Our success depends largely on our ability to make wise decisions.

Do you want to make better decisions? Then join me in this conversation to learn more about intuition. What is intuition? And what is its relationship to the invisible hand?

One of our greatest assets in life and business is our intuition.

How does it show up? How can we better recognize intuition and the role of the invisible hand in our lives, and use these concepts to make better decisions? Revisit a traumatic childhood story with me, truly my first profound experience with intuition, and several other pivotal moments in my life to understand the extraordinarily powerful roles intuition and the invisible hand play in our lives, how we can use these tools to help keep us safe, get us back on track, avoid certain risks and move through hard times.

You will see more clearly how intuition has shown up in your life, and where you may have ignored the support it can provide to you personally, and in your business.

>>> Subscribe to Guts, Grit & Great Business on Apple Podcasts

Check out these highlights:

3:00 What is intuition?

5:15 What intuition is not.

10:00 Why it is so easy to mistake or miss the invisible hand.

12:00 Examples of Intuition from my life, starting with my first traumatic experience involving intuition that kept me safe (at age 3).

22:57 The invisible hand does not always make our lives easier.

35:40 The experience that led to me not sleeping for 1 month straight, instead having to focus around the clock on simply breathing.

44:56 An important question for you.

—————————————

About Heather Pearce Campbell, founder of Pearce Law, PLLC and The Legal Website Warrior® and host of Guts, Grit & Great Business.

Heather Pearce Campbell is a warrior mama, nature lover, and dedicated attorney and legal coach for world-changing entrepreneurs. Based in Seattle, she is mom to two little, wild munchkins, and founder of Pearce Law PLLC, home to her legal practice, and The Legal Website Warrior®, an online business that provides legal education and support to information entrepreneurs (coaches, consultants, online educators, speakers & authors) around the U.S. and the world.

She hoards information, paper, and books while secretly dreaming of becoming a minimalist, and relishes an occasional rare night with her hubby when the kiddos are miraculously asleep and she can soak up HGTV without guilt. 

–> Check out all Guts, Grit & Great Business podcast episodes here.

Imperfect Show Notes

We are happy to offer these imperfect show notes to make this podcast more accessible to those who are hearing impaired or those who prefer reading over listening. While we would love to offer more polished show notes, we are currently offering an automated transcription (which likely includes errors, but hopefully will still deliver great value), below.

GGGB Intro  00:00

Here’s what you get on today’s episode of Guts, Grit and Great Business.

Heather Pearce Campbell  00:05

The moment he walked into the room, I knew that something was wrong with Darrell, I had a very very strong feeling that he was not a safe person. And yet I was young enough and not verbal enough to be able to describe the feeling that I was having to my parents. And so I did not want Darryl anywhere near me and there he was brushing my hair.

GGGB Intro  00:33

The Adventure of entrepreneurship and building a life and business you love preferably at the same time is not for the faint of heart. That’s why Heather Pearce Campbell is bringing you a dose of guts, grit and great business stories that will inspire and motivate you to create what you want in your business and life. Welcome to the Guts, Grit and Great Business podcast where endurance is required. Now here’s your host, The Legal Website Warrior®, Heather Pearce Campbell.

