Intro: [00:00:00] Welcome to Energetic Advantage, the podcast where energy isn't woo, it's your edge. I'm your host, Jessica Cerato. Intuitive strategist, lifelong pattern decoder, lover of numbers, and energetic guide for visionary leaders. Around. Here we go. Energy first, strategy second. Every episode will give you a perspective, a tool, or a timeline shift that helps you lead from your power.
Because the truth is your energy is your most undervalued asset. Until you learn how to use it, get ready. You're about to have the advantage. Let's begin.
All right, I wanna talk about something today that I think is incredibly important if you are someone who considers yourself intuitive. And spoiler, even if you don't consider yourself intuitive, you are, so this episode is also for you. And this is especially true if you've spent the last few years, or maybe your entire [00:01:00] life, like, learning how to trust yourself, because there is something that can happen when you start trusting your intuition that I don't think we talk enough about.
And here it is, 'cause you know I'm gonna talk about it. You feel something. You know something. You have this deep feeling in your heart that says, "Okay, this is happening. Something is changing. This is gonna be important. Ooh, I'm entering this new chapter. This relationship matters," or even, "This relationship is the one.
This opportunity, oh yeah, this is going somewhere." And then it doesn't happen the way you thought it would And suddenly you're not only disappointed about the thing that didn't happen, you also start to question yourself. " Wait, did I get that wrong? Was that not my intuition? Did I just make it up? was that wishful thinking?
Can I actually trust myself again?" And you know, this came [00:02:00] up during my Q4 energy forecast this past week, and it really unlocked something for a lot of people in that room. Because here's really what it's about. Your intuition can be right while your interpretation of your intuition is completely wrong, and these are two very different things.
You know, even maybe a better way of saying it is your heart can know something without knowing what it looks like, and that's what I want to explore today. Because I think there's some of you out there who have been making your intuition wrong simply because the details didn't turn out the way your brain decided they should.
And today, in addition to exploring this, I'll also share some real-life examples of how this has happened to me, and this is why you don't hear others in this space talking about it, because no one wants to admit they were wrong, [00:03:00] especially if you work in the intuitive space. And I have learned that's just not the case, and you know I am always going to bring the truest and realest version of myself here to the podcast.
So let's go. I actually wanna start with an image. I work with an artist and her name is Rachel Frisk. She is amazing. She is a clear channel, and how I work with her is I channel the energy that I'm seeing and feeling. I send her these honestly unhinged voice messages, and she translates the energy that I'm feeling and seeing and sensing into art.
She's an amazing artist. She works in so many different modalities. , But she brings the imagery that I see to life. And so at the end of last year, I was... So this was in November and December of 2025, I was channeling the energy for 2026. And [00:04:00] if you're watching this, , on video, you can see behind me, I actually had created one of these beautiful images into an artwork for my wall.
It's the year of the visionary leader, so there's this beautiful woman with her hair flowing and the horse and... It, it's beautiful. But I'm not here to talk about the beautiful picture. Sorry, Rachel. I'm actually gonna talk about one image that came through that I did not like. Like at all. Like I really didn't like it.
And, you know, Rachel didn't do anything wrong. She drew and created what I had described. But when she sent it to me, I looked at it and I was like, "No." There was something about it that just bothered me. And, you know, normally... Well, usually I have no edits for Rachel. But if Rachel does send me something and something isn't quite right, I can just tell her what to change.
"Ah, can you just move this? Or maybe change this color slightly. Like make this part bigger or [00:05:00] take this out completely." You know? But every time I tried to edit this image, I couldn't. Like something in me wouldn't let me change it, which was so freaking annoying because I also didn't like it. So I was like, "Ah, okay.
Well, I'm just not gonna edit it. And also I might never use it or share it 'cause-" I don't like it. Okay. And so probably some of you are thinking, "Oh my gosh, yeah, I don't think I've ever seen this image." Well, you haven't. The first time I shared this image was on the Q4 forecast last week, because it sat there for an entire year, and then I was...
When I was preparing for the forecast, I looked at it again, and suddenly I understood it. I was like, "Oh my gosh, this is the entire lesson." So I know it might be hard if you can't see it, but I will do my best to describe it. This image had a heart, a person with a heart, right? And coming from [00:06:00] the heart were these sparkles, green sparkles, this energy, this feeling, and it was kind of like projecting a screen above the person of all of these very literal images, and they looked honestly like clip art for those of you who have ever Word in-- worked in Microsoft Word.
