If you’re hearing a small, quiet voice telling you something needs to change, you’re starting to listen to the whispers.

You know the whispers. They’re those faint signals in your brain that represent you at your very best–the you that’s truly possible.

But they often get drowned out by the negative noise of our lizard brain–the part of us that holds us back to try and keep us safe. (Psst: it doesn’t.)

And here’s the secret–

In my book Red Cape Rescue: Save Your Career Without Leaving Your Job, I teach you all about how to Listen to the Whispers (chapter 5). Here’s a snippet you can use right now:

Transcript (unedited)

Now what do I mean by the whispers? Well, the whispers are those ways that your future self, your better self, your smarter self, you at your best and highest use, starts talking to you start sending you messages, start sending you little hints and signs about the way that you want to grow next, the way that you want to change next, the things you need to say or do those things that are in your control.

I tried to listen to the whispers for years, you know, at first, they were really soft, you know, so soft that the buzzer of my phone would really drown them out. And they started to get louder and louder. And I tried to cover them up with a busy life and, and all the other noise about everything else, it was so important.

Finally, when I took a little downtime, when I took a little quiet time, I let myself listen to the whispers. And once you start really hearing the whispers, they start to become screams, they start to become loud, and you owe them one thing. You owe them action.

Now, it doesn’t mean having to change everything that might be whispering at you right now. But what’s the one action where you can move forward? Just a little bit on that whisper that you’ve been having.

I had a client who was in a technical consulting role. And her whisper was that she was really interested in interior design. And she kept talking back to that and pushing it aside and just saying well, that, you know, well, you know, that would be silly for me to move into any kind of design role, I have a great job I have great make good money. I’m respected in what I do.

But the one action was to start talking to people who are in the industry that she was interested in, to start to feed that whisper a little bit more with facts with building some new relationships.

We often think that whenever we hear a whisper, a whisper that may be challenging us to make a bigger change, it has to be all or nothing– that has to be like black and white. The truth is, there are many steps along the way of making a change, and putting your foot on the first rock that might be in front of you.

Just listening to the whispers asking yourself, Hmm, how do I want to explore this further, what’s one small thing I can do? That’s a great way to feed that whisper, to build your muscle to try some new things.

And to start trusting yourself that your whispers that voice that’s telling you about something that needs to change about something that you’re interested in something that you’re meant to do in our world of work.

That whisper is legitimate and true and useful for you. Take a minute now. And listen to your whisper. Maybe you’re not going to hear it right away.

Maybe you need to schedule some more downtime and walk outside for a chance to just sit down with a blank piece of paper. Maybe it’s time to hire a coach like me and dig deep into who you are what you want in your world of work right now. And to start to create an action plan to get there.

No matter what, listening to the whispers is a great outcome of any kind of major change in our work and our life. And so I hope you tune into them, because I know those whispers are telling you something that we need from you. In our new world of work.