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Does trusting your intuition really make you more successful?

Does trusting your intuition really make you more successful?

“Trust your gut.”

– said everyone, ever.

Loyal readers will know I’m in the habit of commenting on trends in the business and personal development community. Intuition is a big one.

It’s advertised as the solution to all your problems. Some gurus preach nothing else. But does your intuition contain everything you need to retire in a bathtub of champagne? Is your success already within you, simply waiting to be unlocked?

You need to know the truth.

What is an “intuition” and where do you keep yours?

We might as well be talking about love, truth or justice. These abstract “things” don’t really exist – there’s not a single cell of intuition in your body.

That said, I never let simply not existing convince me that something isn’t real. And neither should you. The paypal dollars in my account aren’t real, but I devote a large portion of my day to finding friends for them to play with.

“Intuition” is just a label we humans have slapped on a set of processes we can’t quite explain. Just like Love, Justice and Money.

Get cosy around this campfire, because we’re about to get deep. 

Intuition doesn’t live anywhere in our body, but just like “happiness”, it has a profound and very real impact on us.

I define intuition as the decision making mechanism of our unconscious mind.

Unconscious mind is another good one. It isn’t real. but merely the label for all the things our brain does that we’re not conscious of. Like breathing. And choosing 90% of the words that come out of our mouths.

Trusting your intuition is about trusting your unconscious mind.

It’s about surrendering to the fact that a part of you has simply “got this” in a way you (the chatter-box mind you call “me”) does not. Those who argue in favor of trusting your intuition are arguing, essentially, in faith.

Trusting your intuition means having faith in yourself to contain something more than who you are, today.

Is that a crazy assumption? Carl Jung doesn’t think so.

Jung pioneered the concept of the Unconscious Mind. His vote would be firmly for trusting your intuition, because he believed that our unconscious mind was tapped into a neural network of epic woo-woo proportions.

Jung hypothesized The Collective Unconscious. He believed that all humans shared a neural network, a one-mind, that defines our species and the lives we create. By tapping into this collective mind, we can access an intelligence vastly greater than our own.

Imagine having access to the sum total of human intelligence that ever was or ever will be. That’s what trusting your intuition is about.

Here’s how it impacts your bottom line:

1. Creativity is the source of innovation.

Ask any serious entrepreneur about how they came up with the game-changing idea that made them a rockstar – you’ll ALWAYS here a story that amounts to divine inspiration. They will have plugged into a source they don’t quite understand (and can’t quite explain).

At the heart of our unconscious intuition, lies every story ever told. The archetypes of the human condition reside in this place and are the keys to solve our challenges. Like Prometheus taking the fire from the gods, the game-changing technologies yet to be invented are just waiting in the ether. Waiting to be snatched and made real.

This is just how it works.

2. Indecision kills business growth 

The vast majority of my clients are successful entrepreneurs who have arrived at a level where just one challenge remains: Decision making.

The most certain entrepreneur in the room, wins. You can tweet that.

Consciously analyzing every option available to you, pros-and-cons style, is cripplingly slow. If you’re running a serious business, you’re making way too many daily decisions to do that. Your intuition has to step in. With the power of the Collective Unconscious, your incredible mind can analyze all the data in a heartbeat and arrive a complete conclusion.

This conclusion will be delivered as a hunch. Those who aren’t connected to their intuition doubt their hunches and pay the price. Those who trust, make swift decisions and win.

I’m a fan of trusting your intuition

In fact, the covert mission in all of my client work is this: To shorten the distance between my client and their unconscious mind.

That goal is the journey of a lifetime. Perhaps it’s a journey without end. Either way, my goal with clients is only to accelerate it. I know it’s a journey, not a destination, and that phenomenal business success and impact are found on the path.

I’ve devoted every day of my professional life to figuring out the “How” – finding techniques, strategies and tactics that bridge the conscious-unconscious gap. Many of them have been published here in the blog, usually in the guise of strategies to boost profit or productivity.

But there are many, many more strategies as yet unpublished.

I’m curious about two things.

First, are you (yes you, dear reader) interested in hearing more?

Second, what are your tactics for connecting to your unconscious? Or, what happened that time you accidentally connected with it?

This is what the comment section is here for. I’d love to hear your thoughts.

22 Comments

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  1. Yeah, I’d love to hear more.

    I tap into my subconscious mind through lucid dreaming. Inside your dreams you have direct access to it. I suppose it’s like hypnosis on steroids.