And if you haven't used Microsoft Word, maybe I would say they're, like, AI-generated, but by like a three-year-old, right? It was like a dog, like a very 3D dog. There was a plane. There was, like, people walking on the beach. It was like black, very 3D things, and the reason I didn't like those images was that they almost looked, like, fake to me.
It looked very flat. Like, it just looked like clip art. I don't know how else to explain it, and I remember thinking, "There's no depth here." But it was this weekend where I finally understood, yeah, that's the freaking point, Jess. The dog isn't the point. The [00:07:00] plane isn't the point. The people walking on the beach hand in hand are not the point.
Those are the mind's interpretation of what the heart is feeling. The heart is the energy. The sparkles are the knowing. And then the brain comes in and is like, "Oh, I know what this feeling means. It means the dog. It means a plane. It means walking on the beach with this particular person." This is how many people vision board, right?
And maybe that happens, but maybe it doesn't, because intuition and interpretation are not the same thing. The heart feels, and then the brain makes it 3D in order to understand it. And this is the distinction. You know, we experience intuition first as a feeling. There's a knowing, an energy, an expansion, or a contraction, right?
A sense [00:08:00] that something is changing or beginning or important, what-whatever. And we all feel this intuition differently. But for everybody, even if you move quickly through it, I guarantee you it always starts as, like, a feeling. And then our very human brain takes that information and tries to make it tangible.
It turns it into the 3D. It says, "Okay, if I'm feeling freedom, well, what does freedom look like? Oh, I know it means like leaving my job," or, "It looks like making this X amount of money," or, "Oh, I know it, it feels like moving," right? you know, if your feeling is love, "Oh, I feel love," immediately your brain is like, "Who is this person?"
It's like this little robot voice always for me. If I'm feeling this celebration, it's like, "Where's the party?" If I'm feeling this energy of expansion, like, right away, it's like, "Okay, well, what's the opportunity? Where's the [00:09:00] opportunity? When it's gonna happen?" And I wanna be clear here, there's nothing wrong with doing this.
Like, we are human beings, and so of course we interpret information through the reality that we understand. But we have to recognize that the interpretation is an additional layer of information, and it is not necessarily what the intuition actually told us. And this distinction can protect our self-trust because otherwise, when that picture doesn't happen, we make the feeling wrong too.
I want you to think about this. I want you to think about something that you have felt really strongly this year. Maybe you felt, "Oh, I'm gonna have this massive year." Oh, or, "This thing is gonna change my life," or, "This relationship is significant," or, "Something big is happening in my business. I'm going to celebrate or experience so much freedom," whatever it is.
And then your brain started creating [00:10:00] the pictures. Maybe your brain decided how much money you were going to make to create that feeling, or who you were going to work with, or where you were going to live, or when it was gonna happen, or what the celebration would look like, and then those things didn't happen exactly as your brain thought they would.
And underneath the disappointment of the thing not actually materializing came something much more destabilizing, which is, "Shit, my intuition was way off course here." But no, maybe not. Maybe your intuition was absolutely right. Maybe your heart accurately read the feeling, and maybe your brain incorrectly predicted the form.
These are very different things. And to help you really hone in on what this looks like in real life, I'm gonna share an [00:11:00] example from a client, and then I'm gonna share a few examples from my life. And I share these because I know that in each of these you will be able to relate. Now, for the client example, I'm obviously not gonna share the personal details of what she's moving through, but she had a milestone birthday coming up, and she had this deep knowing about this birthday.
She knew it was gonna be transformative, potent, a portal, life-changing. She could feel the significance of it, and we had talked about it months ago, about what that meant. Her brain had created a picture for it, and she made plans based on that. Celebration, parties, travel, all of the things that would make sense if someone told you, "This birthday is going to be transformative."
And she recently celebrated that birthday, and none of that is happening. The form that [00:12:00] it took looks completely different. But is she in transformation? Um, yeah. Is she standing in a portal that is completely changing her life? Yes. Is this birthday making a profound transition? Uh-huh. So was she wrong? No.
She accurately felt the energy. Her brain simply couldn't know the circumstance through which that energy would arrive, and that is such an important distinction. Because imagine if she looked at the absence of the party or the trip and decided not only, you know, sad or disappointed that she wasn't doing those things, but also, like, "See?
See, I know I shouldn't have trusted myself." She would miss the fact that the very thing she sensed is happening. It just doesn't look like the, you know, movie set that her brain created for it. And I used that phrase during the [00:13:00] forecast, and I, and I really like it because the human mind creates the movie set for how it thinks the feeling will arrive.
