Intuition vs. Anxiety – Why Leaders Must Learn to Read Their Internal Signals
Written by Laura McCann, Founder & CEO of Auratherapy
Laura McCann is the Founder and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Auratherapy. A 30-year Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) and tech founder, she’s building a modern movement at the intersection of scent, energy, and self-mastery, turning daily rituals into transformation.
There was a period in my entrepreneurial journey when I stopped trusting myself. I didn't recognize it at the time. From the outside, my business continued to grow. I was making decisions, launching products, hiring people, solving problems, and doing all the things successful founders are expected to do. If you had asked me whether I trusted my instincts, I would have answered without hesitation. "Of course I do."
Looking back, I realize that wasn't entirely true. What I trusted was my ability to think my way through almost anything. Like many entrepreneurs, I believed that if I gathered enough information, sought enough advice, or analyzed a situation long enough, the right decision would eventually reveal itself. Every challenge felt like a puzzle waiting to be solved through better logic, better strategy, or harder work.
Then one experience changed the way I understand leadership forever. Several years ago, I entered into what I believed would become one of the most meaningful business relationships of my career. We shared a vision, built trust, and over time developed what I thought was a genuine partnership. I didn't experience it as a transaction. I experienced it as a relationship. I believed we were building something together that neither of us could have built alone.
What I didn't understand was that we weren't experiencing the same partnership. Over time, hidden struggles, unresolved wounds, and very different motivations began to surface. What I believed was alignment slowly unraveled into one of the most stressful and costly partnership ruptures of my entrepreneurial life. Like many business breakups, it wasn't one defining moment that changed everything. It was hundreds of small moments that only made sense in hindsight.
For months afterward, I replayed those moments in my mind. I searched for the conversation I had misunderstood, the warning sign I had overlooked, or the decision I should have made differently. I assumed I had missed something obvious. Surely there had been a point where a more experienced leader would have recognized what was happening.
Eventually, I realized I had been asking myself the wrong question. Instead of asking, How did I miss it? I began asking, What had I felt that I chose not to trust?
That question changed everything. When I looked back through a different lens, I remembered subtle moments when something didn't quite feel right. There had been conversations that left me with an uneasy feeling I couldn't explain. Small inconsistencies that I noticed but quickly rationalized. Tiny contractions in my body that seemed too insignificant to matter. None of them were dramatic enough to justify changing course, so I did what many capable leaders do.
I explained them away. I wanted the partnership to succeed, so I trusted the narrative more than I trusted the signals.
The experience taught me something I wish every entrepreneur had learned much earlier in their career. Our bodies often recognize misalignment before our minds are willing to acknowledge it. That doesn't mean every uncomfortable feeling is intuition or that every hesitation is a warning. It simply means that our internal experience contains information, and learning to interpret that information may be one of the most overlooked leadership skills of our time.
After thirty-four years as an entrepreneur and conducting more than 15,000 aura and chakra assessments alongside my business partner, Jim Levinson, I no longer believe the greatest challenge in leadership is making better decisions.
I believe the greater challenge is learning to understand ourselves before we attempt to understand the situation in front of us.
Business schools teach us to read financial statements. Executive coaches teach us communication. Leadership books teach us strategy, influence, and negotiation. In recent years, neuroscience has taught us a great deal about emotional regulation, stress, and the remarkable influence our nervous system has on the way we think and perform.
Yet very few people teach leaders how to interpret their own internal signals. We are taught to trust data. We are taught to trust analysis. We are taught to trust experience. Rarely are we taught to trust awareness.
That distinction has become one of the defining questions of my career because I have come to believe that leadership is not simply an intellectual exercise. It is a deeply embodied one. Before every important conversation, every difficult decision, every strategic pivot, and every meaningful opportunity, our bodies are already gathering information. The question is not whether those signals exist. The question is whether we know how to read them.
Learning to read the signals beneath the story
One of the most important shifts in my leadership journey came when I stopped assuming that every uncomfortable feeling meant the same thing.
For years, I treated all internal discomfort as something to overcome. If I felt anxious before a presentation, I assumed I lacked confidence. If I hesitated before making a major investment, I questioned my decisiveness. If my stomach tightened during a difficult conversation, I interpreted it as stress. Everything became one category. Emotion.
Over time, I realized that wasn't true at all. What I was experiencing were different internal signals, each carrying a different message. The problem wasn't that I was feeling too much. The problem was that I hadn't yet learned the language my body was speaking.
This realization led me to an area of neuroscience known as interoception, our ability to perceive and interpret sensations originating inside the body. Long before our conscious minds organize experience into coherent thought, our nervous system is constantly gathering information. Changes in heart rate, muscle tension, breathing patterns, and subtle shifts throughout the body are being registered and interpreted, often before we are consciously aware of them.
Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio expanded on this idea through his Somatic Marker Hypothesis, suggesting that our bodies help guide decision-making by attaching physiological responses to previous experiences. In other words, the body is not separate from intelligence. It is part of the way we think.
I found that fascinating because it gave scientific language to something I had been observing for years.
The body often notices before the mind understands. As entrepreneurs, we spend an enormous amount of time developing our intellectual abilities. We learn how to read financial statements, analyze markets, negotiate contracts, and build strategic plans. We become fluent in external data, yet many of us remain surprisingly disconnected from our internal data. We know our quarterly revenue, customer acquisition costs, and profit margins, but we don't always recognize what our own nervous system is trying to tell us.
Perhaps that is why so many successful leaders describe feeling disconnected from themselves despite achieving extraordinary results. They have learned to master the business while slowly losing touch with the instrument through which every business decision is made.
