Intution

Listening is one of the most important skills that we learn as we grow up.  Leadership requires listening skills, good counselors are good listeners, and good relationships require good listening skills.  But how about listening to yourself? That must be one good skill to have.  I always thought good critical thinking involves figuring out what is logical? I thought it only involves what makes sense and not what your intuition says.  Each day, I learn my assumptions are wrong.

Daily in my life, I am learning some times my intuition is the sixth sense I never thought I have.  I still haven’t learned to obey my gut feeling yet, but I am seeing so many reasons why I should have listened.  I’m left with dealing with the consequences of not listening to my ‘gut feelings’.

 

In an article on Psychology Today, Carling Flora says, “Intuitions, or gut feelings, are sudden, strong judgments whose origin we can’t immediately explain. Although they seem to emerge from an obscure inner force, they actually begin with a perception of something outside—a facial expression, a tone of voice, a visual inconsistency so fleeting you’re not even aware you noticed.” 

I think that is the problem for most of us—at least for me – the problem is because I think gut feelings just arise based on our fears, or preconceived ideas.  We consider them being baseless so we discard them.  In fact, according to the article they do possess some of the qualities of pre-conceived ideas.  She says they are like a brain’s matching game where the brain search through a file and matches to the best analogous experiences.   After all, they do have a logical source.

Decisions, of course, should not be made simply based on gut feelings.  We have learned from our infamous president the result of that; however, putting your intuition in consideration when having to make a decision, will save you a heartache that arises in dealing with the consequences.  It sucks to have to say, “Darn it, I knew that would happen.”