How Do I Know What the Right Choice Is

When you’re searching for direction, rather than seeking outside guidance or reading other people's advice books, sometimes what you need is to slow down, listen deeply, and learn the language of your own inner guidance.

In this solo episode, host and Soul Medic Rachel Alexandria explores what it's like to trust yourself, especially when you’ve been conditioned not to. 

Drawing from her work with high-level leaders and her background in psychology and spirituality, she unpacks the difference between fear and intuitive knowing, how spirit communicates without urgency, and why clarity requires your active participation. Through personal reflections and a powerful story of receiving unexpected guidance, Rachel offers a grounded, nuanced perspective on how to partner with the unseen while staying rooted in your own sovereignty.

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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.

Rachel: [00:00:00] Welcome to Lonely At the Top, a podcast for high level leaders carrying the invisible weight of the world. 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, it's just us. I want to be offering some more solo episodes. To just give you a little bit more insight from where I sit in my place of counseling and supporting leaders and just what I tend to think about, when I record these episodes and observations I have from my background, both in psychology and spirituality Today, what I wanted to talk [00:01:00] about is.

Something that came up for me a little bit during Mark Silver's episode. we talked a lot about spirituality in different forms during that conversation, and I.

A lot of my clients talk to me about things like, how do I know, how do I know what to listen to? How do I know what's my gut versus my heart, and how do I know the right steps to make the right choice to make? You know, how do I know when it's the universe guiding me versus. My own decision making. I have come to sit in a very different place with this than I used to.

I mean, I do think we get a lot of information from, you know, now, now science is starting to say we have three brains. We have a head brain, a heart brain, and a gut brain. Maybe I will try and find the science and put that in the show notes, but we'll see if I get to it. [00:02:00] but. That we get different information from those places and everybody's a little different in how they know and receive that information.

This is part of what I'm working with clients on all the time is. How do you know how to trust yourself, especially if when you grew up the people around you told you not to listen to what you thought you knew inside yourself and instead to believe them, whether that was, maybe an oppressive culture, upbringing, or a very demanding religion, or parents who weren't the healthiest.

A lot of the clients I work with are. Trying to relearn how to trust themselves even when the world isn't necessarily validating them. And also, there's only so much validation you can seek. Even if everyone around you who you now love and trust is saying, yeah, this is a good mode, that this is a good plan, or you're doing enough, you're not gonna trust yourself if you've never learned how to do that.

So [00:03:00] there's. The psychological aspect of learning to do that and connecting with yourself and with your parts. You know, learning to harmonize between your brain and your gut and your heart. And there's also listening to what I would call spirit. you'll hear in Mark's episode, he talks a lot about, and you kind of see him exemplify this like.

Listening deeply and making a practice of listening deeply. And you might wonder what, what is one? Listening to? How do you know when you hear it right? and that's, that's one question that I think takes time and practice. One of the things I have written about before is Spirit almost never says things with urgency or anxiety. If it has fear or anxiety in what you're receiving, that's probably coming from a part of you. That's, that's coming from something else That's not spirit because spirit relays things from a, a timeless place where [00:04:00] there's no such thing as urgency. Not really.

So everything that I ever really know that I hear from spirit is calm, and it is not demanding or commanding or imperative. It's just here's this piece of information.

And so part of the difficulty Or the nuance, I should say, with wanting to wait for direction from the universe, from Spirit is

You can only partner with it because it is relatively neutral. As far as you know, it's not, it's not a person, it doesn't have personal psychology, spirit or God, or however you wanna define this. and some of you may have backgrounds that disagree with me, which is fine. You know how I'm talking about this may not work for you from my standing spirit is neutral.

I mean, it, it cares about everything in creation, but it is not, um. Judging us or having preferences, really, what it does [00:05:00] is partner with us. And so when you are seeking to know a direction to go, you have to put energy and impulse into it. It's almost like. The idea that objects at rest tend to stay at rest and objects in motion tend to stay in motion.

Like you get to put something into motion and then get a response. There is a mirroring, there is a responding that the universe or spirit will do, but it's almost never, I would say very rarely. initiatory, like we are the ones who take initiative. We're the ones who partner. with spirit to get information, to take action, to be like, okay, is this working?

Give me insight, like to ask. And what I loved about Mark's episode that he talked about, for a fair bit was. He took the time to do his personal work to really identify better how to name what he needs, and that works so much better in personal relationships and in professional relationships to [00:06:00] be able to articulate, okay, I'm having a problem and here is what the kind of thing I want in response from you.

This is also true in our relationship with the divine, with the infinite, with the universe. When you say, I have a problem, I don't know, do something about it, that's not likely to be very successful. because we are here to be in our sovereignty, to be in leadership of our own lives and. Instead, when you go to Spirit or the Divine and say, okay, very specifically, I want to get a clear feeling of is this like, here's the choice I wanna make and I want some clarity about, is this for my highest good?

Like a question I have often asked in years past when my business wasn't doing as well as I needed it to, was, should I just quit and, and find a job? And I have asked that very specifically and looked for answers and tried to be as open as possible to hearing [00:07:00] whatever I need to hear. Like I'm not in this lifetime to be in opposition to what is from my greatest good.

you know, like I am here to learn, to be adaptable, to work with the flow of life, not against it. They call it pushing the river. I don't wanna push the river, you know, so every time I've done that, in one notable time, I can remember I was doing a, constellation for those who know family constellations or systemic constellations.

I'm also a facilitator, and so I set. A bunch of objects up as representatives for a choice. And I was talking to a friend across the table. We were at one of my favorite restaurants in Seattle. Shout out to Saffron Indian cuisine. And I was talking to my friend and explaining things and kinda going through my process.

I don't even remember the conversation, but I had set up. Objects on the table to represent things, and I had set up like a water glass was full of water as the, this represents me just quitting and [00:08:00] getting a job. If that's in my highest and best. Interest. So we're talking and exchanging.

It's a busy restaurant. Lots of things going on. And then I kind of, okay, come back to what I'm working with, looking at these objects and I'm gonna move them around and see how they feel like using them as a way to test my knowing and receive information. And the glass of water that I had set up as quit the option to quit, had been removed from the table.

I didn't even notice one of the busers had come by and cleared off something from, they, they did this constantly, this restaurant is very well maintained. They had taken away my water glass, they had taken away that glass and it literally, it had been removed from the table, and that to me felt like a very clear message.

But I had made a very clear request. So that is my take on those of you who might be in the quandary of like, what should I do? [00:09:00] I, I'm waiting for guidance from the universe. I would say get clearer on what your ask is and what you need as a response. Like specify your need because it will help you in your communication with people and with the divine.

That's it for today.

So thanks for listening to Lonely At the Top. If today's conversation resonated with you, I hope you'll check in with yourself and see what you might be carrying because you don't have to carry it all alone. I work with high performers and leaders who wanna clean up their secret messes, and you can learn more.

At my website, rachelalexandria.com, you might not know, but I also do Magic sessions, which are standalone sessions to just help people get real fast clarity, get some deeper insight because that is one of my specialties. So you can find out more about that at my website, [00:10:00] rachelalexandria.com. If you know another leader who needs to hear this message today, please send this episode to them because yeah, it's lonely at the top, but it doesn't have to stay that way.

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