Why Your Intuition Will Never Fail You
When was the last time you listened to your intuition?
You had a choice to make - perhaps it was a simple one. Eat in or take out? The red shirt or the black one? You couldn’t decide, but you felt a pull towards one option over the other, and that’s how you made your choice.
What about more important decisions where the stakes are higher? When was the last time you deferred to your intuition? And more importantly, did you listen to your intuition despite evidence pointing in the other direction? Take the exciting job offer in a new city where you don’t know anyone or stay in your stable current job near your family and friends? Give the person a chance at a second date even though the first date was a disaster?
We all have a gut instinct that wants to guide our every decision in life regardless of how small or large the choice. Our ancestors needed this instinct to survive harsh environments and dangerous wildlife. But modern life has conditioned us to put our intuition in the backseat in favor of making decisions based on evidence and data. Many times, intuition and data lead to the same conclusion. However, we are tested when all evidence points to a logical choice, and yet, there’s a voice in our head urging us to take the other path.
Intuition is constantly guiding us toward the life we are meant to live.
That life can include a family, financial security, a career, or simply, a happy life. In a modern context, intuition is sometimes described as our brains subconsciously processing our life experiences and our knowledge of our environment to lead us to the best outcomes. But this does not account for those choices that on the surface seem like the less optimal choice. In such cases, what does our intuition know that we do not?
The answer will probably throw us down a deep rabbit hole about destiny, faith, fate, etc. But whether we believe in any or none of these things, the point is that when it comes to our intuition, it doesn’t matter. The answer may be as simple as believing in ourselves. All of us have had the experience of taking a multiple choice test and not being able to decide whether the answer is A or B. We flip a coin and pick A. Later we go back and change the answer to B. Of course, the correct answer turns out to be A. We should have stuck with our initial choice. Our intuition was encouraging us to trust in it and ourselves.
“Learning to let go and allow our intuition to take over every once in a while is an easy way for us to get to know ourselves better and to trust ourselves more.”
Trusting our intuition is a skill that needs to be honed.
We are well practiced in using evidence and data in our daily decision making. But most of us are not comfortable relying on our intuition to guide us. Some of us may not even be able to recall the last time we truly looked inward for an answer. We can use easy exercises to awaken us to our intuition and grow our relationship with it.
5 ways to hone your intuition:
Listen to your gut - Become familiar with your inner voice. Learn to listen for it in your ordinary daily life such as at the grocery store.
Meditate - Contemplative practices are helpful for focusing our mind which can allow us to hear our inner voice more clearly.
Journal - Writing in a journal regularly gives us the opportunity to express our unfiltered thoughts and emotions and allows our inner voice to take center stage.
Spend time in nature - Being in nature opens our senses to the environment around us. Our intuition perks up in nature, because its evolutionary purpose was to keep us alive and safe.
Pay attention to your dreams - For those of us who are able to remember our dreams, our sleeping hours can give us access to our unconscious mind and give our intuition space to express itself without external distractions.
We make so many decisions in a single day. We are lucky to live in a time when we have many resources available to us to help us make the most informed decisions. But having access to so much knowledge can also be overwhelming. Learning to let go and allow our intuition to take over every once in a while is an easy way for us to get to know ourselves better and to trust ourselves more.