Heather Pearce Campbell  01:05

Hi there welcome. I am Heather Pearce Campbell, The Legal Website Warrior®. I’m an attorney and legal coach based here in Seattle, Washington. Welcome to another episode of guts, grit, and great business. So today, I wanted to talk with you for a few minutes about a topic that is really near and dear to my heart, but also really relevant to life in general and very relevant to business, intuition, and the power of paying attention to the invisible hand. Now, some people might be wondering, what does this have to do with business? Well, in my opinion, it has everything to do with decision making, and keeping ourselves on the right track and making new decisions that are the right decisions. I think intuition can play a really big role in our business and in our work lives. And I think it’s really easy to get disconnected from intuition. Life is busy, things pile on, especially if we are under stress, or we’ve got a lot going on in life that’s keeping our attention occupied, it’s really easy to either turn off or tune out of our intuition, and to miss the ways that the first of all, to miscommunications and miss the ways that the universe is trying to support us. And I’m a firm believer that when we’re clear on what we’re here to do and create, the universe actively supports us in that. And that doesn’t mean that we don’t have obstacles. Sometimes obstacles are the way but meaning that we have opportunities and information provided to us to support our path. And if we’re not paying attention, we might miss it. So let’s start by talking about intuition. In my mind, intuition is really, first of all, it’s an extension of ourselves. It’s a way that we are connected to the universe, one of the ways and it’s also a method for receiving communication and receiving feedback. Right? So intuition, I really, when I picture human beings on this planet, I see threads woven between all of us. And there are different ways that we receive communication, but in the form of ideas, in the form of gut instincts, in the form of multiple ways that both energy and information travels. Intuition is a huge part of receiving those communications and sometimes sending communications. So intuition for me has operated pretty consistently throughout my life. Now we all have intuition. I think some people think, oh, others are intuitive or others are more intuitive. And while it might be true that some people do have more skills when it comes to intuition, I think they are just somebody that is more practiced at paying attention to their intuition, right, just a little more so than others. But we all have intuition and we can all access it. In my experience, intuition can show up in a variety of ways. To me it often looks like a new thought and instinct, a new idea. It pops in often when your mind is busy actually doing something else working on something else. You’ve probably heard the term intuitive hit Right and intuition does kind of hit, you can feel like you’ve been hit out of the blue with an idea, a gut instinct, a piece of information or maybe a question. It generally doesn’t look like common thoughts, you’ve already had recurring thought patterns, rumination, something that’s kind of old hat, that is a consistent brain pattern or thinking pattern for you think of intuition as a message that has been delivered, right? You have received a communication. And it’s been delivered generally, at unusual times, and in new ways. Not always. But that’s my experience. Now, whether or not it is received, whether or not that communication is received is a different issue. And we’ll talk a little bit about that. 

