Intuition

Let’s talk about intuition. Intuition, why it’s important, what we mean by intuition and also, how to develop your intuition. A few tips for developing your intuition.

I don’t know about you, but here in the UK, suddenly, we’re faced with several days of dark, dank, dainy, rainy weather. It’s interesting how it changes your mood, but intuitively, I know that my mood will change as the weather changes too. So intuition, then.

So intuition, yes.

Why is it important?

Well, I don’t know about you, but years ago, when I was learning things and learning to become a management consultant, intuition was really, really disdained. It was regarded as, “No, no, no, no, you must have rational, evidence-led decision-making.” Intuition could play no part. It was something that spiritual people and women maybe had something to do with, but it had no validity and I think that’s been true for quite a long time.

Personally, I blame Rene Descartes, but mind you, I blame Descartes for a lot of things. But this separation of the intuitive, this need for the rational, this need for these things called the Cartesian coordinates, where you put decisions through all these coordinates and it’s all very rational and very, very intellectual. But there’s no gut feel, there’s no intuition. And in business, business is gradually beginning to understand that actually, intuition is really, really important.

Without intuition, we don’t have innovation, we don’t have creativity. Intuition is what sparks the innovation and the creativity. I have a number of clients who struggle with intuition. They struggle with finding their intuition, being in touch with their intuition. When they do make intuitive decisions or intuitive discoveries, they find difficulty actually trusting whatever it is they’ve come up with because for so long, we’ve been taught that intuition, in some way, isn’t valid.

In the Hawaiian system, intelligence isn’t something up here, it’s not in your head. Intelligence, actually in the Hawaiian system, is in your gut. So the person who was most in tune with their gut area. But the person who is most in tune with that, and the knowledge of that was regarded as being intelligent. That was a real skill. There’s some great work now on actually, we have effectively, a second brain in our gut. It’s not like the brain in the head, but it responds to the environment.

It responds to energy, it responds to what’s going on in our body, and it also responds to what’s going on outside our body. So number of reasons why intuition is important, and why it’s really important to be able to hook into your own intuition. Now, in search of what is intuition, ’cause we all kind of know what it is, but I thought I’d go on a little dictionary tour of what intuition actually might be.

The Oxford the OED, the Oxford English Dictionary has some great definitions. Now there’s some old ones, and there’s some new ones. This one’s obsolete, but I rather like it. The spiritual perception or immediate knowledge ascribed to angelic and spiritual beings with whom vision and knowledge are identical. Now put aside, for a moment, the angelic beings. But for me, intuition is very much a state where vision and knowledge are identical. That actually, when I put aside the angelic beings, it works for me.

The more modern definition. There’s one, immediate apprehension by the intellect. The sense that it’s immediately, it happens just instantly. It’s not something that you have to think about or rationalise. Another definition, direct or immediate insight. So we just know it, it’s that state of knowingness. That state of just yeah, I know it.

There’s a guy called John Dewey. He was a psychologist and actually, a real a Renaissance man in the 30s in the States. A very, very intelligent man. He talked about intuition and his model of intuition was that we have some kind of awareness of something and it’s a problem or an answer or an insight or something. It triggers a load of subconscious, unconscious brain activity, and the solution pops in. Now, this isn’t that different to the creative process.

In the creative process, what happens is that we over the problem. We might do some research, but we’re thinking, thinking, thinking and then, we have some kind of arrest. It might be sleep, it might be having a drink. It might be having a bath. It might just be doing something completely different. When we’re in that state, suddenly the intuition, the solution pops up. Often dreams, the electric sewing machine, the problem of the electric sewing machine and where it was solved by a guy who had a dream.

He dreamt he saw Natives with spears, and the spears oddly had holes in the tips. And he realised that this was actually the solution for the electric sewing machine. There have been chemical, I think it was the benzene ring. The discoverer of the benzene ring was sitting on the top of a bus, and he was kind of daydreaming and it popped into his head. He’d been doing a lot of work on it, and it was in that relaxed moment. It was in that relaxed moment, the intuition, the knowledge, the idea popped in.

I’ve had that recently with builders. I need to get my house repointed. It’s lacking in waterproofness. So I’ve been casting around for builders. Now, I had a great builder. We had a flood a long time ago and great builder fixed up, but I thought he was retired so I completely discounted him. I went off and I started looking at different builders. Now, my intuition has told me that one builder is way too cheap. My intuition has told me that another builder might be okay, but I’m not sure. So suddenly, it popped into my brain. Why didn’t I phone my previous builder and ask him just to give me opinion? That’s all. He lives around the corner, he knows my house really well. He can just give me an opinion.

So I phoned him up and it turns out that actually, he is still working. Actually, he can give me a quote and he’s somebody I can trust. I wouldn’t have gone back to him if I hadn’t allowed my intuition to bubble up and then, trusted and acted on that intuition. Intuition, it’s not deliberate. If you sit there going, “I’ve got to get the answer, I’ve got to get the answer,” you rarely get the answer. Intuition tends to bubble up very often when we’re in a relaxed state and we’ve done some of the work.

One of the things about intuition that’s really important is that you’ve got to be willing to entertain doubt and uncertainty to allow the intuition to bubble up. Very often, we’re conditioned by conditioned thinking. Well, “I think in that way, this is the way it works.” If you’re totally dedicated to, “This is the way it works,” then it’s really difficult to allow the intuition to bubble up. In my case, I had pushed aside the idea of using the previous builder because he was not working. He’s retired, isn’t he? Therefore, it didn’t even occur to me to approach him for his ideas.