So if you feel expansion, your brain builds the set. If you feel love, your brain will cast the actors. And if you feel change, your brain will write the script. You feel success, your brain chooses the props. You feel celebration, your brain plans the party. And then life arrives, and it's like, okay, like, here's how we're actually doing it, and then suddenly the set is different.
The actors are different. The timeline changed. The scene you were thought going to happen in act one, you know, happens in act three, or maybe it doesn't happen at all. But the feeling may still be exactly right, and that's why I don't believe that intuition is necessarily a prediction of form. Sometimes it is.
I have accurately, in precise detail, used my [00:14:00] intuition to predict form that is undeniably exactly as I thought it would be. Typically, if I'm honest, I do this for others because there's less emotion involved in it for me. You know, sometimes the specificity is incredible, and I do not think we should demand specificity from intuition in order to trust it.
Which, of course, brings me to me, the giant, living, breathing example that has been teaching me this lesson for the last month, which is the Inner Compass app. We submitted Inner Compass to Apple on August 28th, and I remember exactly how I felt. I was so optimistic, and actually, you know, optimistic doesn't even describe it.
It felt like there really wasn't even a question in my mind. I was like, "We're ready. This is happening. We're going live." And my brain interpreted that feeling as, [00:15:00] "Okay, well, we'll, we'll be live on Apple by September 1st." So of course, I did all the Jessica things, you know, and every time I felt like this is it, and then the details didn't unfold the way I thought they would, I started to make my intuition wrong.
Apple rejects us for the first time. Let that be a hint on where this is going. So I was wrong. Okay, we submit. Okay, now, still waiting. Maybe I'm wrong. Something else happens. We get rejected again. We resubmit again. Okay, this is it. Yes. Nope. And at some point in this process, I'm basically, of course, so disappointed, but I'm also having this, like, existential crisis of, oh my gosh, Jessica, you have built your entire business around intuition, and you are so wrong about this.
So burn it down. Everybody go home. You don't know anything. Except [00:16:00] wait, was I actually wrong? Because here's what happened. I told you we submitted to Apple on August 28th. What I didn't tell you is that we also submitted Inner Compass to Google for Android, and less than an hour after we submitted, I was standing in the grocery store when the approval came through, just like that, easy peasy.
The exact feeling I had felt, it was going live. People could download it. People can use it. The thing I felt was happening actually happened, but my brain just attached that feeling to Apple specifically. And, you know, this just cracks me up because at one point, I pulled a card kind of asking when the app would be live, and I pulled the nine of hearts, and the date connected to that card was actually August 30th.
And so I was convinced, August 30th, that's it. And guess what happened on August 30th? Google went live. I was right, but Apple didn't. So I [00:17:00] could, you know, stop there as I did now and be like, "Well, Jessica, you were right," but that's not what my brain did. I don't know if I've ever shared with you this on the podcast, but I call my brain Dolores, especially when she starts to really mess with me, 'cause that's not what Miss Dolores did.
Because my beautiful brain, Dolores, had already decided that live meant Apple. And so the next time the nine of hearts came around was September 28th, and as September 28th approached and we were still dealing with Apple, my brain started doing it again. "See, you're wrong. There's no way. You read this incorrectly."
Even though the app had literally gone live on the first nine of hearts date. Do you see how insane this is? Like, the information was there, but because it did not arrive in the form that I had attached to it, I discounted the information, and this is what I want us to stop doing Because not [00:18:00] only do we have to determine if it was right or wrong or maybe predicted the wrong form, sometime we actually do predict the quote unquote "right form", but it's so literal.
There are so many times in my career when I have seen something and I took the literal interpretation of it, but when it actually happened, I was like, "Oh, right. Okay. That's what it meant." And so I want you to practice this. When something doesn't happen the way you expected, instead of immediately saying, My intui- my intuition was wrong," I want you to go back, and I want you to ask yourself, "What did I actually feel?
Like, what did I actually know, as in, like, known in the heart?" Before the interpretation, before the timeline, before the specific person, before the number, [00:19:00] before that 3D dog or the plane or the people walking on the beach, what did you actually feel? And for me, I knew the app was ready. I knew it was moving.
I knew it was crossing from creation into the world. I knew people were going to start using it. I knew something was opening. It's all true, and it happened. But what did I add? Apple. Specific dates, specific details, specific mechanisms. Those pieces came from my interpretation, my brain, not necessarily from my original knowing.