Heather Pearce Campbell  05:56

But intuition can sometimes be the first thought that you have in response to thinking about a problem or a question or trying to figure out a path forward. And it can also be a thought, or intuitive hit that happens when you’re not trying to solve the problem. And in my experience, that’s more often when it’s likely to arrive is when you’re not actively thinking you’re not actively in your analytical brain thinking about the problem working on solutions. For me, intuition is much more linked to openness, creativity, you know, maybe it’s in a brainstorm session. But again, a brainstorm session is really different than analytical thinking. And so the way that intuition works often is that it shows up at times when we’re not necessarily actively thinking about the problem or looking for a solution. And this is why it can be a little bit tough to pay attention to. So your brain gets busy working on things, when you’ve got a problem to solve, your brain gets busy working on things. And the beautiful part about our brain is that even when we’re not actively thinking about something, we still often have wheels turning in the back of our mind actually working on the problem for us. So sometimes I have intuition that shows up in my sleep, or in the middle of the night, or as I’m trying to go to sleep, right, not always the most convenient time. But it can also show up when I’m daydreaming when I’m focusing on something else. But the solution arrives, often in what later I can describe as intuition. And it’s not really that your brain is the creator of the message, it receives the message and delivers it, don’t get me wrong, we’ve got powerful brains, and they’re they’re responsible for creating a lot of things. But the way that I think about intuition is more that our brains act as a receptor of communication. Now, the power of intuition, to me personally is critical in life and in business. And if you think that I’m wrong, think back to any time that you have had an inclination, a gut instinct, an intuitive hit, even if it was a very, very quick thought that flashes in the back of your mind stays for a minute, and then you dismiss it later, maybe time passes, circumstances evolve, and you wish that you had done that thing. You wish that you had followed that path, implemented that idea, essentially followed your intuition. I think everybody can relate to that experience. That was an intuitive hit. And we can be reminded and really educated about what intuition looks like in our life, by looking back on experiences, even when we didn’t follow our intuition and pay attention to what those circumstances were. So now let’s move on to talk about the power of paying attention to the invisible hand. And intuition and the invisible hand, in my mind are closely connected to each other, right? The invisible hand is very, very closely connected to intuition. And they stem from the concept that I believe that we are all connected to each other, to the universe to the life force, whatever you want to call it. We’re all connected. And there are a variety of ways that we communicate. But when we’re clear on something that we need, we’re we’re asking questions clearly we’re seeking for specific information. In my experience, the invisible hand often shows up to support us and so Notice that includes when we’re not paying attention. Sometimes we are paying attention. And it’s helpful if we are. But because it’s the invisible hand, we don’t always know that what we are receiving is the solution. So let’s talk about some examples of that. I actually had one recently, and I’ll tell you a little bit more about the backstory. But essentially, in my, in my health life recently, I’ve been looking for a solution, I’ve had a an ongoing issue, stemmed, it got really, really bad when I was pregnant. And anyways, it’s it’s been an ongoing issue. And I was meeting again recently with my naturopath and something had come up basically, the solution to this problem had had popped up in an interesting way. And he smiled, we were on basically a zoom call, he smiled and said, Ah, the invisible hand. Now, that moment was such a sweet reminder to me of the way that the universe works. And it was also an affirmation of the truth that we are all connected, and that there are solutions all around us, if we are paying attention. There are opportunities all around us if we are paying attention, but they often show up not necessarily looking the way that we thought they would. So I wanted to share a couple of examples of intuition and the invisible hand and the way that they have shown up in my life. And really, as I walk through some of these stories of questions I want you to ask yourself is that, you know, are there things that you are looking for? Answers solutions, information, maybe that might have already appeared might already be in your awareness? You just didn’t recognize them? So what does intuition look like? Let’s first start there. My relationship to intuition started really young in my life. And I’ve got some stories for those of you that know me already, you know that I’m a sucker for a good story. And I’ve got loads of stories, I like to tell people that I have lived life wide and deep. But intuition started young in my life. So I was about three years old, when I had a particular experience. And as I, as I look back on this experience, I think this was my first really profound experience with intuition. And it’s, it’s kind of amazing for me to look back at that now. Because I have a daughter who is two and then just under three weeks, she’s going to be turning three. And she’s about the age that I was when I had this experience. But I was three, I was living in Idaho at the time, my parents were going out for the evening, and they’d hired a babysitter, they had a church function or something to go to. And there would have been my brother and I, my younger sister was born. But I think that mom and dad took Ashley with them. And so Justin and I were at home. Justin was four. I was three. And I was young enough that I remember being verbal, but not as verbal as I wanted to be. And the other thing that I distinctly remember about that night is I was young enough that I was in full body PJs, the ones that go clear over your feet, right, the old school ones with little plastic footies and a zipper that zips all the way up. And I still remember actually going to the local mall with my mom and choosing them out. They were pink and they had you know, white little plastic feet on the underside and full bodied zipper. And I was in those PJs, when our babysitter showed up. And I was in the family room which was right off of the main entryway. And I think I you know gotten out of a bath and I my hair was wet and I was sitting on the sofa. And our babysitter. Turns out was named Darrell. And to this day a very, very negative negative feeling associated with the name, Darrell. So I apologize in advance to any derelicts out there who do not deserve my you know, negative association to their name. But our babysitter was named Daryl and the moment he showed up and literally walked into the family room and my mom was there. And Daryl was from our church. Darrell was 16 Which to me at the time, you know, he seemed like a man I was three so I just remember him feeling like a grown up, even though it was a teenager. And the moment he walked into the room. I knew that something was wrong with Daryl I had a very very strong feeling that he was not a safe person. And yet I was young enough and not verbal enough to be able to describe the feeling that I was having to my parents and