How often do you listen to your gut feeling? Your instincts might be your #1 tool for making your best decisions.
First things first, what does that term – “gut feeling” – mean? You know it when you sense it. It’s that voice in your head who whispers advice, knowledge, guidance from some inexplicable, mysterious source of information. Or is it?
In reality, it is a combination of instinct and innate, deeply stored knowledge your brain has tapped into to make sense of a situation, provide information to connect dots, and give you advice. This is your core intuition, and it might be your best decision-making resource. However, we often ignore it since taking advice from your “gut” feels somehow illogical.
Think back to the times when you’ve ignored your intuition. How did those decisions turn out? Speaking from my own experience, I can report that 100% of my worst decisions were a product of ignored intuition. And some of my absolute best decisions are directly tied to that voice rising from a whisper to a shout, and I turned away from something that, in hindsight, was too good to be true
Intuition isn’t a magical gift only a few lucky people possess. It is a gift we must be willing to unwrap and put to good use, though. If you want to learn how to listen to and leverage it more frequently here are a few good starting points:
1. When your body is trying to tell you it’s sick. Out bodies are designed to send us signal when something is wrong. Listen!
2. When you feel exhausted just being around a particular person. Red flag that your body has sensed that person might be draining your energy, like a vampire, and this could be a toxic relationship.
3. When you sense danger. You know you’ve felt that gnawing in your stomach when a dark hallway doesn’t seem like a good idea to walk alone, or someone is potentially following or watching you too closely. Apply common sense in these situations but be on alert.
4. When you think someone is lying to you. A business-ethics doctoral study conducted back in 2014 found that people who make quick judgments about a person’s honesty are more likely to be correct about whether that person was dishonest. We may be on the lookout for the usual physical signs such as shifty eyes or quick talk, but dishonest people can easily deceive us. Often, our intuition can tell us exactly what we need to know.
5. Overthinking something you know how to do! Our rational brain can be a bugger, and internal self-talk causes us to question our hard-earned skills and talents. In these cases (like writer’s block), distract that rational brain with a totally unrelated activity and unlock your instincts.
The situations above are just a sampling of times when it makes sense to trust your instincts, the mysterious gut feeling, first. The more you exercise the muscle, the more comfortable you will feel when leveraging this valuable internal tool to make your best decisions.
