When Your Intuition Doesn’t Make Sense to Anyone Else

The Loneliness of Knowing

By Jacqueline Rogers, Founder of The Athena Network | March 2026

There’s a particular kind of loneliness that comes with knowing something you cannot explain.

Not a sad loneliness. More like standing on a cliff in the dark, completely certain the ground is solid beneath your feet, while everyone around you is telling you to step back.

I’ve stood on that cliff more than once.

When Logic Says No, But You Know

In 2005, a business advisor told me that The Athena Network model would not work. He was experienced. He was credentialled. He was, by every logical measure, someone I should have listened to. And I heard him. I genuinely did. But something inside me – something that had no spreadsheet, no market research, no precedent to point to – said this is going to work. I could not have explained that knowing if my life had depended on it. I simply knew.

Twenty+ years later, The Athena Network is still here.

Intuition in Times of Crisis

In 2008, the world financially fell apart. I was told, with great certainty, that women would not invest in networking when they felt so financially unsettled. That we would fold. That people only spend on what they absolutely need in a crisis. And yet, something scratched away at me again, that same quiet insistence, women need this more now, not less. We had one of our most profitable years on record.

Acting Before the Evidence Exists

In early 2020, before any government instruction told us we couldn’t gather, I had already started moving The Athena Network online. I had created a handbook for running an Athena meeting digitally. It was clunky. It was imperfect. But it existed, because something in me would not let it not exist, there was a drive to complete it that I could not explain. When lockdown came, we were already ahead of it.  We were the first network to take our meetings online.

Holding the Line When It’s Unpopular

And then 2021. The decision to keep our meetings online permanently. I will be honest with you: I was not prepared for the response. The emails I received were not simply disappointed, they were vicious. Women told me how stupid I was. Women gossiped and colluded, determined to take me down. Women who had been part of this community wrote to tell me they hoped I would fail.

Hoped. That’s a specific kind of wish.

And still, underneath all of it, the knowing held. This is the right decision. I could not have given you a watertight business case. But I knew.

What Intuition Really Is

Here is what I’ve come to understand about intuition: it doesn’t arrive with a justification. It doesn’t carry credentials. It doesn’t explain itself at the door. It simply is. And the work, the real work, is learning to trust it even when everyone around you is speaking a louder language.

The Cost of Standing Firm

I’ve made decisions over twenty years that looked, from the outside, like stubbornness. Like arrogance. Like recklesness. Like a woman who wouldn’t listen. And in hindsight, always in hindsight, the women who stayed in our community have been grateful for the stance I took. Not because I was lucky. But because I stayed rooted when the ground was shaking.

A Different Kind of Leadership

In times of instability, I don’t lose my head. I don’t catastrophise. I fix my eyes on the end result and I walk toward it, even when the path looks different to everyone else.

That’s not a leadership style I learned in a boardroom. It’s something older than that. Something embodied. Something that lives in the body before it ever reaches the mind.

Trusting Yourself Anyway

If you’re sitting with a knowing right now, something you feel but cannot yet articulate, I want to say this to you: you don’t owe anyone an explanation for what you know. You owe yourself the courage to act on it.

The cliff is solid. Trust your feet.

Jacqueline Rogers, Founder of The Athena Network