Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “None of us will ever accomplish anything excellent or commanding except when he listens to the whisper which is heard by him alone.”

In the noisy and often confused world in which we live, it is easy to miss the whisper.

Your intuition, while not completely explainable, is based on years of experience and insight. Decisions should rarely be made based on intuition alone, but I find more often than not it is intuition–a form of the whisper–that gets discounted or ignored.

We live in a world of copies. While we often emulate others to learn our roles and professions, the tragedy is when emulation becomes a habit and we lose our uniqueness.

My friend Joe Calloway writes and talks about being “a category of one.” His concept couples uniqueness with what customers truly value; as I often say, it isn’t enough to be different if the customer doesn’t value the difference.

The focus during these especially trying times is on what we don’t want, or what we want to avoid. Keep listening for the whisper that is uniquely your’s, for it will remind you of things you didn’t even know you knew and keep you focused on your dreams and desires instead of your difficulties and dreads.