Everyone’s born with the wonderful gift that is their Internal Guidance System (IGS). Your IGS helps you know what’s in your best interest, how to live your best life, and is there to assist you at any moment.
Unfortunately, most people today generally aren’t aware of their Internal Guidance System and have to be taught how to use it.
This is because people are taught early in life to pay more attention to what’s going on outside of them rather than their own feelings.
When you’re told over and over to disregard your feelings, then you naturally begin to distrust them.
If you feel an urge to go left, but are told that you’re wrong and are pulled over to the right every time you so much as try to go left, you’ll possibly begin to discount your urges.
This will cause you to change your course at least for a while.
Some people are very aware of their IGS from a very early age. They’re the people who still followed their inner compass even when their friends, families, and teachers told them to go in a specific direction. They never discounted their urges because they knew exactly what they wanted from the beginning, but everyone is different.
Parents can learn about their IGS and then pass on that knowledge to their children. You can encourage your child to pay attention to their Internal Guidance System and learn how to use and trust in it. Thus you can support both a child who is already aware of their IGS and a child who hasn’t developed this connection already.
Whether a child is born with a strong sense of their IGS or not, there can come times where they seem to have lost this connection. The child who was always independent begins to follow the crowd or makes choices that you foresee having negative consequences. As a parent that’s aware of the power of the Internal Guidance System, you may actually wonder if it’s possible for your child’s IGS to break down.
I can assure you that the IGS itself is not broken.
There are one of two possibilities:
- Your child has stopped checking in with (or listening to) their IGS.
- Your child is checking in with their IGS and it’s taking them on a path that’s different than you would prefer.
The thing for any parent to do in this situation is to first check in with their own Internal Guidance System. This will help you to approach your child in a way that’s most likely to achieve a positive outcome. That doesn’t necessarily mean that your son or daughter will start making decisions you would prefer, but it’ll allow you to understand what’s going on in your child’s life.
They might need a gentle reminder about their IGS or a refresher on how to tap into and trust it. Sometimes a person needs reminders about the tools they have at their disposal.
Or you may discover they’ve consciously been bypassing the use of this powerful tool. At some points in life, it’s possible for a person to choose not to use their tools for a variety of reasons even when they know they have them. For example, they might be afraid of being “different,” or it may seem like it’s just easier to follow the group.
Whatever your child’s reasons are for not following their IGS, you can still be a role model by tapping into your own. In this way, you’ll feel when it’s right to encourage your child and when it’s better to step back for a while. Don’t try to force to use of a tool they aren’t open to in the moment.
Keep in mind that even if they aren’t consciously following their IGS, it isn’t broken. They’ll learn from this experience and when they come back to this tool, they’ll have been on their path and have more information to help them formulate their next moves.
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