As the Year Closes: Awareness, Intuition, and Choosing to Live Awake
As this year comes to a close, I’ve found myself reflecting.
This January marks 12 years since I held my very first Pretty Loaded class in the back of a SCHEELS sporting goods store. Looking back now, I see what led me to start a new business at one of the most inopportune times in my life.
Starting Pretty Loaded was the beginning of healing every fear, every memory, and every nightmare I had carried since I was nine years old. It was the moment I stopped letting fear quietly run my life.
The truth is, that incident wasn’t the first time my safety had been threatened. My life up until that point had been marked by close calls, moments that seemed ordinary until they suddenly weren’t. And time and time again, my intuition saved me.
What I’ve seen consistently over the years, whether training healthcare workers, working with corporations, or listening to everyday people share their stories is this:
The moments that change lives rarely come with a warning siren.
They arrive quietly. Subtly. Often as a feeling that something isn’t quite right.
That’s intuition. Intuition doesn’t shout. It whispers.
It shows up long before danger becomes obvious. The challenge isn’t that intuition isn’t speaking, it’s that we’ve been conditioned to ignore it, explain it away, or override it with logic, politeness, or social expectations.
Intuitive signals can look like:
✔️ A sudden sense of unease or hesitation
✔️ Tightness in your stomach or chest
✔️ A nagging thought you can’t shake
✔️ A feeling that something doesn’t add up
✔️ The urge to leave, change direction, or create distance
✔️ A deep knowing that someone or something isn’t safe
These signals aren’t random. Your nervous system is constantly gathering information, body language, tone of voice, movement patterns, and energy—and processing it faster than your conscious mind ever could. Intuition is your body alerting you to what it already knows.
Where people get into trouble is when they start negotiating with that signal:
I don’t want to seem rude.
I’m probably overthinking this.
Nothing bad has happened yet.
But intuition isn’t asking you to prove anything. It’s asking you to pay attention.
Learning to trust your intuition means responding sooner before you have all the answers. And yet, so many people talk themselves out of it. They worry about being polite. They don’t want to seem dramatic. They assume they’re overreacting.
In hindsight, almost every person who has experienced harm says the same thing:
“I had a bad feeling, but I ignored it.”
This year reinforced why intuition and awareness are not “soft skills.” They are survival skills. They’re rooted in the body’s ability to sense danger before the mind has time to rationalize it away. They’re part of how we were designed to move through the world; alert, grounded, and present.
Simple ways to strengthen intuition include:
👉 Reducing constant distraction. Awareness requires presence- get off your phone in public or if you are on the move.
👉 Creating physical stability. Proper nutrition, hydration (filter your water), rest, and movement all matter.
👉 Spending time in nature- barefoot if possible, or simply grounding yourself outdoors by holding onto a tree.
Grounding isn’t spiritual fluff. It’s physiological. A regulated nervous system is more aware, more responsive, and far more capable of protecting you.
What gives our team hope are the quiet wins, the messages from people who avoided a situation because they trusted their gut, the parents teaching their children awareness instead of fear, and the individuals who realized that protecting themselves isn’t selfish. It’s an act of self-respect.
So as this year ends, my invitation to you is simple: trust yourself more. Listen sooner. Don’t ignore the signals your body gives you. Live awake. Live empowered. And carry awareness and intuition into everything you do.
Because the only thing we truly have is the present, and it’s where our happiness lives.
If this resonates, don’t stop here. Watch the intuition video below and trust the internal alarm system you were born with.
Your intuition is your first line of defense. Intuition is the highest form of intelligence, and the more you listen, the stronger it gets.
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Beth is the founder of Pretty Loaded and a former NICU, PICU, and Sedation nurse. On a mission to install strength, awareness, and confidence, Beth began her journey as an educator and National speaker after a close encounter with a would-be predator. She has trained thousands of people in person, and hundreds of thousands through her online training and videos. Her safety videos have reached millions globally! She is responsible for starting the National Situational Awareness Day and this was approved by the registrar of the National Day Calendar. Beth has been featured on Fox News, Consumer Reports, Reddit, Yahoo!Finance, Elite Readers, BuzzFeed, ViralNova, and many more networks.