Themselves. One question has gradually become central to the way I approach both leadership and the work we do at Auratherapy.
Where do you feel it? It is a deceptively simple question.
When I ask it during an aura consultation, people rarely hesitate. They don't need several minutes to analyze the answer or search for the right words. Almost immediately, they point to their stomach, their chest, their throat, their jaw, or their head.
The body already knows. What most people have never been taught is how to interpret what those locations may be communicating.
Over the past decade, after conducting more than 15,000 aura and chakra assessments, I have noticed something remarkably consistent. Anxiety is universal, but it rarely expresses itself in the same place or in the same way. Two founders can be facing nearly identical business challenges while experiencing completely different internal realities.
One entrepreneur becomes consumed with financial security. Every decision is filtered through questions of survival, stability, and control. Another worries primarily about disappointing employees, customers, or family members. A third becomes trapped in relentless self-questioning, convinced that one wrong decision will expose them as unqualified. Yet another retreats into endless analysis, believing that one more conversation or one more spreadsheet will finally produce certainty.
From the outside, all four appear anxious. From the inside, they are experiencing entirely different conversations.
This observation became one of the bridges between my entrepreneurial life and my work studying the chakra system. Traditional psychology describes these patterns through cognition, emotional conditioning, attachment, and behavior. Neuroscience explains them through the nervous system and the brain's predictive responses. The chakra system offers another lens, suggesting that different areas of the body become associated with different aspects of the human experience, our sense of safety, creativity, confidence, compassion, communication, intuition, and purpose.
For many years, these disciplines were presented as though they belonged in separate worlds. I have never experienced them that way.
To me, they are different languages describing the same human reality. One uses biology. Another uses psychology. Another uses energy.
All three are trying to answer the same question: Why do human beings behave the way they do under pressure?
Once I stopped seeing these perspectives as competing explanations, something unexpected happened. I also stopped asking whether someone was simply "anxious." Instead, I became curious about how their anxiety expressed itself. That distinction changed everything.
A leader whose primary concern is safety makes different decisions than a leader whose greatest concern is approval. Someone whose internal dialogue revolves around self-worth will approach conflict differently than someone whose deepest struggle is trust. Although the outward behavior may look similar, the underlying signal is entirely different.
Different signals require different responses. This is one of the reasons I have become cautious about leadership advice that promises universal solutions. Human beings are wonderfully complex. The same strategy that liberates one leader may overwhelm another because the underlying challenge is not the same.
The work, I have come to believe, is not learning to suppress our internal signals. It is learning to become fluent in them.
When excitement sounds like intuition
One of the questions I am asked most often is how to tell the difference between intuition and anxiety. It is an understandable question because both can create powerful physical sensations. They can increase our heart rate, sharpen our attention, and leave us feeling as though something significant is about to happen. For many years, I assumed those were the two experiences I needed to learn to separate.
Over time, I realized I had been asking the wrong question. I don't often confuse anxiety with intuition. If anything, I confuse excitement with intuition. As entrepreneurs, we spend our lives creating, imagining, and pursuing opportunities that don't yet exist. It is natural that our bodies respond when we glimpse the possibility of something meaningful. A new business idea, an unexpected partnership, or a bold strategic decision can create a surge of energy that feels both exhilarating and unsettling. The challenge is that excitement, anxiety, and intuition can all produce similar physiological responses, making it difficult to distinguish one from another.
The body is responding, but it is not always responding for the same reason. This realization changed the way I think about decision-making. Rather than asking whether I feel excited or nervous, I have learned to become curious about the quality of the signal itself. Is the feeling expanding or contracting? Does it become quieter as I sit with it, or does it grow louder and more urgent? Does it remain consistent over time, or does it fluctuate with every new piece of information? Those questions have proven far more useful than asking whether I simply feel good or bad about a decision.
One of the clearest examples came when I made the decision to open Auratherapy's first retail location inside Asheville's historic Grove Arcade. From a conventional business perspective, it was difficult to justify. The world was still navigating the uncertainty of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), retail businesses everywhere were struggling, and I had never operated a permanent storefront. Financially, the commitment stretched me beyond my comfort zone, and I ultimately needed to borrow money from my mother to make the opportunity possible.
If I had looked only at the numbers, I might never have moved forward. Yet beneath all of the uncertainty was something I can still remember with remarkable clarity. There was a quiet steadiness that never disappeared. It wasn't confidence in the outcome because I knew there were no guarantees. It wasn't the excitement of starting something new, although that was certainly present. It was something deeper and far less emotional. It was a calm sense that this was the next right step, even though I couldn't yet see where it would lead.
Looking back, I have come to believe that this is one of intuition's defining characteristics. Excitement rises and falls as circumstances change. Anxiety becomes louder when uncertainty increases. Intuition, however, remains remarkably consistent. It does not demand immediate action, nor does it argue for its own importance. It simply waits patiently for us to become quiet enough to recognize it.
Read more from Laura McCann
Laura McCann, Founder & CEO of Auratherapy
Laura McCann, a former child star, France-raised creative, NY fashion alum, and tech entrepreneur, now leads Auratherapy as Founder & CEO. With 30 years as a founder across CPG and tech, she’s bringing luxury and innovation to functional fragrance through breathable, essential oil-based Aroma Perfumes and water-based aura sprays. Auratherapy pairs this with data-driven aura and chakra diagnostics that translate energy into personalized rituals. Her mission is to help people reclaim their breath, remember they are vibrational beings, and transform through the practice of adoring yourself.
