The Thing I Already Knew
When something in you has been trying to get your attention for a while.
There is a particular kind of knowing that doesn’t come from data.
It arrives without evidence, without logic, without a single slide you could show in a board meeting. It just sits in your chest and refuses to move.
I have always had that kind of knowing. As a child, I could read a room before I had the vocabulary to explain what I was reading. As an executive, my intuition was the thing I trusted most quietly and justified most loudly, because the rooms I was in did not reward “I just know”.
Then I ignored it. Completely. For long enough that it cost me a company.
A Danish company approached me to take over a company, cut the losses, and run it efficiently. They had already invested significantly. There was a daily manager in place, a person who had been running the operation and who knew it far better than I did. I was brought in to bring strategic clarity, to scale, to professionalise. The logic was sound. The numbers were plausible. The people involved were credible.
And something in me, from almost the beginning, was not right.
Not a fact. Not a red flag I could have put on a slide. Just a frequency, low and persistent, that I kept filing under “new situation nerves” and “give it time”.
I was running another business at the same time. I was a single parent. I had a life that needed managing.
I told myself I was delegating appropriately, trusting the person in the daily manager role to run the operation while I focused on sourcing products and creating opportunities for the business.
I was good at that part. I was not good at what I was not looking at.
I found out too late that the trust was misplaced. By the time I understood the full picture, I had already put a significant amount of my own money in. I was the legal owner of the company. What had happened was complicated, and the responsibility for dealing with the consequences ultimately landed with me.
The company entered bankruptcy. I remember that period more clearly than I would like to. I did what I could to honour the obligations that were mine to honour. And then I closed.
Just writing this still makes me feel something I have not entirely found the right word for. Not shame, exactly. More like the specific grief of a mistake you could not have made if you had not known better. Because I did know. That is the part I have had to sit with, and eventually make peace with.
My intuition was not silent during that chapter. It was loud. It was persistent.
I simply decided, again and again, that the rational case was stronger. That the external validation, the investment already made, the credibility of the people around me, outweighed the thing that had no evidence to offer.
Looking back, what surprises me most is not that I ignored my intuition. It is how convincing my explanations were. I wasn’t telling myself obvious lies. I was telling myself intelligent, reasonable stories.
Give it time. You’re overthinking. You don’t have all the information yet. Don’t overreact.
The more accomplished we become, the better we often get at building a case against ourselves.
What I have learned, and carry with me now as the most reliable thing I own, is this: my intuition was not wrong about that chapter. I chose not to listen. The lesson is not “trust people less”. The lesson is “trust yourself more”. Those are not the same thing at all.
I want to say something to you now, because I suspect it is relevant.
You are accomplished. You have spent years in rooms where the premium is on evidence, analysis, and rational justification. You have been rewarded, repeatedly, for your ability to build the case. And somewhere along the way, in that very understandable process, you may have developed a habit of treating your own quieter knowing as the thing that needs permission before it can be acted upon.
I see this in almost every accomplished woman I speak to who is standing at a crossroads. Not a lack of information. Not a lack of options. A habit of overriding the signal that doesn’t arrive with a spreadsheet attached.
Your intuition has been processing far more than the facts directly in front of you. It carries every conversation, every experience, every success, every disappointment, and every lesson you have gathered along the way.
In my experience, it has been one of the most accurate instrument in my own life. And it is probably trying to tell you something right now.
The question is whether you are listening.
I am building something of my own now. Just me, at this stage. And I am already in love with the process in a way that surprised me. Not because it is easy. But because every decision runs through a filter I trust completely.
When something feels off, I do not file it under “new situation nerves”. I stop. I look. I listen.
That is what I bring into the work I do with other women. Not a formula. Not a four-step framework. A genuine conversation about what you already know and have not yet allowed yourself to act on.
If you have been carrying something like that, a quiet persistent knowing that keeps getting filed under “not yet” or “be rational” or “give it more time”, I would rather you had a conversation about it than not.
The Second Act Strategy Session is a 90-minute space for exactly that.
For more details, click here.
I won’t tell you what to do. I will help you separate what you already know from all the noise that has been talking over it.
Warmly,
Pia