Self-preservation Radar: Your Gut Is Your Guardian:

The Forgotten Intelligence of Values Alignment:

By Duncan Bolam | Good Being Blog

Published: 1st April 2025

👁️‍🗨️ In Brief:

Most people underestimate the gut — seeing it as a digestive organ rather than the seat of deep inner wisdom. But emerging neuroscience shows that our gut acts as a values radar, detecting breaches in personal integrity and alerting us when our environment or choices are misaligned. This article argues that values live in our gut, and tuning into our gut-feelings can powerfully enhance decision-making, career alignment, and holistic wellbeing. 🔥 Featured Quote

"Your gut isn't just your second brain — it's your values radar, whispering: This work is not who you are. This work is not 'why' you are."

🧭 Introduction: Harnessing the Power of Gut-Instinct: Your Inner Guide to Self-Preservation and Personal Survival:

Most people don’t know what a value is, let alone what their values are — or how they form the bedrock of who they are. And even if they did, fewer still know how to 'feel' their values or apply them. Almost no one has been taught that our value system is physically housed in the gut — as a form of intuitive self-preservation radar.

As neuroscience catches up with ancient wisdom, we are learning that the gut isn’t just a background function. It is the biological seat of one of our deepest truths: the place where we sense alignment or misalignment long before we can articulate it.

In a world where millions feel out of place in their jobs, relationships, or wider culture, this revelation is nothing short of radical. Your gut may hold the key to navigating life in a way that truly preserves your wellbeing — and your soul.

🧠 Your Gut Is Smarter Than You Think:

Science confirms that our gut contains over 100 million neurons - more than the spinal cord. Far from being a second-rate organ, the gut is the body’s first responder to violation, incongruence, and incoherence. It processes memory, emotion, and pattern recognition in real time — and crucially, it can never lie. Recall those butterflies, or are they tetradactyls, when falling in love - you can trust your gut to get that emotion spot-on too!

This is why so many people ‘just know’ when a situation feels wrong — even when all the logic stacks up on paper. The gut has already run the simulation and formed a strong sense of the outcome based on subtle data patterns it recognises, stores, and responds to.

⚖️ Values Are Not Concepts, They Are Sensations:

Values aren’t just lofty words scribbled in a personal development worksheet — they are the felt truths that govern our lives. When we face a violation of our core values — such as being forced into dishonesty, coercion, or compromise — our gut tightens, our breath shortens, our focus diminishes and our energy saps away.

We might experience such encroachments as quiet revulsion, fatigue, betrayal, numbness, or low-level dread. The body is not us being dramatic. It is our gut informing us, working as radar. Whispering: “You’re betraying something that matters deeply within.”

🧭 How to Reconnect with Your Gut-Based Values Radar:

What are Values and How does one identify them: Values and principles act as the foundational elements in a person's life relative to maintaining happiness, safety and wellbeing. These are the core beliefs and standards by which individuals assess and make decisions, judge behaviours, and align their re/actions within the context of any given environment, alien or familiar. They serve as both compass and radar for personal survival, ethical conduct, alignment of principles and our sense of fulfilment. They are key ingredients in our personal constitution and sense of individuation.

For example, if a person values honesty highly, this principle will guide their interactions and choices, influencing how they live their life and interact with others. The downside is that if they are expected to compromise their values, the risk is they will feel ethically, emotionally and morally violated. With the result risking being disillusionment, alienation, detachment, a sense of defiled boundaries, and an ideological infringement; that accumulate into conflicted behaviours and a clash of 'culture' that can prove hard to heal.

Values Ownership:

1. Name Your Core Values - Start with 3–5 values that mean the most to you. Not ones that sound good — ones that feel like they oxygenate your thoughts, feelings and performance.

2. Observe Your Gut Responses - Track how your body responds in meetings, decisions, or relationships. Are you softening or tightening? Expanding or shrinking?