So maybe a better practice is, "Okay, what did I feel?" And then you can ask yourself, "Okay, so what did my brain decide that that feeling meant?" And separate those two things. Write them down separately if you have to, because what I think you might discover is that your intuition has [00:20:00] been much more accurate than you have been giving it credit for.
And you know what's really fascinating is that earlier on in the Q4 forecast, before I even had taught or shared about this concept, I took everyone through a guided visualization, and I kept on saying, you know, like, "Don't decide what it means, just notice." They saw a stream, and I asked them to notice, like, how the current was moving, , but don't decide what that means.
Just notice. I guided them through the visualization of there's an object in the stream. , Again, just notice. And afterwards, people started sharing what they saw, and one woman had seen something that initially looked like a small stick, but then she got closer, and she was like, "Oh, that's not a little stick.
That's a huge dead branch." You know, someone else in the visualization saw a weight. But when she moved it, the message that she knew and heard was, "Oh, this actually wasn't even impeding your flow." And that's so interesting to [00:21:00] me, right? Because how often do we decide something is an obstacle before we actually get close enough to understand it?
How often is our perspective slowing us down more than the actual thing? Maybe you're using enormous amounts of energy trying to move something that isn't even blocking the current. You know, maybe the thing you thought was tiny is actually big, maybe the thing that you thought was a problem isn't a problem at all, and maybe you just need more information.
And that's intuition, too, because it's not just, "I saw a rock, therefore the rocks means X." It's, "I saw a rock. Okay, interesting. Let me get closer. Let me notice. Let me receive more information." And this is another practice that I really encourage us, myself included , to get better at and to keep working on.
We can receive something without immediately [00:22:00] knowing what it means. We don't have to interpret everything immediately. You can have a dream or an image or a word, a feeling, a synchronicity, a card, a knowing, and simply say, "Interesting." You don't have to immediately turn it into an action plan. You don't have to Google it.
You don't have to decide, you know, that the butterfly means that you're moving to Antigua with Steve. You can just notice the butterfly, because sometimes meaning arrives later. This artwork that Rachel created took almost a year. Almost a year. The information was there, and I just didn't have the context to understand it yet.
And had I forced myself to explain it in December, I probably would have interpreted it incorrectly. So sometimes time or the passing of time is part of the interpretation You know, there's another part [00:23:00] of the visualization where I had everyone stepping into the stream, and instead of swimming, I told them, you know, "Let the water carry you.
You can still choose, you can still reach for the bank, like you still have agency, but you don't need to manufacture the movement because there's movement and momentum already here." And I think that's such a beautiful way to work with intuition. You aren't passive. You're not sitting on your couch saying, "Well, my intuition says I'm going to, you know, be a millionaire, so I'll wait."
No. You participate, you make decisions, you move, you choose, but you don't have to manufacture every detail of how the current carries you. You can work with the information instead of trying to dominate it. And then one of my favorite parts is at the end of the visualization, everyone got a little glimpse through an open door, a color, a word, an image, or a feeling, like a tiny movie trailer for twenty twenty-seven.
And I instructed them, I said, "You know, don't run towards it. Notice it. We're still here. We've got an entire quarter to live." And how [00:24:00] often do we receive a tiny glimpse of something and immediately abandon the present trying to get there? So maybe this glimpse isn't an instruction to sprint or go towards it.
Maybe it's information. And this becomes even more important as we move into October here and eventually into twenty twenty-seven because we're moving into the energy of the two. And when two enters the chat, other people enter the chat. This changes things , when it's just you, right, you can control, I'm putting in air quotation marks, a lot more of the variables.
But then another human enters. And listen, if parenting has taught me anything, is that you literally cannot control shit. You can have the best plan in the world, and then another human being does what another human being is going to do. Relationships, clients, children, partners, teams, collaborators, [00:25:00] audiences, organizations, Apple, hello.
There are more variables now, more energy, more information, more choice, more data. So the form becomes less predictable, but that does not mean the intuition becomes less trustworthy. It just means that there are more ingredients participating in how the intuition takes form, and that's different. And so I think we're going to need to get even better at this, trusting the signal without gripping the form I really want this one to land.
If you felt transformation and transformation arrived through a completely different circumstance than you expected, you were not wrong. If you felt expansion and it didn't come through the opportunity you thought it would, you were not wrong. If you felt completion and the ending looked completely different, you were not wrong.
If you knew someone was significant, but [00:26:00] perhaps misunderstood the role that they would ultimately play in your life, the significance wasn't wrong. If you knew something was going to change your life but couldn't exactly have predicted how, the knowing was not wrong. The feeling is not less real because the form changes, and the form changing doesn't automatically mean you should distrust yourself.