so on. Jerell came over and I think my hair was wet, probably, I was holding a brush and he volunteered to brush my hair told my mom that he would brush my hair for me. And it really felt like I didn’t have a choice in the matter. But I remember feeling like I was having a visceral reaction to him like very, very adverse reaction, I did not want Darrel anywhere near me. And there he was brushing my hair. And so I sat there on the couch, just feeling extraordinarily uncomfortable. And here, my parents were getting ready and racing around and getting ready to leave us with Darrell. And long story short, you know, fast forward a little bit and I, you know, was getting ready to go to bed I had gone potty by myself in the upstairs bathroom, I had brushed my teeth. And again, I was still little enough I clearly recall, you know, being small enough that I had to reach clear up with my hand like visually look up to reach the door handle and open the bathroom door by myself. And when I opened it, Darrell was outside of the bathroom on his knees. And he stopped me and asked me to zip down my PJs, so he could see down there, right. And he pointed to my private parts. Right? So I’m a three year old. And basically there’s a man outside of the bathroom and I I lost it. I had very clear boundaries, even as a little person and I went ballistic. I just remember screaming at the top of my lungs yelling No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no over and over and over. And I think my reaction scared Darrell, there, it’s kind of a blur. What happened after that. But he retreated and went downstairs, he was probably worried that Justin would be alerted and Justin was still only four. But Darryl went downstairs and I ran to my bedroom and close the door and climbed up into my little twin bed and sat upright against the backboard of my bed and the door was loose on the hinge. So for what felt like hours, I just sat upright, holding my pillow and looking at that door. And whenever anybody walked around downstairs, that door would shake on the hinge. And I thought that Darrell was outside the door, wiggling the door, I was terrified, I literally fell asleep being terrified that night. Anyways, all of this is to say that, you know, that was a very young age to have that kind of reaction. And yet I knew from the minute that Darryl walked into a room that he was not a good person. And I knew that as a three year old that is intuition that didn’t come from life experience that came from an innate knowing a communication from the universe, right in the form of intuition. And so for some people intuition may start young like that, certainly, we probably all have had experiences whether or not we recognize them as intuition, they can start very young in life. And certainly our intuition grows and gets better with experience if we hone it if we pay attention to it. But that was a really profound experience in my life. And the irony of you want to talk about the invisible hand. So the next day, like in regards to this particular experience, the next day, I was so tired. I think that falling asleep, I was so tired, from you know, being a little person and so stressed out and waiting for mom and dad to get home that the next day, I could not remember anything about what had happened the day before. It’s just like, my mind was an empty slate. I felt like a little zombie walking around. And I knew something was wrong, but couldn’t figure out why I couldn’t remember anything. And, you know, the invisible hand played a role that day and in bringing, essentially helping me to remember and what happened is that that next evening, something again came up and I remember sitting at the dinner table that was on my dad’s lap. So I was a little person, right three years old on my dad’s lap and mom and dad talked about well, we need to find a babysitter last minute they needed to go do this thing. I don’t know if it was another church event or something else and mom was standing across the kitchen by the phone on the wall and she said oh well why don’t I just call Daryl again. Boom, the second she said his name. I had a full physical reaction. I flipped backwards are backwards on my dad’s lap. I started screaming and crying hysterically. I remember my mom froze. She was holding the phone that was attached to a cord on the wall. And she froze and looked at me and looked at my dad, and she just put the phone right back on the wall. And somehow they got me to calm down. And I’m sure they got me to tell the story. Anyways, long story short, Darryl went on to become a police officer of all things. But it was a really, obviously an a very poignant experience in my early life about the power of intuition. And it’s one that I look back on and, you know, realize like intuition is in all of us. Intuition has consistently played a role in certain decisions in my life. So, for example, law school, I look at how did I make the decision to go to law school, it was never actively a known option on my path. I didn’t know any attorneys, I’d never once thought about becoming an attorney, you know, growing up, like, never considered it. And here I was, in my last, essentially my last year of school, and I enrolled in a couple of courses. And this might have been where intuition played a role, right, I enrolled both in a business law class, and a writing class where, at the at the end of that class, we had to write, basically, you know, a big paper, and I decided to write my non legal ethics. Now, who knows why I chose legal ethics. But it was a choice that I made and the overlap of those two things at the same time, open the door to law potentially being a path. Now, the invisible hand came in and that particular scenario, because my mom actually just had a conversation with me one day, I was talking to her about not wanting any more business schooling, right, I had done a double major in finance and economics, I’ve added economics. During my third or fourth year of school, I had a really heavy class load. And I knew that I wanted more education, but I didn’t want more business, I felt like I’d really maxed out my business training for the time being. And so my mom just said to me there, have you thought about going to law school. And that was the first time that I actually thought about it, even though I was in a business law class, even though I was writing a big paper on legal ethics, still hadn’t crossed my mind to actually consider going to law school. And so in that particular story, the invisible hand was my mom simply asking the question, Have you considered law school and once I sat with that, and explored it, like in a matter of a few days, it went from being a total unknown in my life to suddenly being my path it fit. And as I looked into it, and I reached out and talked to a couple of lawyers, it fit. So that ended up being a new choice. Another example of the invisible hand, and this one, actually, intuition and the invisible hand, this is, you know, also, the thing I want to point out about the invisible hand is, does not always make our lives easier, though, I firmly believe the universe is here to support us. And that’s in part what the invisible hand does, doesn’t always do it through the smooth this path. We’re here to learn things, we’re here to grow, we’re here to evolve. And so the invisible hand also sometimes hands us things that are pretty tough, or opens our, our eyes to things that are pretty tough. And one of these examples was my first marriage. And, you know, truthfully, looking back, I didn’t have any business being married at the time, but you know, we all make our mistakes.

