4 Things No One Tells You About Intuition
Intuition can seem like a nebulous concept, only accessible to those ‘lucky few’ who naturally have this ability. The opposite is true. Intuition is our natural instinct as humans, that each of already has installed. We can develop it to a higher degree by learning how intuition shows up and making choices informed by it.
We’ve lived in a society that has taught us to favor logic over intuition, which is exactly how we got disconnected from this human instinct from a young age.
What is intuition, though, and how can we recognize it since it won’t be as obvious to us as our logical thinking?
Intuition can be summarized most simply in these four ways:
Not the logical choice
Whisper vs. obvious
Feeling vs. thinking
Knowing without the ‘why’
Not the logical choice
If you’ve ever seen the movie iRobot, you’ll know that the main character Detective Spoone, played by Will Smith, views robots as inferior to humans, because they make decisions completely from logic, and not from their heart (which obviously doesn’t exist, they don’t have consciousness).
There’s an underwater car accident Detective Spoone is involved in, where a robot runs a simulation calculation to determine which person in the group it should save in the quickly sinking car.
The robot chooses to save Spoone instead of the young 11-year-old girl since her rate of survival was much lower than his. Spoone is deeply unhappy with this outcome, and believes a human would have known to save the young girl with a whole life ahead of her, even if it wasn’t the ‘logical’ choice.
In my own life and the lives of my clients, there have been plenty of times where a necessary decision to make didn’t seem logical.
In fact, these decisions actually seemed like they could potentially be harmful, but it was clear by terms of intuition that they were meant to happen, because the current circumstances were no longer working and something needed to be changed. Leaving a job without another one lined up because your intuition says it’s time is one example that comes to mind.
Whisper vs. obvious
An ‘intuitive hit’ will start as a whisper. It’s a faint knowing, at first. That’s why so many people ignore it. It’s not obvious or loud, it’s in the background vs. the forefront of your awareness, especially if you’re used to using your logical mind to make most important decisions.
Logic is obvious because we live in a society that has placed the value of logic over emotions. Once you develop your intuition, however, it becomes much more clear and it moves to the forefront of your awareness.
Intuition if ignored, however, is like a seed that will grow and grow until it will become so unavoidable. It sees you’re not taking the hint and will likely show up as an upheaval in your life. This is mostly because you didn’t have it in your awareness and now it has to make itself known, and usually this is a painful experience.
Trust me, you don’t want it to get to this point, because this is the moment your life can be turned upside down, not by your choosing, instead of being stable and led by your confident choice.
An example that comes to mind is getting fired from a job that you knew (deep down) wasn’t a good fit, but you ignored this ‘knowing’ and didn’t choose to leave because you ignored your intuition.
Feeling vs. thinking
Intuition shows up as emotions! If you notice a prolonged shift in your emotions, based on a particular circumstance like a job, relationship, or living situation, then these are clues. If you only rely on thinking to navigate complex decisions, you can easily fall into the trap of overthinking and analysis paralysis.
Thinking can only get you so far. Like Einstein said, “We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.”
Becoming emotionally empowered means recognizing your emotions as they arise in the moment, and STOPPING to process them, which then allows you to distill the insights they have for you.
Most people tend to AVOID unpleasant emotions by repressing and numbing them. They think something is wrong with them, or that their mental health is in trouble. And while that can certainly be the case sometimes, it’s usually your inner compass showing you what’s important to you, what triggered an old way of thinking or being, and what isn’t working. Use this knowledge to your advantage.
Knowing without the ‘why’
I also like to describe intuition as knowing without the ‘why’. Oftentimes, we know the answers to our problems deep down, but we don’t feel ready to take the necessary actions to solve them because we don’t have an explanation.
We have a clear gut instinct at first, but we stop ourselves from following it out of the false notion of requiring the ‘why’, the master plan behind it, so we can feel 100% certain. That’s not how intuition works!
Intuition only shows you the next small step to take. Once you take that baby step, the next one is made clear, and so on. Often your limited perspective from your thinking mind cannot grasp the sheer amount of possibilities available to you, and instead you’ll cling to the idea of what you THINK is right, but unfortunately you’re not all-knowing.
Your intuition however, does know best because it’s tuned into a higher level of universal consciousness.
So we don’t need to know the WHY, we just need to take the next best step in the direction of this knowing.
In the book, The Gift of Fear by Gavin de Becker, Gavin shares countless examples and research backing the phenomenon of intuition leading people to avoid violent behavior by listening to their emotions of fear.
It’s listening to that ‘bad feeling’ the first moment it makes itself known that can LITERALLY save your life, in many cases where you don’t have all the information as to WHY someone would harm you.
Learning to trust your intuition
Intuition is your gut instinct, designed to work with your subconscious, your emotions, your body’s nervous system, to lead you to safety, and towards the highest and best outcomes for you.
Learning to trust your intuition and make decisions from it, allows you to better lead yourself and your life, instead of letting your ego make choices or solely relying on your logical mind, which has its’ limitations.
With love,
Emily Grace
This is the work I do with clients in my 1:1 program, which you can learn more about here.
