Read the full transcript of Jo Simpson’s talk titled “The Courage To Trust Yourself…Listen To The Nudges” at TEDxUniversityofEdinburgh 2016 conference.
Listen to the audio version here:
TRANSCRIPT:
The Decision You’re Not Making
JO SIMPSON: What decision are you not making? Yes. That one. A few months ago, I spoke at a leadership conference and I opened my keynote with that question. And there was one of those artists at the back of the room.
You know the ones that capture everything the speaker says and make some lovely drawings of it. Great portrait they did of me as well. And I did as most speakers would do and I thought, this is brilliant straight on Facebook. Isn’t this cool? Within ten minutes, my phone rang.
And it was one of my dearest friends and also one of the bluntest. “So what decision are you not making, Joe?” Don’t you just love it when you get your own words back at you? And something popped out. Something that I’ve been nudged on for a while and perhaps wasn’t listening to.
And I’ll share that with you later. But we get these nudges. These nudges that might say, do this, do that, slow down, take action. Sometimes we listen and sometimes we don’t. But if we don’t, they won’t go away.
They keep coming and coming until we perhaps get a slap around the face and you get a bigger nudge. So maybe something drastic happens or a course of action that you are on gets thwarted. And if we don’t listen to the slaps around the face, then the steamrollers of life come together. You may have experienced these yourself or certainly know of somebody else. Either a redundancy, a health scare, a relationship breakdown.
And at the time, it’s horrible. It’s messy. It’s dark. And then people say, “That was the best thing that ever happened to me because it led to me meeting the love of my life or me changing how I was working because I was doing too much.” Why does it take a steamroller to get us to change?
What if we were to listen to those nudges and really be proactive and act on them when we get nudged? Because there is a part of you, call it your intuition, your inner voice, your gut instinct, but there is a part of you that always knows what to do in any given circumstance. I want to share with you today ways in how we can learn to trust that and encourage you to act on your nudges.
Listening to Your Intuition
I visit my hairdresser once, maybe twice a month, and Alan had been moving house, it seemed like forever. But every time I went in, he was like, “Joe, we’ve got another problem with the house move.”
So he and his partner had found the house of their dreams. “You won’t believe this now,” he said. “The people that we’re buying from have only gone and delayed it because they don’t want to move out. We haven’t even got anything in writing. We haven’t even got an exchange date.”
“It keeps moving. I’m getting really frustrated.” And I said to him, “Alan, we’ve been having this conversation for quite a while now. Do you really think it’s the right house?” “Well, funny you should say that.”
“I’ve got a feeling that perhaps not, but it’s beautiful.” And this is where logic defies what we’re being told inside. He said, “You know what? I’m going to do something. I’m going to put a stake in the ground and I’m going to tell the other party that if we cannot get an exchange date by the middle of December, it’s off.”
Now the conviction and the clarity with which he made that decision, I believe, brought changes about because they didn’t move into that dream home. By him making that decision, the other party said, “Well, we can’t possibly do that. It’s going to be another three, four months.” So he called it off. He had the courage to call it off.
The next day, he had a phone call from an estate agent he’d been in touch with a year ago. The next day. “Are you still looking for a house?” she said. “Funny that. Yes, we are,” he replied. “I have one I think you might like,” she said. They went to view it. I was in there a week or so ago. They moved in within four weeks.
Everything flowed from start to finish. And he’s very happy, and this turns out to actually be their dream home. Now what if he’d gone for the other one? We will never know. And we will never know what will happen if we’d have taken the other decision.
But that one that comes from within, be it within your gut, your heart, your head, that’s the one that we need to listen to you. There’s a part of you that’s bigger than you. There’s a part of you that knows the answers. And a real way to harness that, to trust on it, and to act on it is through your core values. Because your core values are at the heart of every decision you ever make, every relationship you encounter, and every goal you achieve, whether you’re consciously aware of it or not.
Understanding Your Core Values
So when we make these things that drive us more conscious, we can work with them. So let’s just have a bit of fun with it. This is Richmond Park, and I was facilitating a workshop not far from there, a year or so ago. I went for an early morning walk. This is about seven in the morning.
It was summer. And as I walked, I got to the point in the woods, in the words of the famous poem by Robert Frost, where the two paths diverged. One was wider and one was a little bit narrower, and I thought, got about half an hour.
Which one shall I take? I took the path on the left, and the path on the left to me says mystery.
It says adventure. It says unknown. It says exploration. Some of you might be thinking, why on earth would you take that path when you’d only got half an hour? And you may take the other one, the one on the right, that’s wide open, clear direction, feels a bit more secure perhaps.
But we’re all different. And whatever it is for you when you look at those two paths, what is it that comes up for you? Because there’s a clue in there to what it is that drives you. So now when I get those feelings of, okay, do I act on these nudges? I check-in with my core values.
Now there were three very powerful questions that we can ask ourselves to highlight what our values are. And the first one is what’s important to you. It stands to reason that if something’s important to you, it’s going to be a value. So what is important to you? Might be family.
