It can be really hard to “trust your gut” in certain situations because you never know if your gut feeling is right or not. However, after reading these stories, you may learn that trusting your gut is something you should always do. People share the times when trusting their gut ended up paying off. This content has been edited for clarity.
“Construction Debris”
“We were returning home late one night from watching my grandson in a play. Our car was packed with my mother, two grown kids, two grandkids, my husband, and myself. I was exhausted. Driving down a dark rural highway, we passed something on the side of the road that looked like a big pile of metal. My brain was trying to process what I’d seen and shrugged it off as construction debris, but a voice in my head kept saying I should turn around and investigate.
My youngest daughter finally said, ‘Mom, if you think we should check it out, do it. Turn around.’ So I did, and what we found was a mangled car with a young man trapped inside. No one else on that road stopped, but I’m so glad we did. We called 911, flagged down a passing car that just happened to have a nurse inside, and we all stayed with the young man, talking to him until help arrived. I was never able to find out what happened to him after that, but I felt like we’d saved his life.”
Close Call
“June 18th, 2016 at around 4:30 PM, I was almost abducted. I had asked my boyfriend who was 18 at the time (I was 17) if he could get me a pack of cigarettes and come hang out with me. He couldn’t because he was at work so instead of waiting til 9 PM for him to get off work, I ended up reaching out to a ‘trusted friend.’ My friend said he couldn’t because he was busy, but his buddy John could swing by and take me to the gas station.
I still remember very vividly getting into his truck, a white 2002 Silverado. As I crawled in, he looked at me stating, ‘I was prettier than my friend told him,’ and immediately something felt off. His eyes were bloodshot and he just kept looking over at me. As we were arriving closer to the gas station he said, ‘I have to make a stop in Riverside first. You’re coming with.’ I immediately asked him to pull over.
Riverside was NOT a place you wanted to be caught in. It was an area with a lot of drugs, street gangs, violence, prostitution, and abductions. He didn’t pull over and as we were approaching the bypass he should’ve taken to get to the gas station, he nudged left and started driving towards riverside.
My instincts kicked in and I started screaming to let me out. A woman who was driving on the passenger side of the vehicle saw my erratic behavior and tried sandwiching the car but John sped up to get her away from his truck. So I snuffed his nose and broke it. I then jumped out of the car. Thankfully every car stopped and a man was calling the police from his vehicle.
Come to find out, John was actually wanted in my area as a suspect in the abduction of another girl. My ‘trusted friend’ actually wound up ratting both of him and John out and they had a girl who had been missing for 8 months. Ever since that day, I trust my gut. With all of this being said – please be careful who you trust and where you are with whoever. This was seriously somebody I trusted and knew for years that set this up into an actual plan to harm me, who analyzed my life and movements to try and take advantage of me. Please trust your gut.”
Run
“When I was around 14, my parents and I traveled around Africa. We ended up midway down the East Coast in a rainforest area called Nature’s Valley. There were no woods, just pure free green luscious forest – Tarzan-style vines and all. Our small campsite was quite a ways into the wilderness surrounded by trees and ferns, but was peaceful and pretty safe, as it was private property. The groundskeeper actually stayed anywhere near there and he was a pretty nice guy. All in all, safe.
I decided one afternoon to walk down the hill instead of up through the forest as I usually did. As I was nearing the entrance to the property, a dusty faded pickup truck stopped right by the gate. There were about eight men in the vehicle – two in the cab and six in the back – and I knew something wasn’t right. They hadn’t seen me yet but their clothes didn’t fit the scene of the campsite; their shirts were stained and full of holes, and in general, looked like the sort of people a 14-year-old girl would want to stay away from.
But I’m not prejudiced. I knew something was wrong, but I wasn’t about to run away without provocation. Obviously one of them saw me because he said something to the others, and they all jumped out of the vehicle and over the gate, in a friendly way, as if they were lost and wanted to ask for directions or something. But I trusted what my intuition was telling me and began running away with as much energy as I could muster.