So instead of obsessing over what will happen, who will be there, how much money will I make, what will my business look like, where will this lead, when will it happen, what exactly will it look like? Try going underneath those questions. Ask, "How will I feel? When I cross this threshold, how do I feel? When I experience this relationship I'm sensing, how do I feel?
When my business expands, how do I feel?" And when you get that feeling, don't [00:27:00] immediately ask how you're going to manufacture that feeling. That's just the brain building that movie set, right? Feel it first, because that's where the actual intuitio- intuitive information is And a reminder that intuition doesn't have to prove itself, bringing me back to one of my favorite quotes of all time, "For those who believe, no proof is necessary, and for those who don't believe, no proof is possible."
And sometimes I think we turn intuition into a test. Did I get it right? Did I predict the date? Did the card mean exactly what I thought it meant? Did that person show up? Did I correctly forecast the future? And then suddenly, do you see what happens? Intuition becomes another performance. It becomes another place where we can succeed or fail.
It becomes a place where we can be right or wrong, and I don't want that relationship with my intuition. I don't wanna be standing there with a clipboard scoring it. Correct, incorrect, check, [00:28:00] wrong. You know? Half points, half credit, kind of. I want a relationship with my intuition that has room for curiosity
That's a much more alive relationship So again, as we kind of get to the close of this conversation, I want you to think about something right now, something you thought you knew, and something that didn't turn out the way you expected. Maybe it was from something from this year or further in your past.
And instead of asking, "Why was I wrong?" I want you to ask, "Was I actually wrong?" What was the original feeling before your brain made it concrete? Before it chose the details, what did your heart know? And then ask, " Did that happen?" Maybe it did, just differently. And if it hasn't happened yet, can you hold the knowing?
Can you hold the feeling without forcing the form? [00:29:00] Can you stay curious? Can you allow more information to arrive? Can you allow the current to move without deciding exactly where every turn has to take you? And that's the practice I am taking with me. Trust the knowing, but hold the details loosely. Your heart can know something without knowing what it looks like.
Your intuition can give you the direction without giving you every turn. It can give you the feeling without giving you the movie set, right? And maybe that's enough. And that's the whole point of an inner compass. Think about an actual compass. A compass doesn't give you a photograph of your destination.
It doesn't show you everything you're gonna meet along the way. It doesn't tell you that there's going to be this giant dead branch in a stream, right? It doesn't promise that the route will unfold exactly the way you pictured it. It points this way, and then you move. You pay attention, you gather information, you make decisions, you adjust, you interact with other people, and the [00:30:00] compass keeps doing its job.
It keeps pointing. Maybe that's what self-trust actually looks like. It's not, "I know exactly what's gonna happen," but, "I trust myself enough to stay in relationship with what I know, even when I don't know what it's going to look like." And listen, at the point of recording this, I would still really love Apple to approve my freaking app.
I would love for my intuition and my interpretation and Apple's review team to all get together and agree on the same timeline. That will be lovely. But I'm not going to use Apple's timeline as evidence against myself anymore, because the feeling is still there.
The knowing is still there. Inner Compass is already here. It's already live in the world. People are already using it, but the form is still unfolding. And you [00:31:00] know, I'm laughing out loud, 'cause of course, there couldn't be a more perfect lesson for the woman who literally built something called Inner Compass.
Of course, this is a lesson. Of course. So this week, notice where you're making yourself wrong because your reality doesn't match the movie set. Go underneath the picture, underneath the details, underneath the timeline, and ask, "What did I actually know? What did I feel? And what did my brain decide that feeling had to look like?"
Because your intuition might not have been wrong, maybe it just looks different than you thought it would, and maybe you can trust that. So, you know, today I talked a lot about this Q4 forecast, and the visualization really unlocked a lot of things for a lot of people. So you can still grab that whole forecast on replay.
It's 90 minutes. You get a workbook where you can go back to it as many times as you want. The invitation [00:32:00] and the intention is to set up yourself for confident, , action in the last quarter of this year. So we'll put it in the show notes. And if you're on Google Android, go ahead and grab Inner Compass.
, And regardless of what you choose to do with this information today, I would really just love for you to tap into your own inner compass and give it some love. All right, everyone, I'll talk to you soon.
Outro: Thanks for being here inside The Energetic Advantage. If today's episode open something for you, share it, tag it, or send to the person who popped into your mind. And remember, energy first strategy second. Your advantage has always been in you. Now it's time to lead with it. See you next time.
