How often do you have a strong gut feeling about something? When I say gut feeling, you can replace that with intuition or inner knowing if you like. In other words, how often do you just ‘know’ something, but can’t really explain why you ‘know’ it, or where the feeling came from?
And how often when you do have such a feeling do you ignore it, or more likely, rationalize it away and then regret it afterward?
They’re two questions I frequently ask clients, and I nearly always know what the answers are going to be.
Quite often and very quite often.
This is an area I have covered off a few times in the past, but it’s worth re-visiting it as the whole gut instinct thing has come up in the comments a couple of times recently.
Your unconscious mind is brilliant and I certainly make sure I take mine with me everywhere I go. It beats my heart, contracts my muscles, digests my food, blinks my eyes and does loads of other good stuff that I simply haven’t got time to do.
It’s not just simply a plate spinner either. Your unconscious could probably spin plates whilst juggling live squirrels and reciting the complete works of Shakespeare backwards, if it really wanted to. Yes it really is that clever.
However, it has one major design flaw that often leaves it feeling isolated and misunderstood. The clue is in the name – it’s unconscious.
Note: Some people refer to the unconscious as the subconscious. There is some debate about this and the terms are interchangeable. It’s a matter of semantics, but personally I prefer the school of thought that suggests the following:
The unconscious is much more powerful that the conscious mind, therefore to call it ‘sub’ is a misrepresentation. It doesn’t hang around under your consciousness; it sits side by side and feels insulted when we suggest anything else….probably.
When we say it is the unconscious mind we mean it can’t communicate in the traditional manner using words. It can though communicate very effectively using other methods, such as feelings.
A gut feeling is often a rapid calculation done much quicker than we could ever hope to achieve using the conscious mind. And the subsequent generation of feelings that are then used to communicate to you at a conscious level are designed to tell you whether it thinks playing dodge the speeding train after 10 beers is a good idea.
On the other hand, those feelings can sometimes be the result of the 5-Alarm Chili you ate the previous night that is now gorging itself on your stomach lining. And therein lies the problem.
Your conscious mind is useless at dealing with lots of information. In fact, it literally can’t deal with more than nine pieces of information at once, and even that many is very unusual. Six or seven is more like the norm.
If you doubt what I say, try it out. Shift you awareness into various parts of your body one at a time, whilst each time retaining consciousness of the previous locations. You’ll be struggling by about five and at seven your head will feel like it’s going to explode and you’ll hate me for always being right.
The analogy I use (because I can’t think of a better one) is your conscious mind is like the RAM on your computer and your unconscious the hard drive.
Going back to the original questions. This is the reason so many of use overrule our unconscious mind. It’s easy to rationalize a feeling away as not making sense, because it’s nebulous, a bit weird and way too much like indigestion.
Then after we have done so and everything goes horribly wrong for the nth time, we’re left wondering why the hell we don’t follow our intuition a bit more often?
If you want to become a better decision maker take the time to listen to the internal messages you’re being sent a bit more often. Obviously meditation is a great way to do this, but if that’s not for you, there are other ways.
Tune in with your body whenever you can. Try to spend time in peace and quiet at least once a day. Resist the urge to dismiss or rationalize strong feelings because they don’t make much sense to you at the time.
Tim you are so right about intuition. I believe studies show that the best decisions (on average of course) are the gut instinct decisions and that the more one analyzes and the more conscious information brought to bear, the worse the decisions get.
I hate generalizing like that and of course you do a great job walking through that in your post, but I always try to go with my gut when I am in doubt. Many years ago my “rational” mind had a big problem with this idea because I, like many people I think, thought of intuition as some pseudo-scientific balderdash. As you so clearly describe, however, there is nothing unscientific about it.
It’s your unconscious brain cranking away at high speed and bringing the sum total of your experience and skill to bear on the matter. I prefer the analogy of background vs. foreground processes. Your conscious mind is the window you are actively working on and focused on and your unconscious mind is all the processes running in the background, out of your present focus. There are a lot of them and they can do a lot more work than the single process with focus. The analogies don’t really matter and none of them get it exactly right. Maybe one of your brilliant readers can offer up one that shines brighter than either of these.
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I’ve found that my gut instinct feelings about what I should do are usually spot on, except when it’s my gut feeling telling me I shouldn’t do something I have a huge fear of. Maybe I have two guts – one a strong gut, and one a chicken gut?
My strong unconscious really has a firm grip on the kinds of things I am good at, what I’d be happiest doing and what would be the most successful course for me. It’s less good at figuring out that stuff for other people. It also seems to be very good at figuring out people I should avoid/approach with caution.