Heather Pearce Campbell  23:37

And this one, this would have been six or seven years into our relationship, although only about one, you know, one and a half years into the marriage, which was really short, thankfully. But things were hard, our relationship was not good. It just felt that the best way for me to describe it, there was a song that I came across at the time. Actually, it’s a Minnie Driver song, but she talks about, you know, in the context of relationships, somebody being a tree, and somebody being a vine, and I felt like the tree, I felt like I was carrying the weight of that relationship and like my knees, my legs, were down into the mud, you know, up to my knees up to my thighs, like it was hard work and I was carrying the weight of both of us and trying to do the work in that relationship. You know, one of the flaws in my personality is that I am determined to the nth degree and certainly like most people, I did not get married so that I could get divorced. But I would have stuck with that relationship had this thing not happened and, and I’ll tell you what that was but along the way, right I had a friend or two a little ways into this asked me, Well, do you think he’s cheating on you? Right, that was the invisible hand. I didn’t recognize it at the time because like, I knew we had our struggles, I knew we had problems, but I was certain that infidelity was not one of them. And I was like, oh, no, no, I mean, we’re having a hard time. But that’s not it, like really dismissed it out of hand, right. And so that was the invisible hand, but I didn’t recognize it. And at that time, I didn’t follow up. And it really would have only been a short month or two later, you know, we continued in therapy, we continue to try to talk about things. And it literally just felt like we were getting nowhere, I was getting nowhere, I had no additional insights into what was going on. You know, I was doing what our therapist said to do, and nothing was changing. And I thought we had a pretty decent therapist to this day, I really liked him. But But nothing was changing, nothing was resolving. And so moving forward in the story to the point of intuition. One day I was sitting in I was I had a downtown law office at the time, I was literally sitting in the middle of a meeting with about five other people on a sizable project. And all of a sudden, out of the blue, this thought hit right, and we’re talking about an intuitive hit, you need to be inside of his email.

