How To Use Your Intuition To Get What You Want In Life

Intuition is an incredibly powerful tool for decision making. It ensures we respond in the moment, freeing up valuable mental resources to tackle novel experiences and optimize learning.

While not infallible, intuition is invaluable.

Intuition provides us with a “gut” response – an inner voice ­– beyond logic or learned responses, revealing both who we are and the knowledge we have gained.

If we listen, we can benefit from the creativity it offers and the feeling of confidence that it brings. Let intuition help you grow and make time-critical decisions based on resources that are not always easily reached.

Recognize the circumstances when you are at your most intuitive. Find opportunities to recreate them and tap the potential for creativity and fast, insightful decision making.

Intuition is that feeling in your gut when you instinctively know that something you are doing is right or wrong.

Or it’s that moment when you sense kindness, or fear, in someone’s face. You don’t know exactly why you feel that way; but it feels right.

But what is intuition? After all, researchers can’t see it in the brain.

While understanding intuition offers a considerable challenge for science, broadly speaking, it is often described as “learned responses that are not the outcomes of deliberate processes.”

Intuition is not logical.

It is not the result of a set of considered steps that can be shared or explained. Instead, while based on deep-seated knowledge, the process feels natural, almost instinctual.

And yet, while intuition is quick and usually beneficial, it is not always entirely accurate. The subconscious brain attempts to recognize, process, and use patterns of thinking based on prior experience and a best guess.

Paradoxically, intuition feels unknowable. After all, you cannot explain the thinking behind a snap decision that appears out of nowhere.

It just happens.

Intuition is an incredibly powerful tool for decision making. It ensures we respond in the moment, freeing up valuable mental resources to tackle novel experiences and optimize learning.

While not infallible, intuition is invaluable.

Intuition provides us with a “gut” response – an inner voice ­– beyond logic or learned responses, revealing both who we are and the knowledge we have gained.

If we listen, we can benefit from the creativity it offers and the feeling of confidence that it brings. Let intuition help you grow and make time-critical decisions.

Recognize the circumstances when you are at your most intuitive. Find opportunities to recreate them and tap the potential for creativity and fast, insightful decision making.

Some theories about how intuition works.

What does psychology have to say about intuition, when much of what happens in the brain is invisible ?

Many scientists propose a dual-process theory – decision-making processes split between intuitive (experiential or tacit) and analytical (rational or deliberate).

In Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, Malcolm Gladwell (2005) describes the two different approaches as blinking, when intuition is used, and thinking, when an analysis is performed.  Gladwell says,

There can be as much value in the blink of an eye as in months of rational analysis.

Intuition (or blinking) typically refers to the use of knowledge that is not explicit.  It might be described as a “hunch” or “women’s intuition.”

When it happens, it’s hard to quantify or define, but it is there. As with the following thought:

I had a feeling there was something wrong; she just didn’t seem like herself.

Hogarth (2010) suggests “the essence of intuition or intuitive responses is that they are reached with little apparent effort, and typically without conscious awareness. They involve little or no conscious deliberation.”

Seymour Epstein (2010) offers a further, complementary insight: “Intuition involves a sense of knowing without knowing how one knows” based on the unconscious processing of information.

Intuitions also appear to be holistic – combining insights from multiple sources and often requiring a leap in thinking based on limited information.

Using heuristics to make decisions.

Herbert Simon’s research in the 1950s into the concept of bounded rationality guides much of the work on intuition. Simon suggested that people often make decisions – and reduce their cognitive load – based on what is good enough.

Rather than arriving at complete and entirely correct answers, when faced with specific tasks, we often resort to heuristics – or rules of thumb – that help form intuitive judgments (Simon, 1955).

The use of heuristics is considered commonplace and the default approach for making decisions (Epstein, 2010).

The process of recognition – a fundamental evolved function – is also crucial to intuition. It appears separate from other parts of the human memory in the brain.  It’s capable of persisting in the most challenging conditions with accuracy sufficient for practical purposes.

Intuition appears to rely on the automation of the decision-making process.

Newly learned tasks often require us to consciously consider each move or action. As a result of practice and learning, this knowledge becomes more habitual and automatic. Such tasks are acted out without conscious intervention, saving significant processing power and freeing the mind to focus on more intensive or newly acquired actions.

Forward and backward inferences also play an essential role in intuition (Hogarth, 2010). The knowledge we have acquired through experience helps us predict, intuitively, where the ball will land or why the child tripped and take action.

The knowledge we build up over time allows real-world predictions,.  This enables us to act quickly and effectively in situations that most of us have encountered many times before.

Learning and retrieval are also highly relevant to successful intuitive processes.

Having experienced objects and scenes before, we are highly adept at pattern matching to support our ability to decide and act quickly and effectively.

For example, when we walk into a coffee shop, we recognize a cup as something we have seen many times before. We also understand, intuitively, that it is likely to be hot and easily spilled on an uneven surface.

Intuition appears to arise – like an epiphenomenon – out of the interaction of many distinctive cognitive processes, rather than a single one. They combine to deliver a fast and effective response when it is most needed.

Do you feel a calling to explore more about who you’re capable of becoming?

If your intuition calling you, I’d like to accompany you on your journey as your coach and guide.

My Whole Life Coaching program could be just what you’re looking for to intentionally create your best life, just as you define it.