It might be your friends. It might be team. It might be freedom, security, adventure, making a difference. So what is it that’s important to you? Number two, what do you enjoy? What do you really enjoy? There’s a clue in there to the things that drive you. Me, I love skiing. I’m not the world’s best skier. I love skiing.
But what I love more than skiing is being in the mountains, being in the snow. Now what does that give me? It gives me energy. It gives me connection, fun, love. I generally go with my partner. And I make a difference to my skiing mainly. These are my core values. The third question, what frustrates you? We need to do a little bit of a flip on this. But what really frustrates you?
For me, defeat. Don’t lie to me. There’ll be trouble. And the opposite of deceit for me is truth. And it’s a very high value of mine.
Now most people don’t truly know what it is that drives them. But when we do, we can link those nudges and we can check-in and say, if I make this decision, is it going to give me energy, fun, connection, love, freedom, whatever it might be?
Acting on Your Nudges
I remember getting a sign from life, the universe, that when I acted on a decision that for me was very courageous at the time, and it was just over twelve years ago. And I’ve been working in learning and development for most of my career. And I wanted to get into coaching.
So I and I just I knew it was the real way to unleash human potential. So I went along for an open afternoon, loved it, knew this was my calling, knew that I wanted to be a coach. But there was a catch. It’s three thousand five hundred pounds to do a year’s diploma. I didn’t have three thousand five hundred pounds.
So I walked out. And as I walked out, it was in London, and I was walking through Mayfair. And I’m like, three thousand five hundred pounds, Joe, you want to be a coach. Go back. Go back. Go back. I went back. I signed on the dotted line. Because I think you’ve got four free books if you signed up that day. And I gave over my credit card.
And I went home shaking and I had a sleepless night. The very next day, it was really early because I haven’t slept. I went into work. And at the time, I was a global training manager for a banking software company in London. And an email dropped in that it said that we were being taken over by an American company and that every member of staff would be forced to cash in their shares.
So I added mine up, and these were the shares that weren’t really worth anything unless you were there for, like, seven hundred years. Guess what it came to? Three thousand five hundred and ten pounds. Something like that. I was like, oh, that’s a coincidence.
And I really harness that. Now do things happen that quickly in the decisions that I’ve made since? No. Not all the time. And it’s they’re not without their obstacles and their hurdles.
If you are being true to you, you are listening to those nudges and you’re checking in with your values, I’ll give you a bold guarantee that decision will work because it’s right for you. And I’ve made a lot of bold decisions since. And when I first set up my business working as a coach, I initially went out on a joint venture, and I set up a business based out in the Middle East. So it’s based in Dubai. I was there for five years.
I then went on to have my own business out there, executive coaching and mentoring. And one day in meditation, this is May 2009, and everything was going great. It had taken a while to build the business. There had been some obstacles as I’m sure you can imagine with anything. But things were great.
Things were good. The business was going well. I got a team of coaches working with me. I got a pipeline of clients for the next year. I had a beautiful apartment overlooking the ocean, and I’m in meditation.
And this voice comes from somewhere. “It’s time for you to go back to your own country. Your work here is done. It is time for you to serve the leaders in your own country.” This is a bit more than a nudge. I think this was a calling. So I’m there and I’m, like, having a chat with whoever’s listening. What? You want me to go back there? But it rains and they pay tax.
Why am I going to leave Dubai and move back to the UK? And it kept coming and coming and it made no logical sense whatsoever. But I acted on it. Didn’t tell too many people because I was still debating it myself, but I acted on it. And five months later, I moved back to the UK.
Two days after moving back, I met my partner who I’ve been with for the last six years. Life had a greater plan for me and we have to learn to trust. And the decision that I wasn’t making was the decision to play big. I speak, I coach, I mentor, and my first book published last year. And during the course of the past eighteen months, I’d call it suffering, but I suffered with adrenal fatigue, which took me very, very close to burnout.
I virtually had no energy. I could hardly walk to the corner of the street to the post box or postal letter without having to come back and lie down for three hours. My body was telling me something because there’s something I was not listening to. And I knew it, and I wasn’t playing big enough. I had a message, a methodology that could help change the way people lead the way people lead and live.
So I put my stake in the ground and I set the intention to act on the nudge, and the nudge said, “Universe, life, God, my message is bigger than me. Help me get it out to the world.” What happened next I actually got clients saying, “Jo, we want to train in your methodology. Were you accredited?” I hadn’t got an accreditation program at that time.
I do now. I had other clients saying, “Jo, we’d like your online learning program.” I didn’t have one. It was something I planned to do. It’s in progress right now. I listened. I’m now putting in the effort to deliver, and it scares me. It scares me the possibility of where this could go, and it also excites me. There’s a fine line. So what are your nudges telling you?
Listen to them. Don’t let the steamrollers of life come to get you. Check-in with your core values. Get out of your own way. Let life lead the way, and really harness the courage to trust yourself.