    1. Hey Jamie,

      Thanks! Interesting stuff on the lucid dreaming. I used to play with that, years ago. I struggle with dreams personally – they’re so damn gnomic that it’s an area of psychology I’ve been guilty of ignoring.

      Buckminster Fuller used to attempt complex problem solving by using a technique that suspended him halfway between sleeping and waking – kinda the same principle I think.

  2. I totally agree Peter. Certainty and focus help you to become a better decision maker, as does trusting your instinct. Combined together those three elements are a sure fire way to succeed in business.

    Now if only people would actually do, be and listen to these elements on a regular basis.

  3. Ah, young Jedi,

    Always there It is, the Force between my throat and heart.

    When a direction It takes, only at my own peril have I ever ignored It.

    No better explanation is there for how I found you.

    Speak it, you must, for all padawan who doubt their own source.

  4. Intuition is very powerful. It can give you access to pattern recognition and predictions skills beyond the ken of your conscious mind.

    However, I can tell you from personal experience that intuition is only as good as your unconscious strategies. If those are dysfunctional, the intuitions that arise from them will also be dysfunctional.

    Ever repeated the same dumb mistake, even though you knew better? Vowed to avoid people like person X from now on, then picked a new friend or mate just like them? That’s dysfunctional intuition at work.

    The good news is that in addition learning to tune in to your intuition, you can also train it to make better decisions. I’m looking forward to how Peter explores this in his upcoming intuition series. Knowing him, it will be brilliant.

    1. Hey Joy,

      Interesting perspective on this. Do you think that it is dysfunctional intuition or simply a failure to listen to one’s (functional) intuition?

      I guess we’re asking: Can intuition be dysfunctional?!

      you’ve got me thinking 🙂

      1. > I guess we’re asking: Can intuition be dysfunctional?!

        Yes, intuition CAN be dysfunctional. And no, I’m not talking about failure to LISTEN to intuition, which is a separate issue.

        A big part of learning any skill well is TRAINING your intuition to pay attention to what really matters, and to make good choices. Your intuition didn’t start out knowing how to drive a car. It was clunky and kept directing your attention to unimportant details, making wrong decisions (that your conscious mind then had to correct), and so on. Now, of course, your intuition is so skilled at driving that you can zone out for long periods and let it do the work.

        In the example above, the intuition didn’t HAVE a skill, and had to learn it. With dysfunctional intuition, often the intuition DOES know how to do something, and does it on autopilot — but poorly, or in a way that is skilled, but creates problems.

        I have a friend who learned to drive from a reckless driver. He intuitively learned BAD driving skills, and guess what: he’s a poor driver with poor driving habits. Changing his driving habits would take active retraining, at which point his intuition would correctly guide him to drive safely and well.

        A lot of people make bad intuitive decisions about who to trust, who to date or marry, investments, money management, risk-taking, and so on — not because they’re dumb, but because their intuition is untrained or badly trained WRT that particular issue. The same person often has a stellar track record at other intuitive tasks.

        Fortunately, once you NOTICE where your intuition gives you less-than-stellar guidance, you can fairly easily retrain it. Retraining intuition is one of the main things I do when I guide people through change work. I help them build an automatic, intuitive strategy for improving their intuition and intuitive decision-making (!), and once that’s in place, well, they just keep making their lives better, automatically. 🙂

        1. Hmmmmm, this is fascinating. I think you have a point. What your saying definitely overlaps with the philosophy that underpins the best education you can get in doing therapy… which usually focuses on consciously learning a lot of skills and technique, so that the intuition’s toolbox is that much deeper and richer.

          That said, we’re conscious learning these things and they automatically become unconscious and intuitive. So dysfunctional intuition is really a lack of conscious competence maybe?

          1. Hi Peter,

            Yes, this IS fascinating! Thanks for a lively and interesting discussion.

            > …we’re conscious learning these things and they automatically become unconscious and intuitive. So dysfunctional intuition is really a lack of conscious competence maybe?

            Not necessarily. I’ve seen and experienced dysfunctional intuition in myself and others resulting from lack of experience, poor role models (the “best” the person shoots for isn’t very good), and lack of cooperation and synergy between otherwise competent conscious and unconscious processes. And I think dysfunctional intuition very commonly results from a COMBINED lack of conscious and unconscious competence. E.g., one or the other makes a poor decision or judgment, and the other lacks the skills, knowledge, or criteria to FLAG it as poor and needing adjustment/correction. IMO when someone keeps trying the same failing strategy harder and harder, thinking if they just push harder it’ll work, that’s what they’re struggling with.

