better business blog

Tips and stories to add value to you and your organisation

How To Access Intuition

2 December 2009

Intuition is a great asset and much undervalued. We often don’t admit to knowing what we really know we know. We prefer to keep collecting information, or to keep making little adjustments, when all the time we’ve had the answer. We’ve caught ourselves in a little loop of anti-intuition, where more ‘facts’ will ease the risk of making a bad choice, or of making a mistake. This is plainly silly and we can trust ourselves; we can trust our intuition.

One way to access our intuition is to go for a sense of what we would like, rather than an absolute (which of course craves more facts). Within a cloud of thoughts there will tend to be a perfect little snow flake of reason, that can be picked out and used to prompt an action.

When working as a coach I often ask clients:

“What would you like to do first? What’s your sense?”

Invariably they give me an answer that draws heavily on their intuition and I often follow this up with:

“That’s great; you can do that!”

…And they smile and relax. So, the next time a colleague of yours is stuck and you have a hunch that they do know the answer, bypass the data and give them permission to give you a sense of things…their apparent fuzziness will be sharper and more accurate than they will realise.

I used this approach recently and my client ‘discovered’ a complex Lean Implementation Plan already stored in their head. They could now stop data gathering and start focusing on action. Their intuition on where to start was right, they just needed a hand to access it and a friendly smile from me to begin trusting it.

Tags: coaching, How To, intuition