Once I let go of that, I was able to let the idea of him come in and sure enough I’m getting a quote from him. We need to avoid the trap of this conditioned thinking. These are the rules, this is the way the world works. We think we know the way the world works, but very often, that’s not actually the way that the world works.

So let go of that, allow yourself to trust the fact that you have intuition and that your intuition is potentially as good as anybody else’s intuition. Very often, we’re operating from the same information. There’s a relationship between intuition and creativity, which I kind of referred to already. I will do a live at some point on creativity, but the intuitive process is so like the creative process, that I’ve got a problem. Then I relax, and then something bubbles up.

One guy described it as a pattern matching process, where we use previous experiences to categorise an interpret the choices and decisions. I think that’s quite a rational, logical way of thinking about it, but hey, if that way works for you, if you need a rational, logical definition of what intuition is and why it should work, then go ahead. It’s the result of using previous experiences and doing some categorization and stuff in our head. Then, we interpret it.

Einstein was really big on intuition. He talks a lot about how his work and his discoveries, and the work of people like him, would not have been possible without intuition. I find that in the literature on intuition, the talk about intuition, this piece is missing. There’s also something about energy and intuition. So yes, we may do that in our brains, but there is something about allowing ourselves to open up to energy.

Now if you’re like me, I really doubted the existence of energy for about 40 years. If you talked to me about energy, I’d go, ” No, no no no, I’m not having any of that.” It had to be rational, it had to be logical, and I couldn’t accept the existence of energy. I certainly couldn’t accept that I had the ability to tune into energy and I was tuning into energy, whether I liked it or not, on a minute by minute basis. Because whether you like it or not, we’re all tuning into energy on a minute by minute basis.

When you allow yourself to tune into the energy or acknowledge that you are tuning into the energy, then that also can be incredibly powerful in terms of your intuition. Because as you trust your sense of energy, you also start to trust more your sense of your own intuition. There’s a strong relationship between intuition and energy.

How do you get better at intuition?

Well, the first thing is allowing yourself to switch off, particularly if you want a solution to a problem. Allow yourself to switch off and allow the information, the insight, the intuition, just to bubble up. If you’re a spiritual mind and you trust source, then giving it over to source, allowing yourself to trust source to bring in those intuitions that are gonna serve you and that potentially, can be life changing.

Another way is to practise guessing. Now, this very much taps into the energy thing, but it was an exercise that I started to do as I was developing my intuition and my sense of, “Can I trust?” So with the practise guessing, you can do it very simply. You can do practise guessing with a coin, heads or tails, and see how well you do.

But I think a more fun way even is let’s say you’re walking down the street and you’re coming up to a corner, guess whether the next person coming around the corner is gonna be a man or a woman. Guess what they might be wearing. As you build up that guessing, then make it more and more complex. Guess is it gonna be a man or a woman? Okay, it’s gonna be a woman, and she’s gonna be wearing something red. So building it up so that you open up your intuition muscles, as it were.

As I say, alignment with source can be really helpful, alignment with spirit. The big one is trust because you’re probably having intuitions or intuition insights all the time. The question is, “How tuned in are you and how willing are you to receive them, believe them, and act on them?” Now, one way to test whether you’re willing and receiving is when you have an intuition and you’re not sure whether it’s valid or not, is you can get a pendulum.

Now, you can make a pendulum out of anything. I have a little gold-plated weight on a chain, which I meant to bring to this live and then forgot. Basically, all you do is you’d set the pendulum going and you ask the pendulum, give me a signal for yes. You just hold the pendulum, and see which direction it goes. And when you’ve got a clear direction and it could be left to right, it could be front to back. It could be ’round and ’round, clockwise, ’round and ’round anticlockwise. There’s a number of different ways that it can happen.

Once you get a really clear signal for yes, just still the pendulum and then, ask it to give you a really clear signal for no. Notice what that signal is and then, put your pendulum down for a moment. Then ask your question, which might be, “Is this intuition true?” Hold the pendulum and wait to see what happens. It’s a great way of testing quickly, whether an idea or an intuition is valid, is a good one.

I’ve done it in terms of pricing some of the services I offer. Should I charge this price, yes or no?” Yes, okay, great. No, hm, okay, let’s look at something different. The downside of pendulum is you can only do yes and no, but it’s an amazingly useful way of validating what what’s going on with you and your relationship to your intuition. That’s really what I have to say on the how. I hope you found that useful.

If you’re struggling with intuition, I really encourage you to practise as much as possible and to allow yourself, just allow yourself that little opportunity to trust what would happen if you did trust your intuition? What could be different? Because once you’ve got the intuition, sure you can do all the rational stuff, you can do all the evidence-based stuff. You can prove it. That’s what people like Einstein did, but start practising .

Start working on how you can get those intuitions. As I said, I hope this has been useful. If you’re interested in developing this more and you’re a woman, I’ve opened up the Kukui Collective, which is a group. We meet twice a month and we use meditation, release work, and laser coaching, it’s group coaching, to enable you to really achieve deep, lasting change. To move out of your rational thinking, to move out of the thinking of, “This always happens this way, these are the rules”, move beyond and really create your life, the way you want it to be.

If group coaching is not your thing or if it happens that you’re a guy who’s chanced on this video, I also do one on one coaching work. Either way, you can either message me or go to secretartofhuna.com/diary to book a call with me.

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