That 4am gut feeling

Four in the morning. Your gut’s churning, and you’re not entirely sure if you’re awake or if this is your subconscious doing the work while you sleep. Either way, some part of you already knows. A big problem is coming.

Then morning arrives, and somehow it doesn’t feel quite so bad anymore. You tell yourself it’ll probably be fine. You get up, get on with the day, and quietly ignore the thing that woke you at four in the morning in the first place.

I talked yesterday about the holiday that gets booked three to six months before the trouble actually lands. This is what happens underneath that. It’s not that people don’t know. It’s that they know, and then two things take over and talk them out of it.

The first is ego. Admitting there’s a problem feels like admitting you’ve failed, so it gets pushed back down where the four a.m. feeling came from.

The second is hope. The quiet belief that the big deal will land, the new contract will come through, the one good month will fix everything, before any of it actually needs fixing.

Here’s what I’d say to that four a.m. version of you. That feeling was correct. It’s not paranoia, and it’s not you being dramatic. It’s information, and the earlier you act on it, the more options you’ve got, and the cheaper every single one of them is.

You don’t need to have it all worked out. You just need to stop overriding what you already know.

Do you need someone on your side? I’m Mark Smillie.