I absolutely love being a woman. I enjoy the dresses, high heels, makeup, hair, jewelry, perfume and other accessory choices that are made available to us. My closet and personal spaces reflect the variety and is extensive. Like many women, shoes rank among my favorites. Of the many I own, almost all of them are high heels. It is a joke in my household about how clumsy I am when I walk around in my bare feet. In addition to my shoes, I like changing my appearance. I can look completely different than the day before, including the style, length, and color of my hair. While it tends to catch some off-guard, I like the changes, I like myself, and I embrace all of my options.

Even more exciting to me than the superficial things available to us, we have something we were born with – intuition. It is a knack for sensing when something is wrong, when it’s right, when we are being lied to, and when someone – particularly a spouse, partner, or child – is planning to tell a lie even before they think it up. Trust me, it’s a powerful, built-in radar of sorts.

Women’s intuition has saved many of us from taking the wrong job, making bad parenting decisions, dating or marrying the wrong man, and other potentially harmful choices. The trouble for us starts when we ignore “Her,” our intuition, because she’s not telling us what we want to hear, so we punt our decision-making over to our emotions. Yikes! How many times has “She” told you not to do something, and you did it anyway because your emotions gave you permission? Do you talk yourself out of the warning signs She gives you about someone by rationalizing their behavior, making excuses for it, or because emotions like fear, loneliness, rejection, or embarrassment consume you?  What did it cost you?

On your journey to becoming the best version of yourself, you must learn to trust your intuition. Some helpful tools to do that are faith, intent, and grace. At the core of faith is the belief in something or someone bigger than you – often unseen. If you exercise your faith by spending time to deepen it, hoping for positive outcomes in your life, trusting your needs will be met, and believing that all things work out the way they are supposed to, not necessarily the way you want, you can better trust your intuition, experience less stress, and feel more at peace in your life. Faith is free and abundant.

By living intentionally, you choose to make decisions and act on the things that really matter. As women, our intentionality tends to center around major goals – mostly career, marriage, and children, and not necessarily in that order. For some, our intent to be married and have children before a certain age forces us into making bad choices for our lives by ignoring our intuition. Instead of planning a marriage based on understanding and agreement about values, faith, boundaries, trust, family and what that means, particularly if you are blending children – we are focused on the wedding – the ring, gown, location, who’s invited, getting the last name and paperwork.

Too often, women want to be brides so badly, they ignore the truths their intuition tells them about the red flags they see as if they will magically disappear. In the end, some discover the vows, the ring and the paperwork doesn’t change behavior or someone’s heart.

Intentionality is critical. It’s actually about your purpose – seeking to understand what you are here on this earth to do. While we’re all here to serve others, you have to figure out what that means for you and your life. It looks different for each person and assignments in your life are different from your purpose. Tapping into your faith and intuition will help you gain clarity.

We all need grace. Learn to forgive yourself. Women are too hard on themselves, and each other. I find it very interesting that we as women have the tendency to extend grace and forgive others, even when their violations were egregious, yet, we struggle to extend grace to ourselves. To better connect to your intuition, you will need to have self-compassion. Beating yourself up for the mistakes you make will only serve to further destroy the trust you have in yourself and your decision-making ability. Give yourself permission to be human, acknowledge that everyone makes mistakes, and remember, to help avoid experiencing additional pain caused by others, forgiveness does not mean reconciliation. They are two different things.

There’s no easy way to navigate this thing called life. But just like the GPS you use on your phone, or in your car to help you reach your destination, your intuition is there to guide you. Even when you follow “Her,” you will still experience hurt. Pain is a part of life. But, if you trust “Her,” it will hit differently. Go ahead, embrace your womanhood, have faith, live intentionally, and extend equal dignity and grace to yourself as you do to others. I triple dare you!

Visit www.yourpointofpride.com to start the journey of becoming the best version of yourself.