Why 'Follow Your Yes' Might Be the Best Career Advice You've Ignored

"We're conditioned to ignore our yes."

When Shelley Poovey said that on my podcast, it stopped me mid-note. It's true. You rarely get stuck because you have too few options. You get stuck because you've spent years learning not to trust the option that keeps quietly pulling at you anyway.

You already know how to make good decisions. You've built a career on it. That's exactly what makes this moment so disorienting: the same judgment that got you here is now telling you something doesn't fit anymore, and you don't know whether to listen.

That's the question I explored with Shelley, founder of Attune Coach Academy and author of The Energy Intelligent Business, on the latest episode of the podcast.

One Decision Doesn't Lock You In Forever

Shelley didn't set out to become a coach. She went to college on an education scholarship, expecting to teach. Then she took a gap year and changed directions, into research psychology. From there she found her way into programming, then years of corporate systems work in New York.  None of it was chosen as a step toward the business she'd eventually build.

She described the years in between as a kind of skip in a record. Things would almost come together, then not quite, then almost again, the same section catching on the same scratch each time around. It took her a long time to stop hearing that as failure and start hearing it as information.

If you're mid-career and wondering whether changing direction means admitting you got it wrong the first time, sit with that image for a second. The winding path isn't proof you took a wrong turn. It might be exactly the material the next chapter needs.

Which brings us to the phrase Shelley kept returning to.

Following Your Yes Isn't Following Impulse

People hear "follow your yes" and think: I’m quitting Tuesday. That's not what it means.

It means paying attention to what keeps coming up. Small experiments before big declarations. Listening before acting.

"The yes is there," she told me. "Everybody has their yes."

You don't need a five-year plan to start following yours. You need to notice the pull that keeps showing up, then take one small step toward it before deciding what it means.

Why Career Confidence Gets Buried Under Conditioning

Here's the harder part. If the yes is there for everyone, why do so many capable people ignore theirs for years?

Conditioning is a big piece of it. So is practicality, and a career identity that took a decade to build and now feels risky to question. Sometimes it’s fear, plain and simple. And sometimes, success itself becomes the cage, because walking away from something that's clearly working looks irrational from the outside.

You can be successful, well-regarded, and paid fairly, and still know the work in front of you doesn't fit anymore. Neither fact cancels the other out.

What makes things harder is that the pull itself doesn't always announce itself in words. Shelley made this great point: what people call intuition is often just the brain processing information faster than the conscious mind can explain it. Pattern recognition and synthesis are  happening below the surface. It’s not woo-woo magic, just information you haven't caught up to yet.

That's worth knowing, because it means the pull you've been dismissing as vague or unreliable might actually be the most accurate read you have.

Confidence Comes After You Follow It, Not Before

The idea that landed hardest for me: once you're actually skilled at decision-making, there isn't really a right or wrong choice left to find. There's just enough trust in yourself to handle whatever comes next.

Confidence rarely arrives before the decision. It shows up after, once you've survived acting on it. That's the quiet payoff of following your yes even in small ways. Every time you act on the pull instead of arguing yourself out of it, you build a little more evidence that you can handle where it leads.

That's also why Shelley's coaching philosophy stuck with me. She measures success by whether someone trusts their own judgment afterward, not by whether she handed them the right answer.

So maybe you haven't ignored your yes because you're lazy or unclear. Maybe you've just spent years becoming responsible, practical, and dependable, and somewhere along the way, you learned that certainty mattered more than curiosity.

Your next chapter probably doesn't start with certainty. It might start with paying attention to the quiet thing that's been trying to get your attention for a while.

Where has your own yes been showing up lately, even quietly? Let me know in the comments.

You can hear the full conversation with Shelley Poovey on the latest episode of the podcast.