The Positive Power of Ignoring Your Intuition

That little voice in your head doesn’t appear out of nowhere.

You face a situation, and you sense that you know the way forward before you have even contemplated taking your first step. You don’t think about it logically, and you don’t spend too much time analysing your options; you just feel that something is compelling you to take a certain course of action.

That is your intuition at work.

Much has been written about the role of emotions in decision-making and the role of the heart over the head in leadership. However, as attractive the imagery might be of heart-based leadership, intuition still very much originates in your head.

Patterns of experience from your past, conscious or unconscious, and even the genetic coding of your ancestors coalesce to create an experience of “knowing without knowing.” You are in a certain situation and you feel that you should behave in a certain way. Maybe you saw a film five years ago, and you sympathised with the protagonist to such an extent that you promised yourself that you would act in the same way should such a situation arise. Then, five years later, when a similar thing happens to you, you already have a response programmed inside you that is activated the moment that this particular memory is engaged.

You somehow feel it is the right thing to do.

Most of us strive to live our lives the right way and to make the best possible decisions at any one time. This naturally puts us in primarily positive situations, and we use these experiences to develop as people. Then, when we meet similar situations in the future, our decisions are even better informed. I suppose you might call this wisdom.

Intuition comes to us outside of our conscious awareness. We are not always sure why we think we should do a certain thing, but the mix of our past experiences can be so strong that we feel compelled to listen, but living in the past is not the best way to make a step change in our future.

This is where intuition is not always the best way forward.

You see, like it or not, intuition is still to some extent rooted in our previous experience. It might be a very random combination of memories, conscious and unconscious that lead us to a certain thought, but they must still originate from inside our heads. Until we are able to digitally download knowledge directly to our brains, (and I am sure that this fateful day will come), many of our decisions are still to some extent governed by our past. We get to the point of making a decision and we want something to hold onto, some sign to help guide us along the way. Whether it’s a logical argument based on what we know, or an intuitive feeling based on what we once experienced, we are inevitably always looking into the past for our answers.

What if we bypassed both logic and intuition and found a third solution?

Sometimes, every now and again, you have to step outside the box and choose an alternative path.

We have periods in our lives which feel a little like Groundhog Day, the same events playing over and over again, but we can’t quite find a way to break out of the self-reinforcing groove. In this case neither logical or intuitive decisions help us. Whether we are aware of it or not, something in our past is holding us back.

This is the point where we need to put everything behind us and paint an ideal and positive picture of where we would like to be. If we choose to let every decision be guided by that future vision and not by our past, we have far more chance of taking a completely new direction.

This is far from easy to do!

For many of us, intuition is like a best friend. It has got us out of many scrapes and difficult situations in the past, and we are leaving ourselves vulnerable if we choose to ignore it. While we risk making bad decisions, we also might make the best possible sorts of decisions – those which take us far closer to where we want to be than we ever dreamed possible. This can happen, it does happen, but only if we decide to leave our best friend behind for a little while.

For many of us, switching off our intuition can’t last long. It inevitably leads to mistakes, and if the thought of making mistakes scares us, we can easily turn to our trusty “old” ways of thinking. If, however, we accept these mistakes as part of our new path forward, we are compensated with new possibilities that open up for us. Once we are confident in our new path, we can welcome intuition back into our life (I’m certainly not suggesting that we abandon it permanently), but only when we feel that we have made that much-needed tweak in our decision-making behaviour.

The well-known phrase “out with the old and in with the new” sums up this mental process rather well. In everyday life, intuition can still serve us incredibly well, but when it comes to those pivotal crossroad moments in life, we would be well served to loosen its influence on our decisions, maybe even entirely in certain circumstances.

I suppose that it comes down to belief. Belief doesn’t need proof, and it doesn’t need convincing. It is just there, feeding on its own energy and giving you the strength to do what you need to do, creating a new path and a strong precedent for the future.

You see, once you have ignored your intuition successfully once, you can do it again, and again. Going against the (historic) grain is not always a bad thing. You might get it wrong a few times, but don't let this stop you, dust yourself off and go again. You’ll get there in the end.

Intuition is still truly a valued friend. However, sometimes you just have to let belief give you strength for a while.