Heather Pearce Campbell  26:20

And it was just like, clear as a bell, like, Okay, I need to apparently be inside of his email. And what I believe is that the universe was ready for me to understand what was going on. I’d been doing the work, things had been very, very challenging. This cast a whole heavy layer over my life. And the universe here again, was the invisible hand, the universe in conjunction with my intuition was really ready for me to understand what was going on. And so I literally sat in the meeting, and I was like, Huh, okay, I guess I need to be inside of his email. And in that moment, I’ve never hacked somebody’s email before. And in that moment, like what came to mind was his his first email through the University of Washington, we’d both been University of Washington students. And I pulled up the login, put in his email address, first guess on the password, which is a combination of numbers that came from his old debit card I happen to know the pin number of, and then something else, I can’t remember what the letter portion of the equation was at this point. But literally my first guest on his password, I’m into his email account. And what I knew is that that was one account, and that he also had a Gmail account. And so with that first account open, I went and hacked into the Gmail account, right, reset the password, the email got sent to the first email address at U DUB, I reset the password. And suddenly, I was sitting inside of two email accounts. And what I learned is that he was sending emails from one account. And he had told the woman that he was seeing to email him at a third account, a third Gmail account, or a third email account that also was in Gmail. And so I hacked the third account. Within a matter of minutes, my world went from being hard and confusing, and, you know, seven years of relationship with this person to suddenly having clarity, having total insights into what was going on and what had been going on. And I’m sitting in this meeting with four or five other people at this table. And I literally just excuse myself, I get up, I go back to my individual office sat with the reality of what was happening inside of this email account. But to this day, I wonder what would have happened if I had just ignored that intuition ignored that very clear thought of you need to be inside of his email account, like right then. And what happened is that set in motion, then a series of things that very, very quickly caused our relationship to come to an end, which is exactly what needed to happen. And within a couple of weeks, even though it was a really tumultuous few weeks from an emotional and processing standpoint, within a few weeks, I could recognize the gift of what had happened, not only his infidelity, but the way that I’d been able to figure it out. And I just saw that there was a point in time where I needed to know the truth, and that was the way that it showed up. But in my life that was a really clear combination of intuition and the invisible hand, working in conjunction to provide me with the truth. There’s a lot more to that story. It’s actually a pretty funny story. Years later, and even months later, it’s a very funny story. I will tell that on another episode, but that particular unraveling Getting inside of his email and seeing very, very clearly what had gone on was exactly what needed to happen. Another example, just in case, these are helpful for you to relate to your own life, about how intuition and the invisible hand works as a mom, so my path to motherhood,