They started chasing me so I eventually jumped off the path and into the thorn bushes despite being barefoot. Long grass on a hot summer day in Africa equals snakes. Deadly ones. I hoped they’d come to the same conclusion and stop running after me, but they didn’t. I was leaping over rocks and somehow didn’t fall or twist an ankle. As soon as the campsite came into view, they all suddenly stopped and watched me run flat into the trees near where we were camped up.
They didn’t come back, and my parents didn’t believe me – despite the dozens of thorns still stuck in my legs and feet and the scratches I had all over myself from the lower tree branches. Still, I didn’t go near that gate again until the moment we drove away. A week or two later, a tragic case of a woman came on the news, and guess who the perpetrators were. Probably the one time my intuition actually worked.”
The Truth Comes Out
“I was sitting with three co-workers one afternoon while we were on one of those obligatory corporate ‘retreats’ where leaders get out of the office and attempt to form better relationships. There’d been a great deal of turnover recently; new C-level leaders had come into the company from a competitor and spirits were not high as many of us had been around for a long time and were watching people we’d known for 10+ years get replaced by – you guessed it – people from the competitor.
My new boss had gotten hired (from a different competitor) just weeks before all of this change and turmoil began. As we were sitting there, I had this sudden, deep certainty that this retreat had only been allowed to go forward as a means of getting us out of the office so that locks could be changed, access codes reconfigured, and root passwords changed. I looked up at my boss who had been gregarious but reserved most of that first day.
‘This is the last time all of us will sit together, isn’t it? You’ve already been told or chosen who is replacing several of us, and they all start this coming Monday. Most of us won’t see our offices again, will we?’ I said.
It was like I’d just dumped a basket of turds into a punch bowl. I continued:
‘Seven. It’s seven out of the nine of us that are being replaced, probably with more than seven people, but that’s because you’ve all worked out the new organization you wanted, isn’t it?’
My boss was distinctly uncomfortable. He was pale and uncertain like I’d just read his obituary or something equally chilling. At that point, the other six or so people that hadn’t been sitting with us had come into earshot and the commentary from each spilled out all at once, overlapping like the sound of traffic on a highway. My boss at the time was neither timid nor quiet, and he seemed to realize what was happening and spoke up:
‘Hold on, hold on. Yes, there are some… changes. I had planned to discuss this with each of you privately on Sunday but I wanted this retreat to happen because we’ve been planning it for so long.’
I stopped him and said, ‘I don’t think that any of us appreciate that this time away is being used to rearrange and reallocate our teams. I also don’t think that it was in anyone’s best interest to travel all over the state to get here to engage in some rah-rah team building and to build one, three, and five year plans that will never happen. I’m right, aren’t I?’
My boss, a man about twice my girth but half my height, stood up and looked at his assembled team. He’d gone from pale and tentative to well into a self-righteous fury.
“Shut up, stop talking. I don’t know how you know any of this but for the most part, yes, it’s true. [Name and name] will be in the office on Monday. [Name] is being reassigned, and we are separating the 24/7 team from the rest. I’ll make sure your name is added to the list. The rest of you, please be in the office at 0800 on Monday and wait in the lobby. Representatives from HR will be on site to handle your paperwork and talk through the job assistance and other programs available to you.”
He stomped out of the room and went to his truck, started it, and left. Everyone was looking at me, most of them with mouths open, a couple confused or disoriented. We spent maybe another hour talking and reminiscing until eventually, someone asked: ‘So how’d you know about this? What did you find?’
I shook my head and said, ‘This all just came to me as we were sitting here. Our (soon-to-be) former boss was a little more quiet than usual and there was something in the way he looked at each of us. I just started talking when it hit me and I didn’t stop. I felt it in my gut and chest that I was right, that it was better if I blew the lid off this instead of letting us waste the next couple of days.”