Your Intuition - Trust It, But Be Sure To Verify It!!

A friend of mine was in the process of hiring a sales person for a critical territory for a new product. She had interviewed a number of candidates, and was leaning toward one man who seemed to have all the qualifications. On the final interview, when she was prepared to make him an offer, she discovered that he was a cigar smoker. He didn't smoke in the interview, he didn't smell like he had been smoking cigars, his car had no cigar odor, but he let it drop that when he had completed a sale, he would celebrate with a really good cigar. That did it. No hire!!

She explained to me that she felt anyone who smoked cigars could not be trusted - her experience was that all cigar smokers felt they were big shots and caused more trouble than they were worth. Irrational? - Maybe. but an example of a more common kind of decison making than you think.

I don't know if that sales candidate would have been successful in that job, but I do know the basis of the decision, his being a cigar smoker, is an example of intuitive decision making gone wrong.

We need to trust our instincts, and I place intuition into the same category as instinct, "gut feeling", and hunch. It is a very important part of our decision making process, but it can be as much an enemy as a friend. It is based on our body of experience, knowledge, education and a number of other external factors. What makes our intuition unique to each of us is how we interpret those external factors. I see cigar smoking one way - my father, who I loved, smoked cigars, as did my uncles. I suspect my friend had an unfortunate experience with at least one cigar smoker, and came to her own conclusions.

Think of your own biases - how someone speaks, how someone approaches you, how someone shakes hands ( I get a real negative feel from a limp shake), what school they attended, their religion, ethnicity, politics, and so on.

What are the things that are your hot buttons - do they make sense, are they relevant, do they help you more often than they hinder? Ask yourself how often you have used intuition to make a decision when the facts and the opinions of others suggested a different decision. How often were you right? Are you willing to expand your base of knowledge that leads you to a decision?

I'm sure you have met people that are very comfortable making decisions - and make good decisions. I'm just as sure that you know people who would rather have a root canal than make a decision, and others who make decisions, only to go back and change their position as soon as things get tough, or others that make decisions easily, but they seem to not work out more often than not.

Each of us needs to trust our intuition in order to be effective and successful, but we also need to continually challenge our intuition - continually ask ourselves if the values we are using to make decisions are relevant and the result of our evolving values based on new experiences.

Where we are is often based on what we were yesterday. We get a set of data points burned into our brains and they guide our decision making, even though it may not be the most effective way to proceed. That cigar smoker was the victim of a set of data points that probably haven't been examined for relevancy for years. They probably will never be examined. They should be - trusting instincts without verifying the basis for the instincts is a formula for failure. It limits our ability to try new things, to change what we are and who we are, and it limits our opportunities to learn and move forward to bigger and better accomplishments.

The more we are willing to challenge ourselves in new situations, take a chance on something new to us, learn something new - a language, a software program, a social group, a non profit organization - the more we are developing our instincts and hunches and intuitions. That person who you know who makes good decisions consistently is probably a person who has stayed open to improving their intuition through new experiences.

Think about your own life - when did you learn the most? Do you remember the first time you visited a town, or talked to someone, or interviewed for a job or fly fished on a new river? I don't know about you, but I never see things exactly the same way the second and later times I see them.

Think about people who seem to hold onto the same prejudices, the same values, the same beliefs, with little or no change. Chances are they are people who are simply not open to change and new experiences. It's like the person who takes a trip to a foreign country, and when they return all they can talk about is how lousy the food was, or how screwed up the traffic, plane tickets or travel was. Or how poorly the place they visited compares to home sweet home.

Improve your intuition - it is a main source of your personal and organizational value. To the extent you remain open to and accept new people, places and things, you will become more like the intuitive decision makers you know who are highly successful.