches our decision-making.

The Gut-Brain Axis: Your Second Brain

Most high performers were never taught that the gut and brain are in constant, two-way conversation. The enteric nervous system, the 500 million neurons lining your digestive tract, processes information independently of your conscious mind. It responds to threat, opportunity, and misalignment before your prefrontal cortex, your CEO, has even begun to analyze the situation.

Your gut isn’t guessing. Your brain is processing.

Herein lies the problem: hustle culture has spent years teaching you that real leaders make decisions from logic, data, willpower, and grit. Your Inner Critic reinforced it. “Push through.” “Be rational.” “Don’t be soft.”

Positive Intelligence

In Positive Intelligence, these patterns are called saboteurs: well-practiced mental habits, well-worn wiring patterns that hijack your best thinking. The Inner Critic doesn’t just live in your head; it also trains you to override your body’s wisdom in very specific ways, depending on how you’re wired.

How Each Archetype Overrides It

Your Inner Critic doesn’t override your gut instincts by accident. It does it in a pattern specific to how you’re wired:

• The Controller overrides gut signals by demanding more data. If it can’t be measured, it doesn’t count. Discomfort becomes a problem to be managed, not a message to be heard.
• The Perfectionist overrides it through analysis paralysis. The body says, “something’s off” and the Perfectionist responds by looking for the perfect answer until the moment passes.
• The Hyper-Achiever overrides it through momentum. There’s no time to pause when there’s a goal in front of you. The body’s signals get filed under “I’ll deal with that later.” Later never comes.
• The Hyper-Vigilant overrides it by constantly scanning for what could go wrong. The body is already buzzing with anxiety, so any new cue of “something’s off” gets dismissed as “just me being too sensitive again.”

What It’s Actually Costing You

Think back to a decision you regret. Not a small one. A real one, a partnership that went sideways, a hire that didn’t fit, a pivot that drained you.

Was there a moment before you committed when something felt off?

Most people can answer yes. The body flagged it. The Inner Critic, also known as the Judge, overruled it. The mind rationalized the decision in clean, logical language.

“Your instincts are neuroscience data. High performers are simply trained to override them.”

Building the Skill Back

The good news: this isn’t a personality flaw. It’s a trained response. Which means it can be untrained.

Interoception

This ability to sense what’s happening inside your body, your heartbeat, your breath, the tightness in your chest, the tension in your jaw has a name: interoception. 

It’s your nervous system’s built-in awareness channel, and research links it directly to emotional regulation, decision-making, and resilience. Most high performers have not lost it. They’ve just spent years training themselves to ignore it.

Somatic Inner Critic Work

Re-learning to read your gut-brain signals is the foundation of what I call Somatic Inner Critic Work. It’s not about slowing down your ambition. It’s about adding the layer of intelligence you’ve been missing, the one that was there the whole time.

Slow Learner

I wish I could tell you I learned this from a textbook. I didn’t. I learned it by repeatedly overcommitting my time. Unfortunately, I’m a slow learner.

One of many of my hard lesson came when I was president of the Arizona Chapter of the National Speakers Association. I kept volunteering for “just one more” board task, “just one more” committee to oversee, “just one more: new initiative to spearhead, and “just one more” project that really needed my leadership.

My body had opinions about all of it. It started with a whisper, progressed to a shout, and then proceeded to shut down. I ignored all the signs.

Instead of listening, one of my Judges, the Hyper-Achiever, convinced me that: “These are great opportunities.” “This is what contributing looks like.” “I’ll rest when I’m dead.”

On paper, everything looked successful. My body, on the other hand, felt like a dumpster fire. I was exhausted, not present with the people I love, less creative, and constantly chasing a feeling of “caught up” that never arrived.

The red flags were there the whole time. My body was giving me data, but I had trained myself to ignore it. I wasn’t letting that data into my decisions.

The result? My body started turning on itself. I developed a mysterious, debilitating chronic illness that I battled for five long years.

That’s why I’m asking you to start noticing your own cues this week. You don’t have to wait until you’re completely burned out to start trusting what your body is telling you. You can start with the next “yes” or “no” sitting in front of you right now.

📝 This Week’s Challenge

Before your next high-stakes decision or meeting, take 60 seconds:

• Place one hand on your chest, one on your belly. Just notice.
• Ask: What is my body telling me right now? Tension? Expansion? Resistance? Ease?
• Don’t analyze the answer. Don’t override it. Just name it. That’s body literacy. That’s Somatic Wisdom. That’s where this work begins.

The most aligned leaders I know didn’t learn to trust their gut by accident. They built the skill deliberately. And now it’s your turn.

Next Week:

Now that you’ve started noticing your body’s signals, it’s time to understand why you’ve been overriding them. Next week, we go inside the Gut-Brain Axis; the two-way conversation happening between your body and your brain that your Inner Critic has been intercepting. We’ll look at how the Controller, the Perfectionist, and the Hyper-Achiever are each wired to shut it down, and what it costs you when they do. 

It’s the neuroscience behind what you felt this week. Don’t miss it.

Ready to go deeper?

Book a complimentary discovery call, and let’s map what’s quietly running your business.

→ ritahudgens@gmail.com