Who has your best advice?

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I have often been asked, “David, given your age, success, and experience now, if you were to give advice to your 20-year-old self, what would it be?”

Simple: pay attention to the still, small voice inside. Your intuition.

I wasn’t aware I had such a thing and how available it was to me, 24-7, until my late 20s. I recognize in retrospect that it was probably driving the decisions I made in my early years—deciding to make good grades in school, taking acting and debate classes, taking a year off in high school to be an exchange student in Switzerland, etc. But who knew what informed those choices? “Following my nose” was the best way to put it, along with taking advantage of opportunities that were presented to me.

My “nose” wasn’t always right. I went seriously off the rails a few times before I was 26, landing me for a short time in a mental institution. It was then I discovered I had several voices in my head. Some were healthy. Others were fantastical, attractive, and terrible to my well-being. Learning to discriminate between the two was a spiritual breakthrough for me. Once I got my bearings about my “inner life” and its standards, and had suffered the slings and arrows of following inner advice that wasn’t so positive, I was able to make better choices about what I paid attention to.

You have (and have had) a similar still, small voice inside. It knows you (probably better than you know yourself), loves you, and has infinite patience in whether you listen to it or not. The thousands of self-help books you can read and consultants and coaches you might employ, as good as they are, would ultimately point you back to this. The good coaches will eventually hand you back to yourself, the bad ones make you dependent on them.

Your path is yours only. Pay attention to the one who knows what that is.

Stay safe and well,

David