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How to Listen to Your Intuition
and trust your gut instinct
Do you ever feel something is wrong but can’t quite put your finger on it? This is your intuition speaking to you. The question is, are you listening?
When making decisions, listening to your intuition and trusting your gut instinct is essential.
This is especially true for learning and innovation leaders, who need to make quick decisions to move their projects forward.
In this article, we’ll discuss the benefits of listening to our intuition and offer some tips for learning how to trust your gut instinct.
What is intuition?
Intuition is our inner guidance system and is often more accurate when making quick decisions than our rational mind.
Take a moment to reflect on the following definition of intuition:
affectively charged judgments that arise through rapid, nonconscious, and holistic associations.
In their paper for the Academic Management Review, Erik Dane and Michael Pratt distinguish between insightful, rational and intuitive decision-making.
- Insightful decision-making uses a deep understanding of the problem.
- Rational decision-making depends on logical analysis and conscious reasoning.
Unfortunately, many of us have been taught to ignore our intuition in favour of logical and rational thinking. We’ve been told to base our decisions on facts and figures, and those gut feelings are irrational.
However, the fact is that our intuition is often more accurate than our rational mind for quick decisions.
In one study, Stanford psychology researchers found that people who followed their intuition were more likely to make correct decisions than those who relied on logic alone.
Intuition led to the best choice 68 percent of the time, compared to a 26 percent success rate for more head-focused strategies.
Before we get into how to develop your intuition and listen to your instincts, let’s clear something up.