Heather Pearce Campbell  30:20

the best way to describe it is really tumultuous. It was challenging. It was physically hard. It was emotionally hard. It was a very trying time. But when we got our son Aiden, not happened on our third pregnancy, you know, he was a healthy, happy baby, things were great with him, I had no once he was here, I had no cause for concern. And yet, early on in his journey with my in conversation with my pediatrician, for whatever reason, I remember asking her several times about autism, and about the signs and what to watch for, and we had none of those, she had never raised it independently. You know, none of what we learned or read about autism was a fit for him. But for whatever reason, in my mind, as a mom, it was a concern. And I asked about it several times. And interestingly enough, our pediatrician was actually married to one of the leading autism experts in Seattle at the time, also another doctor, and she just like dismissed outright, like no, that’s not No, not even a concern, not a worry, you know, not a thing with Aiden. And so our our path continued. And yet, fast forward a couple of years when Aiden was in preschool, when he started to become school age, and we were putting him into some preschool programs. There were some definite struggles that came out. And that caused him and us a lot of heartache with his peers and in the context of a classroom setting. And as other kids began to age out of certain developmental behaviors, Aiden did it. And the struggle continued, and things just felt hard. I just remember for years under, you know, especially that two to three to four age like things just felt tremendously hard. And he was bright, he was very socially motivated. He was athletically very capable. There were not any red flags. I mean, we visited therapists, many, many therapists, we talked to teachers, you know, et cetera, et cetera. And at every stop along the way, the answer was no, no, no, there’s nothing wrong. He’s just a very bright, precocious child. And while I think that’s true, I also could not dismiss my intuition that was telling me there’s something else there. This is harder than it should be. And, or harder than I will say it is for the average person, as I looked around and talked with other parents and saw the experiences of other children. I just was very keenly aware about how challenged we felt. And so we continued to pursue avenues for getting help and helping and trying to really understand even better, and eventually, you know, and this was right before Aiden turned five. And unfortunately, by this point, he’d already been excluded from many opportunities for social support, social and behavioral support, even as people with means I think of my husband, and I, you know, we’re not without resources. And I was asking all the right questions, but I look back on that journey. And I just have such a big heart for parents that, you know, are overwhelmed with life or don’t have resource resources or means to look around or to call on support. Because even with means even asking the right client kind of questions, that was a long, hard journey. By the time we actually got Aiden connected with the kind of support that he needed. He was almost five. He had like eight weeks, basically, of preschool left, and he ended up with a diagnosis of autism, which even then surprised us, but that came from a therapist who had many, many years of working with children and had had the chance to observe him for almost a year, twice a week in group classes, and most kids would go once a week, but because Aiden didn’t have any other social outlets, I put him in twice a week as we continue to struggle to try to find preschools that would keep him in enrolled. He got kicked out basically of like, three different preschools and it was just a very, very challenging time. So here we were, and Aiden is almost five, and we’ve received a diagnosis of autism. And I look back and connect the dots both to intuition and how challenging it was to stay on that path. Right. But there was a lot that we learned and there was a lot of examples along the way of the invisible hand showing up and helping us connect For dots to certain resources that would help on that journey. So that’s just one more very, very clear example in my life where intuition was at play. And I’m really, really grateful that I was able to see it and pay attention to it. Even when others were trying to dissuade me from that even when professionals and doctors and people who I should trust were saying, no, no, that’s not an issue, right? And then one final example back to that one, around help, right? My my naturopath saying, Oh, the invisible hand. And I think he and I, and I’ve, I’ve gotten to know him better over the years, but I think we have very similar worldviews. And essentially what had happened is this issue, I had really, really severe gastrointestinal and esophageal reflux during my daughter’s pregnancy. So bad, in fact that I got a cold one time and it turned into a cough and I was coughing so frequently, and I was also, you know, seven months pregnant. What my doctors didn’t know is that I was aspirating stomach acid, I was coughing and my esophageal sphincter wasn’t closing. And so I was aspirating stomach acid. And so I went through basically three back to back rounds of pneumonia, and they couldn’t figure out why. And it caused such extreme esophageal burning, like it just literally burned out my esophagus, there was a month at the end of her pregnancy, that I could not sleep. For a solid month even for five minutes, I literally spent my time around the clock, drinking water sipping tea, having like doing everything possible to keep my esophagus cleared, what happens you’ve got, you’ve got two kinds of cells actually both in your throat but certainly in your in your stomach and where your Safa jheel sphincter supposed to close off your upper stomach from your esophagus and keep stomach acid from going back up. And mine was not doing the job. 