  5. Many people have no idea what intuition is.
    People that recognize their intuitive ability experience it as physical and emotional feelings. They either “feel good” or “feel bad” about something or someone. Their underlying motivation is often in tune with Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.

    Almost everyone makes decisions based on intuition and, if asked, they justify those decisions with their choice of very sound logic.

    I believe that people who are aware of their intuition tend to make better decisions.

  6. I prefer the term, non verbal mind to unconscious mind. I find the conscious / unconscious line a conceit of the big brain. I think of my body as having many minds, just not all of them are verbal in the way our “chatty” one is. Hence I find intuition comes up as a new growth in a garden that has taken some time to surface. The chatty brain needed to process those inputs before it can “speak’ it out consciously, to verbalize the non verbal; to make available that which was hidden.

    1. Hey Glen,

      Totally get what you’re saying and I think it’s something that really comes down to semantics. “Unconscious mind” is definitely just a label for a whole (countless) series of behaviors that occur outside of our chatty/ego self.

      It’s a useful label in my field/work though, to be able to group all that stuff together. Also, being able to communicate with “the unconscious” is less of a task that communicating with dozens or hundreds of autonomous behavioral robots – so it’s a pragmatic approach too.

      1. “Dozens or hundreds of autonomous behavioral robots” — I like that! I agree with you both — there’s lots going on behind the scenes in a brain, and attributing it all to “the” unconscious mind is an oversimplification, albeit one that can be useful.

  7. Great post. I used to read poetry out loud, quite a bit. Also listened to endless amounts of music, while reading the lyrics. I find my intuition seems to work well, while I am listening to music. As if some of this subconcious stuff slips through, when my mind is focused/amused by a song. Also, I often catch a song in my head “playing”, that is synonymous with how I am feeling and the problem I am latently focusing on.

  8. I’ve been following jungs philosophies as of late, and i feel like i’ve learned alot from it. Entp speaking by the way. Jungs philosophies also show a dark side of intuition from when you go against it or live in a situation not tailored toward you, your inferior functions show ( especially when you reach mid life crisis etc..) and causes what you call intuition to guide you to the wrong outlets for you.

    For example a entp’s functions are

    ENTPs’ functional stack is composed of the following functions:

    Dominant: Extraverted Intuition (Ne)

    Auxiliary: Introverted Thinking (Ti)

    Tertiary: Extraverted Feeling (Fe)

    Inferior: Introverted Sensing (Si)

    the inferior can unconsciously influence decision-making. the inferior function is the primary culprit in unwise career and relational decision-making. Unfortunately, its influence peaks in the later ages of type development (early teens, to late twenties), which happens to be the same time people are making life-altering decisions about their careers and relationships.

    When stressed people may feel their inferior or shadow are their dominant functions because they neglected them, for example if your not a person who likes to be around people neglecting to see anyone may fool yourself into thinking you love people because you went to far to an extreme, but your sadly going to go to another extreme and drown yourself with people which will make your need to be alone come back in large proportions!

    in short dont listen to your intuition when stressed

    dont get stressed by listening to your intuition, by feeding your dominant functions large meals and your inferior and lower snacks..

  9. Thanks Peter.. I tell you, you have a knack of reminding us exactly what makes us tick and it always comes at the most appropriate times! Good reminders and lessons!

    I personally have the best successes of my life following my own intuition. When I decided to move to Idaho, it was on pure “Gut” instinct. Everyone thought I was crazy to leave L.A. What would I do up there in the sticks? It was the best choice I ever made. Both personally and financially! When I decided to quit my job and start my own practice, I had been weighing all the pro’s and con’s and thinking about it and waiting for the best possible time. For 11 years!!! SHEESH! When I finally did it, I did not think….I just did it! One of the other best decisions I have ever made!

    I would like to add that not only do I try and follow my own intuition, I Listen Intuitively. That is a powerful skill that can assist anyone in any situation!! When you listen intuitively you “Hear” so much more than what is being said! With practice you begin to trust and use it more. Its easy to practice. When you get a “feeling” about what you think is being said…clarify it…ask the question…”I hear you saying this (fill in the blank) is that correct?” You would be amazed how accurate your intuition really is. In addition, people react very positively to it. They LIKE that you are really listening. If your off base… they like that you were attentive enough to communicate clearly! Remember, your not just repeating back what you heard with your ears…its what you heard “intuitively”.

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