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How do you tell intuition apart from fear when making a decision?

Q: How do you tell intuition apart from fear when making a decision?

Ask what you would choose without the outside pressure, then own whichever way you go. Jacqueline Le Saunier describes a decision taken out of fear that became the turning point for learning the difference.

Almost everyone has made a decision they later recognised as fear wearing the costume of good sense. The problem is that at the moment of choosing, the two feel identical.

Where the distinction came from

Jacqueline Le Saunier's account of learning the difference starts with a decision she made in her mid-twenties under heavy pressure from the people around her, and which she describes as taken out of fear rather than from her own sense of what was right. What she took from it was not a rule but a commitment: she did not want to be moved by outside pressure again. She has been direct that the clarity came at real personal cost.

The decision does the first bit of work

Committing to live by what is true for you sets processes in motion even before you are any good at it. She is emphatic that it did not make her consistent overnight. What changed was that she started asking, in ordinary moments: what am I feeling here, what is true for me here, what am I actually standing behind. For someone whose default was keeping everyone happy, that question was itself the practice.

The signal is quiet, the mind is loud

Her description of intuition is that it arrives in fine gradations, while everyday thinking is loud and habitual and gets trusted by default. She sought outside training specifically to get better at noticing subtler input rather than only the loudest voice in her head.

The test is ownership, not correctness

When you sense one direction and choose another, say so to yourself in those terms: I can feel which way this points, and I am deciding differently right now, because I am not ready or I do not have the capacity. That framing keeps the decision yours. The alternative, someone else made this impossible for me, hands away both the responsibility and, with it, the ability to revisit it later.

Two cautions. Fear can be information; a strong reluctance sometimes correctly identifies a bad situation, and treating every hesitation as a blockage to push through is its own error. And a decision made under pressure from people who love you is still made under pressure.

Key takeaways

Ask what you would choose if the outside pressure were absent.
Name the choice you actually make, including the cautious one.
Intuition arrives quietly; habitual thinking is louder and gets trusted by default.
Not every hesitation is a blockage to override.