Heather Pearce Campbell  37:13

But you have cells that create mucus. And so I was having acid coming back up my throat. And it was just like this massive overproduction of mucus and then a very, very inflamed throat. And so I had a difficult time breathing, I couldn’t eat food, I couldn’t swallow, I had to go on a pure liquid diet, I was losing weight, instead of putting on weight, you know, growing this baby was a very, very traumatic and stressful time. And my doctors couldn’t figure it out. And finally they ended up putting me on an acid blocker towards the end of the pregnancy, which began to provide some healing still wasn’t the full solution, right. And here I am a couple years later, and still trying to figure out the full solution. And so a few months ago, I’m having some issues, again with swallowing and something just is not getting rebalanced, and I ordered some supplements in the mail, and in the box comes a bottle of HCl, which is hydrochloric acid. And I’m looking at the bottle and I literally had the thought like, Hmm, I wonder if I need this. I wonder if this could be the solution to my stomach and esophageal issues, right. And, but it passes quickly. It’s kind of like, for whatever reason I moved on, or I dismissed it. I didn’t go research. That bottle, that supplement. And I’d also been working in conjunction with my naturopath and the next week, I had a meeting. And we were talking again about my symptoms and how I was feeling and he said for the first time, like, you know, and I’ve worked with him for years, he said, you know, you’re young for this, but I actually wonder if you’re not producing enough stomach acid, he said, there are certain things, and especially really stressful events in the body that can actually basically cause a depletion of the cells. You’ve got two kinds of cells in your stomach, ones that create stomach acid in the lining of your stomach, and ones that create mucus, right? So they work in tandem, and he said, you might have depleted the cells that create stomach acid. And what happens is then your esophageal sphincter doesn’t close all the way. So we were having this conversation and he said to me, have you ever taken HCl? And I smiled at him and I laughed, and I said, Guess what showed up in the mail by accident last week. He said a bottle of HCl and he looked at me and he just smiled and he said, Ah, Invisible Hand. Anyways, and I mentioned that briefly before but it was definitely an affirmation of the fact that we are connected as people as a universe like we are all connected. And sometimes things show up as the solution. And because of the way they show up because it’s through the invisible hand, we don’t always recognize that as the solution. So I just the whole point of this episode, the reason I recorded this episode is really to ask the question, what are you needing? What support? Are you looking for? What questions are you asking? And is it possible that the solution is already there? That the answer is already there that the invisible hand has already been tapping at the glass, right? And the same way that my friends who asked you know about my ex husband is cheating on you, right? Tapping on the glass, in the same way that I’m sure HCL has crossed my path before because there were one or two times I had a conversation with my acupuncturist about it, there was one other time that I went to research it because I remember standing in a store, looking at a bottle of it, right, tapping out the glass. And I think that sometimes we just don’t know to look and examine the thing and recognize it as the solution. But is it possible that if you’re needing information, if you’re needing support, if you’re asking questions, that you’ve already actually had some intuitive hits, and that maybe you’ve dismissed them, or you haven’t taken a second look, or like me, they kind of went through the back of your brain, and you forgot to focus on them in that moment and do something about it, and they just moved on through. So what can we do? I think, at this point, really, it’s about practicing, paying attention, giving ourselves a few minutes each day to ask questions to ask for what we need, and then also to let it go to let our brains let go and be free of all of the work of doing some of the, you know, the analytical problem solving ourselves, and to give instead to give ourselves permission to recognize what shows up in response to that, ask. And then our job is to test any answers any information that we receive any surprise gifts, against our intuition, and to really trust our gut instincts around that. So I hope you’ve enjoyed this episode. Again, this is a topic I care a lot about. Even though I shared a lot of experiences from my personal life about intuition. It shows up in our business as well. And when I look at a lot of client scenarios that I’ve been asked to get involved with, oftentimes, and I do a lot of teaching around what I call red flag scenarios. And so one of the questions I ask clients, or people in workshops, when I’m teaching a workshop is, what scenarios have you had in the past that you want to avoid moving forward? And we look at those scenarios and oftentimes, in intuition has played a role, right? People will reflect back and say, oh, yeah, I spotted this, or I saw that or I recognized it as a red flag. And I ignored it. I didn’t do anything about it. I didn’t follow up on it. I didn’t create my boundary, right? I didn’t yell no, no, no, no, no, no, no at the top of my lungs, not that we have to do that in regards to every scenario. But so much of intuition is also learning to trust ourselves, trust our experience, trust our filters, and that gets better, the more that we practice. So I really hope you’ve enjoyed this conversation. I really hope you give yourself room to practice paying attention in your life and in your business. And to be able to rely on intuition and recognize when it’s showing up, recognize when the invisible hand is giving you a gift and to be able to make the next right decision. Thanks so much for joining me today. I’m wishing you a great week. And I hope you’ll join me again next week. Same day, same time.

GGGB Outro  44:10

Thank you for joining us today on the Guts, Grit and Great Business podcast. We hope that we’ve added a little fuel to your tank, some coffee to your cup and pep in your step to keep you moving forward in your own great adventures. For key takeaways links to any resources mentioned in today’s show and more. See the show notes which can be found at legalwebsitewarrior.com/podcast. Be sure to subscribe to the podcast and if you enjoyed today’s conversation, please give us some stars and a review on Apple podcast, Spotify or wherever you get your podcast so others will find us to keep up the great work you are doing in the world and we’ll see you next week.