How Do Leaders Navigate by Intuition

When you’re at the top, no one can hand you a map. The path forward is yours to navigate, and sometimes, the only compass you have is your own intuition. In this solo episode, host and Soul Medic Rachel Alexandria explores how leaders can learn to trust their inner knowing when logic and strategy fall short. Drawing from her own journey and lessons from past guests, she shares how intuition speaks through the body, why so many of us were taught to ignore it, and how reconnecting with this internal guidance becomes essential for making brave, heart-centered decisions.

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What is Lonely at the Top?

The podcast for high-level leaders carrying the invisible weight of the world.
If you’re a founder, executive, or high-ranking leader, you already know this truth: the higher you rise, the fewer people you can safely talk to.

Lonely at the Top is a sanctuary in the storm—a space where the emotional cost of leadership is named, and where relief, clarity, and grounded support are always on the table.

Hosted by Soul Medic and former psychotherapist Rachel Alexandria, this podcast dives into the unspoken realities of high-level decision-making: the pressure, the isolation, the doubt, and the fatigue. Each episode offers insight, emotional tools, and conversations with seasoned leaders who’ve learned to navigate the weight of responsibility without losing themselves.

 When you're at the top, no one can tell you for sure which way to go and how it's gonna work out. You have to make decisions based on gut and intuition. ​

📍   📍 Welcome to Lonely At the Top, a podcast for high level leaders carrying the invisible weight of the world on their shoulders. Because you know the higher you rise, the fewer people you can safely talk to. Here we welcome founders, executives, and decision makers who feel the isolation and pressure that comes with power.

Lonely at the top is your sanctuary in the storm, and I'm your host, Soul Medic and former psychotherapist, Rachel Alexandria.  Today is a solo show.

I wanted to talk about the episode Leading When All the Lights Go Out with Megan Gluth, because I've really been reflecting on it and it came up again in an episode I recorded today that we will publish probably in mid-November with Dee Meecham.

A topic that comes up a lot with the leaders who are on the show and the people that are in my client seats is, how do you know what to do when you have a hard decision to make? And there's not really anybody who can guide you. There's not really anybody who can say there's a right way or a wrong way.

Leaders have to be people who are comfortable taking big risks because they're the captain of the ship, and there is nothing on the ocean that tells you whether or not you're going the way that you intend to be going, especially if you're sailing out for a land that isn't known to you or anyone on your ship.

We need to talk about the role of intuition and how, you know when something is intuition versus a good idea. Um, in the interview I did today, I was sharing a, a story from my life and Dee actually took a minute to ask me, well, how did that happen? How did you know? And there are so many stories in my life that are like, I just

ran into a wall where I couldn't go any further, and so I had to stop and 'cause I knew no one could give me the answer. Hey, your business isn't successful. How should you pivot it? No one can tell me what's gonna work.

When you're at the top, that's often what you're experiencing. No one can tell you for sure which way to go and how it's gonna work out. So you have to make decisions based on gut and intuition. And for those who don't know what that is or don't know how to explore that, or maybe who have a hard time trusting it, I, I just kinda wanted to talk about it for a minute.

How do you know when something is your gut or your intuition versus thinking thoughts about something, reasoning something out? For me, things that come from my intuition feel fully formed. It's like they drop into my head. Some people call it a download because they'll say, oh, I've got a download from Spirit.

I don't know what we used to call it before. Technology. I have a friend who, has a whole thing about divine droplets, or divine drops. That's what it feels like. I have learned to understand because I, I basically did a bunch of exploration, my internal pilgrimage, I guess, years ago, to really understand what is the difference between me thinking thoughts and me receiving information.

Because they are different and they are subtle, but once you learn it, it becomes easier. It becomes like a muscle memory. And the trouble is when you, like a lot of my clients, grew up in a family or had a very strong figure in your life say, you're wrong about that.

How you feel isn't the truth. That's not what's happening . Being gaslit or, having someone DARVO you, you lose touch with your ability to really trust and believe your intuition. Like right now I'm getting leg tingles, so I feel like I'm onto an important topic. Learning to trust your intuition.

I mean, it's a thing in the beginning that all of us just have. Then life shows up and other people show up, and our desire to please other people or our fear of being punished by other people supersedes our understanding of our intuition and of our gut responses. We just stop listening, we stop paying attention as much.

Reconnecting with it or reestablishing your understanding of that and not discounting it is the work. I know for me, I used to think whenever I got little tingles or, like hair standing on end or feeling racing down my spine or across my arms like I just did right now, I would think,

oh, bodies are weird. And in my family there's the expression, oh, a rabbit walked over my grave. That's what it said in my family when I was growing up. And uh, like you just get a shutter and it's like, oh, I just, I don't know. Weird nerve firings is what I thought it was. And when I was in my year of love and spirit, when I really had

A significant portion of time where I was getting a bunch of signs saying, Hey Rachel, you need to change your life and do something different because it's what you're called for. There wasn't any person who told me that. I just had a bunch of small things but very meaningful things that showed up and happened and I was like, how do I learn to use this?

Okay, so I have a talent I guess, that no one's ever really told me I have, and no one's trained me in it. What do I do with this? I just started making notes and listening and collecting data, and that's how I learned to really value my intuition and understand that little tingles and stuff are signs your hands heating up when you hear something or your gut turning over. The body is your instrument and

we ignore it at our peril because it's constantly giving you information. The information is there, we just usually are ignoring it. So that's the piece I wanted to visit today to talk a little bit to just bring that up and

invite anyone listening to better understand, if you don't already understand, that your body is communicating with you and it's not just about being hungry or sleepy, it's also giving you verification of your intuition. It's trying to get your attention to notice something.

And you can choose to turn toward it and fine tune it, fine tune that instrument whenever you want. And the more you move forward in leadership, the more you need something like that.

This is how you can lead when all the lights go out. This is how my clients understand to make moves when they don't know the right thing to do. They just know they need to do something. They feel this in their body or in their heart or in their gut.

It is an ability to move from intuition and take risks without knowing the path, without the path already being there.

If you're listening to this solo episode, I would love to hear from you about your experience. How have you worked with your intuition? Do you have questions about intuition? And if you have any other questions about the podcast, any of the interviews that I've done or would like a follow up. I would love to hear any responses.

You can email me at [e-mail].  

📍 Thanks for listening today to Lonely At the Top. If this conversation, if this soliloquy resonated for you, I hope you'll take a moment and really check in with yourself and see what you might be carrying. You don't have to hold it all alone. I help high performers and other leaders with cleaning up their secret messes and tuning more into their intuition.

If you wanna find out more, check out rachel alexandria.com. If you know another leader who needs to hear this show, please send it their way, because, yeah, it's lonely at the top, but it doesn't have to stay that way.