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If you listen to enough interviews with entrepreneurs, there’s one piece of advice you will hear over and over: Trust your gut.
Unfortunately, this may be the least practical advice ever, because “trusting your gut” looks and feels different to everyone. And if you’re a billionaire who has built and sold ten companies, trusting your gut may seem like a more valid strategy than if you’re Joe Shmoe starting a dog food business in his garage. After all, Joe’s gut doesn’t have much of a track record.
But this is exactly why I wrote my book Everyday Intuition: What Psychology, Science and Psychics Can Teach Us About Finding and Trusting Our Inner Voice. Intuition is just another word for “trusting your gut,” and I believe it’s a tool that we can all learn to use.
One of the funny paradoxes about intuition is that it is both derided as not real, and then trotted out in the highest-stakes moments. When faced with the choice between two jobs or two apartments or two romantic partners that both have an equal ledger of pros and cons, where there is no clear winner, what do you do? You go with your gut. It’s a fine idea, in theory, but why should you trust your gut at these critical junctures when you haven’t practiced using it in the day-to-day? We need to cultivate everyday intuition.
When I first started writing about intuition, it felt like trying to staple Jell-O to the wall. Because, what the hell is it? I’d use a very technical term, like “vibe.” That didn’t exactly seem like something you could take to the bank. Intuition is indeed a vibe, and it’s also knowing without knowing why (I’d argue the “why” isn’t all that relevant, but your knowing is), and it’s direction: Go this way, not that, move toward this and away from that. You can’t always show your work to mark how you got from point A to point B, and that can make you doubt the final destination.
But after exploring intuition from many different angles — neuroscientific, corporeal, psychological, metaphysical, spiritual, and the plain old pragmatic — I realized something. While intuition is often derided as irrational, illogical, and fanciful, intuition actually is data.
As I did research for this book, I spoke to scientists and psychics alike who study and use intuition. While a psychic might contend that intuition is the province of the spirit, neuroscientists attribute it to the brain. Neuroscientist Patrick House describes the brain thusly: “a thriftstore bin of evolutionary hacks Russian-dolled into a watery, salty piñata we call a head.” Our brain’s main job is to keep us alive, and recognizing patterns rapidly is an evolutionary asset.
So, to neuroscientists, intuition is pattern recognition and memory retrieval that happens superfast, below the level of our consciousness, and often results in biofeedback (sweaty palms, a lump forming in your throat, a wave of nausea). Our brains process the data and spit it out in sweat and feelings. Our minds make meaning from it. Our bodies are inextricably linked to it all. Attempting to locate an Intuition Central in the brain is kind of a fool’s errand (one this fool spent many hours trying to find) because of the complex and dynamic interplay of the human beast.
Related: 4 Reasons Intuition Is an Essential Leadership Skill
From the scientific perspective, intuition is our brains recognizing patterns in the world and sending signals about the meaning of those patterns at light speed, often subperceptual and through biofeedback. Think: your palms sweat when you hear a certain song on the radio that you associate with a memory, even a deeply buried one. So, intuition is an ensemble of brain processes like memory activation, unconscious processing, and prediction. We make predictions based on past experience, and if you have a lot of experience in a given area — reading people, for example — then your intuitions probably come fast and correct. Since that super rapid processing of information is a wildly adaptive trait for humans living in complex environments, here’s the good news: Intuition — you have it! You’re born with it. You don’t have to sit there wondering whether you are intuitive or not. You are.
This is why labeling intuition as an out-there, mystical thing actually makes no sense. Intuition, from the science perspective, is literally everything that’s ever happened to you that you are able to draw upon to make meaning quickly and efficiently. Because intuitive hits do sometimes come out of “nowhere” (even though “nowhere” is actually “everywhere”) it can feel otherworldly. As cognitive neuroscientist Sara Laszlo said on Voices in the River, intuition is “practicing so much it feels like magic.”
Another reason why intuitive data can feel so slippery is because people experience intuition differently. For me personally, intuition is both very embodied and very intellectual. I get sensations in my body, like constriction in my throat, when I don’t like something or someone. Or if I think something or someone is great, I’ll feel a warmth and expansion across my chest. Sometimes I’ll get an intuitive hit that is just a complete sentence, like “That’s a good idea,” or “Stop, stay away.” But you know what else says “Stop, stay away?!” Anxiety, intuition’s evil twin.
Related: How to Blend Data and Intuition for Better Decision-Making
That’s why intuition can be such a mess. But if we apply the framework of our scientist friends — intuition is pattern recognition based on expertise — then the best thing we can do is to become experts in ourselves. How and when do you pick up intuitive information? This is where the clairs are very helpful.
This sort of thing might easily be cast as “out there,” but I prefer to think of the clairs simply as learning styles.
There’s clairvoyance (clear seeing), clairaudience (clear hearing), claircognizance (clear knowing), clairintellect (clear thinking), clairempathy (clear emotion), clairtangency (clear touching), clairalience (clear smelling), clairgustance (clear tasting), and other clairs not on this list that you might experience. They are useful shorthand for how you know what you know, and I believe we can conceptualize them broadly. Take clairvoyance, for example: the image that might spring to mind is someone gazing into a crystal ball. But clairvoyance can be much more than that. It can mean getting images, yes, but it also might mean noticing visual signs in your life.
I vividly remember standing on the street and reading an annoying email. I looked up, and right before me was some graffiti that read, “Please go away.” Coincidence? Maybe, but noticing that little visual message made me smile and shrank my irritation, preventing me from getting totally hijacked.
Clairempathy can be picking up on other people’s emotions, feeling what other people are feeling — or just getting a specific feeling about something yourself. Clairintellect? You just know.
Spend some time — a week, a month — noting how you experience intuition. Is it a constriction in your throat, a drop in your stomach, a warm expanse across your chest (clairsentience)? Perhaps when meeting a new client or contractor you might get a distinct download like “This person is going to screw me over” or “This person is going to be a wonderful collaborator” (clairintellect). But even more broadly, ask yourself: When you have an intuition, do you feel it in your body? Does it come to you in a sentence? Do you get visual flashes or notice objects in your visual field that take on a special significance?
There are a bunch of quizzes you can take to learn your clair. Here are a few.
But… I have a feeling you probably already know.
If you’d like more common sense insights on intuition, you can find them in my book, Everyday Intuition, or my newsletter, “Letters of Intuition.“