My other unconscious is the one I need to overrule. Perhaps I’m calling it by the wrong name. It’s the one that gives me a very strong feeling that I will almost certainly have an anxiety attack or explode if I do something I’m scared of. Not sensible things like “don’t scuba dive with piranhas” but stuff like taking a chance on applying for a job, that sort of thing. So far, nothing bad has happened to me if I ignore it and push through but I haven’t seemed to have internalized the message of “will not literally die if I do not heed the chicken gut”.
I can tell the difference between the two quite easily so I guess I should only call the first one intuition and I’m sure you’ll tell me what the proper name for the second is. If not, I’ll go with chicken gut.
But back to the good kind of intuition, I can’t say that it’s ever steered me wrong. Usually when I follow it, it shows off my leadership skills and creativity. At worst, it doesn’t turn out quite the way I planned in a mildly disappointing way and I learn a lot from the experience.
Thanks for the great post!
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Great Article Tim!
Sometimes we just somehow have to listen in to our intinct instead of our minds. Just how it goes listen with our hearts instead of our minds. Sometimes it can be very difficult, even though I find this hard you find there is a deeper feeling inside you that is worse when we try to analyse.
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If you haven’t read it already, have a look at ‘Blink’ by Malcolm Gladwell for the science behind instantaneous decisions. It’s a fascinating read.
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Great article! I think that our society discourages us from listening to our intuition. I agree with Tracy about recognizing intuition by the strength of the feeling. Intuition has an emotional response attached to it that helps us differentiate it from logical reasoning. For me, meditation helps to stop the chatter that can drown out my natural intuition.
Thanks for the awesome post!
@ Stephen – I can definitely agree with the background vs. foreground analogy. I think that is a good way of describing it.
@ Tracy – This is where it can get tricky and this is where the practice comes in handy.
First and foremost, a fight or flight response is something different altogether. Not that I’m necessarily saying that is what you’re talking about, but I think we should separate the different states out.
An underlying anxiety will often mask our true feelings and that is maybe what is going on here. That is very common in my experience and it can be the thing that stops us pushing through on occasions.
IOW, we don’t set up our own business because we’re worried it will fail. Our ‘intuition’ may be saying “Go for it!” but it can’t be heard above the rest of your body screaming “Holy shit, I’m scared, let’s get outta here!”
Hope that wasn’t too technical for you ;-)
@ Alex – That’s interesting. Is this a case of listening to our hearts? Hm, I’d never thought of it that way, but I see what you mean.
@ Hilary – I’ve read it (or rather listened to the unabridged version) 3 times and it’s a great introduction to rapid cognition or as Gladwell calls it, thin slicing.
My favorite story was probably the Firefighter that thought he had ESP because he pulled his men out of a burning room just as the floor collapsed. Then on reconstructing they realized he’d just compiled about 5 different signals at an unconscious level and followed his intuition.
@ Cathy – I’m actually not sure that Society discourages us, although I have to admit I’d never thought of it before. I’ll tell you for why, because some of the really successful people are great at doing this. I bet you Donald Trump has a really strong sense of intuition. I’d love to hear if you disagree.
I am forever fascinated by my intuition. It creates battles in my brain that force me to learn, investigate, contradict, and challenge. In the flying business I find myself getting a “feel” quite often without consciously knowing why. The “feel” forces me out of my comfort zone and into action to align my reality with a gut feeling, or put it to rest. In safety related operations we operate on this gut feeling all the time.
Daniel Goleman covers much of the science and social conversion of this discussion in his Emotional Intelligence series also.
Another great read Tim.
People laugh at me when I tell them I “just know” something, but 99% of the time, it’s right. The other 1% is paranoia trying to override my unconscious mind. lol
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I have all your books and they are all wonderful.
My inner voice talks to me all the time, although the drugs are helping. he he he.
I listened to my intuition when I started my business and it has gone really well. I try not to dismiss it. It has helped me more times than not.
Great advice. People need to listen to their inner voice more.
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This article has been really helpful. Today I didn’t go to this temp job because I had a bad feeling about it, right from the moment it was assigned to me three days ago. I knew where it was, and how to get there (which are fears I have when I am going to a new place by transit) and yet something was nagging at me all weekend long and I could not put my finger on it. I was up all night worrying as well. I felt much calmer after I called in and told them I would not be able to make it.
This is a tough issue because you cannot let fear stop you from doing things and yet when there is a powerful feeling that it is not a good idea, it is hard to ignore those feelings.
Great Article Tim!
Sometimes we just somehow have to listen in to our intinct instead of our minds. Just how it goes listen with our hearts instead of our minds. Sometimes it can be very difficult, even though I find this hard you find there is a deeper feeling inside you that is worse when we try to analyse.