The Psychology of Intuition and Its Importance in Your Life

How do you make the important decisions in your life? Is it a long process that involves serious analysis of the pros and cons? How about your intuition? Do you trust your gut feeling, the initial inkling that usually happens to be the right one?

​Intuition is a powerful tool, if you’re willing to sharpen and utilize it.

Intuitive Decision Making: What is it?

Intuitive decision making refers to trusting that inner voice and making decisions on the basis of your gut feeling, experience and knowledge. Quite often, we mess things up when we listen to others and when we’re hesitant about committing to one opportunity or another.

Some of the best entrepreneurs and decisions makers know what it takes to practice intuitive decision making and how to keep this sense in a top condition. Yes, there are exercises that can strengthen the intuition but we’ll get to them in a minute.

Intuitive decision making plays an important role in the business world. It’s quite the opposite of rational decision making – assessing the pros and the cons, doing analysis and using the data to choose the more favorable outcome. Various tests and experiments prove that intuition can be just as valuable for decision making as a rational approach.

​According to the researchers, intuition is most powerful when people have to make a broad decision in an area that they have a lot of experience in. Very often, top managers have to make quick judgments and choose an outcome in a situation where analysis is impossible. These are the people that will benefit the most from intuitive decision making but needless to say, they’re not the only ones.

The Benefits of Trusting Your Gut

Making a conscious decision to trust your intuition can become one of your most powerful tools. The benefits of an intuitive approach are many:

• You know more than you know: researchers are putting more and more work in understanding the complex mechanism of decision making. They’ve coined something known as dual processing. We have a lot of knowledge and awareness stored in the sub-conscious mind. By going for that gut feeling, we’re relying both on knowledge and on that otherwise inaccessible part of the brain (which also happens to hold tremendous amounts of data).
• Fast and effective decisions: through intuition, you can make an immediate decision. Analysis requires time to be completed. The more you wait for the data, the more hesitant you’re going to become.
• Decisions align with core values: you’re trusting your gut feeling, which makes you more likely to choose the outcome that’s more in line with your core values and beliefs.
• Most decisions are made this way: approximately 90 percent of all decisions are intuitive. Almost 85 percent of all decisions are made within a minute. You may choose to wait and use data but chances are that your mind is already made.

A Guide to Developing Your Intuition

People that are reluctant about using an intuitive approach may fear that their intuition isn’t that strong or well developed. Luckily, there are exercises and basic techniques that can be practiced to develop a strong intuition. 

Some people are intuitive by nature. Others will need to work consciously on getting in touch with their sub-conscious. Strengthening the intuitive response to all kinds of life situations isn’t that difficult:

• Stop ignoring your gut feeling: the first step towards building your intuition is to stop silencing that inner voice. The more you shush it, the less often you’ll experience that quick and accurate intuitive response.
• Quiet the analytical mind: it’s nothing but natural to begin an immediate situation analysis. You start focusing on the pros and cons, you dig deep to find data that will support one outcome or the other. Try to silence that rational voice in your head. Let your intuition speak instead.
• Try guided imagery: guided imagery consists of exercises that help you relax, concentrate on what you want and reduce anxiety. If you do a bit of online research, you’ll come across dozens of guided imagery exercises that will build a powerful connection with your sub-conscious and teach you how to use your imagination in the pursuit of creative solutions.
• Keep a journal: a journal gives you a better idea about your thoughts, your dreams and the stream of thoughts passing through your head. Through journaling, you can learn to listen to your inner voice and silence the critic in your head who’s telling you that you can’t.
• Be honest with yourself: your feelings about a certain situation will very often clash with the rational approach towards decision making. This is the main reason why so many people dismiss their primary emotional response. Learn to be honest with yourself. If something’s making you feel uncomfortable, there’s a good reason for those negative emotions.

Be mindful and keep on practicing. Start with the smaller decisions to test the power of your intuition, then move on to medium size decisions etc. It’s possible to build the strength of that inner voice, even if you think that you don’t have a powerful intuition at all. The more you cultivate those gut feelings, the more confident you’ll become in trusting them.