3. Check for Fit - When faced with a choice, ask: “Does this move me toward or away from my core values?” Your gut will answer before your brain catches up.

4. Stop Justifying Misalignment - If your gut says no - don’t force it to compromise. As values have a habit of not being surpressed for long. Stop rationalising misfit situations. The more you override your gut, the more you dull its accuracy.

For many people, core values are not merely moral preferences — they are expressions of divine alignment. In this context, a person’s Number One value may reflect the deepest decree of their faith, their devotional centre, or even their interpretation of God itself.

A value like Compassion, Truth, Justice, Egalitarianism, or Stewardship may be the lens through which an individual lives out their relationship with the sacred. Whether that sacred prism through which they review their world is seen as Yahweh, Allah, Krishna, the Tao, the Universe, or the deep wisdom of 'Mother Nature', such a defining value becomes a conduit - a living principle through which spiritual purpose is expressed.

In this sense:- Your value is your 'Why' - your existential purpose. With our mission being our 'What' - how you enact that value in the world. Your work is your how - the day-to-day form your faith in action takes.

So when your gut signals that a choice or environment is misaligned, it may be more than intuition - it may be your soul’s integrity radar ringing the alarm-bell. It may be the echo of something sacred within whispering: “This isn’t aligned with the God I serve - the truth I live by.”

In this way, the gut becomes not just a radar, but a sanctuary - the place where moral truth and embodied knowing meet in affiliation and certitud. Such identification protects the sacred. It alerts you when you’re stepping outside the bounds of your deepest covenant.

💡 Why This Matters for Work & Wellbeing:

Many workplace breakdowns — from burnout to team conflict, redundancy to remuneration and reward — can be traced back to ongoing value violations. People aren’t just overworked; they’re undervalued or misaligned.

Your gut is your safeguard against this. It will tell you when the culture is wrong, when equity is compromised, when the leadership is off, or when the role isn’t right — often before you even know why.

The most powerful leaders of tomorrow will not only think clearly — they’ll be those who can feel clearly. Gut clarity is not a weakness; it is a superpower.

🌱 Final Thought: Self-Preservation is Always an Inside Job

We live in a world obsessed with data and metrics — but your most powerful decision-making tool is the ancient instrument humming within you - at the very centre of your being. Your gut.

Reconnecting with your gut-instinct isn’t about becoming impulsive — it’s about becoming integrated and tuning-in to that purpose-driven, naturally occurring radar evolved to look after your best interests, more capably than any other alarm-system known to humanity. When your heart, mind, and gut are in harmony, your faith in your own abilities become unshakeable. You get to act with conviction and a sense of self-assuredness few know how to leverage fully.

If you want to live well, work well, and love well — start by listening to the one guide that’s never led you astray: your values radar, housed in your gut. It exists for sound reason.

📩 Want More Like This?

Join the Good Being Newsletter for insight, courage, and creative breakthroughs every week. It’s where the future of meaningful work and wholehearted living begins.

🧠 About the Author

Duncan Bolam zeroed-in on his true vocation following a pivotal encounter with a gifted career guidance practitioner in Sunderland at the age of 32 - during what he now calls his ‘career crisis’ of 1994. Paradoxically, just two years later, he stepped into the very role of the mentor who so dramatically altered the course of his life, following a personal reinvention and completion of a 2-year postgraduate diploma in career guidance.

By merging his guidance training with 15 years of high-performance coaching and sports psychology, Duncan carved out a distinct niche as an executive coach, outplacement consultant, motivational speaker, writer and thought leader on the subject of 'calling'. Today, he embraces his life’s calling as a career coach, vocational philosopher, and creator of 'Good Being: The Meaning of Life-Engine™'.

Through his upcoming imprint, Meek & Mutual, he is helping humanity realign love, life, and livelihood. You can follow his latest work at www.goodbeing.blog or subscribe for early access to e-books, articles, and his upcoming card game prototype.