By Victoria Brodsky
Past experiences can leave us rigid and inflexible when it comes to decision making. Though experience is helpful, intuition should not be left out of the decision-making process. Learn how to combine past experiences and personal intuition to make the best decisions for personal and professional development.
Intuition vs. Gut Feeling
Intuition can be a highly powerful source. It’s the feeling of knowing something without having a conscious reasoning behind it. It is often confused with a “gut” feeling, but the gut feeling, and intuition are actually different.
Your gut feeling comes from the collective experiences you’ve had as a human that allow you to sense a fearful, or dangerous situation. Your gut instinct usually makes sense, because it’s there for survival and based on your past. If you’ve ever heard your gut called the “second brain,” it’s for good reason. The walls of your gut contain a lot of signaling information which affects our mood, how we feel, and even how we think and make decisions.
Your intuition is a feeling of absolute knowing–you may not have a reason for it, you just know. Currently, we only have somewhat of a metaphysical understanding of the intuition–that it is a component of the soul, rather than part of the cognitive mind or physical brain. Therefore, intuition is a challenging phenomenon to study, but should not go ignored, especially when it comes to making decisions in your personal and professional life.
Learning to Be Flexible to Make Better Decisions – 3 Practices
It’s estimated that every day, humans make an average of 35,000 decisions. From when to get up, to what to eat, to how to spend your money, we are decision-making machines. To each decision, we apply our experience, our moral character, personal principles, and intuition, sometimes without even realizing it. Decision fatigue is real, and can not only inhibit how you feel, but also the quality of your decision making.
But when we know ourselves better, and can recognize the motives of our decisions, we can make them quicker, and more easily. That’s why learning how and when to be flexible when it comes to these things is important for self-development.
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Practice 1: Stop and Listen to that “Gut” Feeling
The first step in learning to be more flexible is to learn how to distinguish between your experience (the analysis by both your “gut” brain and real brain) and your intuition.
Your experience may actually illicit a quiver or tightness in the gut, almost like a knot in your stomach. This phenomenon is known as the gut-brain connection, an intricate communication system that allows your enteric nervous system (ENS) or “gut” to talk to your central nervous system, your brain. We may be tempted to make a decision based on this feeling, but stop, and make sure you’re thinking about why you may be feeling that way. Did you have a past experience that’s causing you fear? Is this fear helpful, or hurtful?
It’s hard to slow down and analyze that feeling but doing so will allow you to apply that gut feeling appropriately and give it more or less weight in any given situation. Being flexible in how you apply your gut feeling will bring your mind and physical body in-tune so you can make better decisions.
Practice 2: Have Faith in Your Intuition
Having faith in anything you can’t see or hear can be scary. But your intuition is something worth testing. Next time you have an opportunity to make a decision based on an intuitive feeling, do so. If you need inspiration, just look at how entrepreneurs like Henry Ford, Bill Allen, and Travis Kalanick made decisions based on their authentic, individual intuition despite it not really making sense. They each took a leap of faith on their own intuition and won big.
If you’re nervous, try it first with a small, insignificant decision. As you build up your ability to recognize and trust and intuitive thought or feeling, you can be more flexible as to how big of a role that intuition will play in your decision making. Keep a journal of decisions where intuition played a role and compare over time to decisions where your intuition didn’t play a role.
Remember that everyone’s intuition is different, so the only way to begin trusting yours is to just do it.
Practice 3: Lean into Your Best Personal Qualities
Making decisions is all about weighing your experience, morals, and intuition for the best outcome. But don’t forget to take a look at your best personal qualities and consider those as well. You are already empowered.
Perhaps you have a strong personal quality of willpower. When making a decision, lean into that strength. Ask yourself, can I apply my willpower (or whichever quality is your strongest), to this decision-making process?
Using your character strengths enriches the intuition and experience, and therefore a combination of all three can help you make better decisions in life for yourself, your work, and those around you.
Victoria is an entrepreneur, project manager, and content writer; she is a wellness columnist for the Los Angeles Tribune, and writes for the Young Entrepreneur Council of Forbes on personal development, business, and entrepreneurship. Victoria has a BSc. in Nutrition Sciences from UC Berkeley.
Photo by Brandon Lopez on Unsplash
