The Gut Feel: How intuition can lead you to success in business

Chapter Nine: Intuition and Success

Chapter Nine

This chapter concludes this book with a summary and final advice to the reader.

Intuition and Success

We have seen that it is intuition that makes things happen and analytical reasoning can actually bog people down into reasoning paralysis that delay or even prevents people from taking any action upon opportunities they have found – a matter of letting good opportunities just slip through the fingers. We have also seen that people who make decisions based on their intuition rather than reason and analysis are more likely to succeed in their endeavours.

Although intuition can speed up decision making dramatically and promote action orientated entrepreneurship, there are always dangers that our intuition can be hijacked by our biases. We have already seen that reasoning can be in conflict with our intuition and our ego can be confused with our intuition. Besides these influences our mind is programmed with sets of beliefs that are called heuristics. Some heuristics assist in decision making but others introduce bias, create misconceptions, fallacies and abstract inferences. It is misguided beliefs that distort the balance of our intuition and hinder our reasoning, intuition, and finally judgments.

For example, we may selectively look for evidence that supports our beliefs, see patterns and trends that don’t really exist, rely on irrelevant pieces of information, or make attributions about something based on past performance, i.e., just because we have been successful in the past we believe that we will be successful in the future, which is inclined to develop complacency within us. There are so many different types of cognitive biases that can cause shortcomings in our sense of intuition.

When you drive down the road of uncertainty, which is especially the case with opportunities that we construct, shaping and molding our responses as we go along, our intuition is the only voice that we can trust. As we see in many Hollywood films dramatizing dramas where the President of the United States must make some important decision, the President obtains a host of opinions before making up his own mind, where the full responsibility rests with him. You are the president of your own venture, the person with everything at stake where those advising around you have little vested interest and sense of responsibility. It can be very lonely and even frightening making venture decisions, especially when you are new at it. However with balanced intuition one is able to consider the issues holistically and sub-consciously in a way that your conscious self may not consider, generating a feeling, tendency to favour, an urge to go in a certain direction that will appear after some incubation, giving you that insight you need about how to handle a particular issue.

What we have also seen is that intuition is closely connected to our sense of personal mastery. Sound intuition develops within us within the specific domain that we are involved in during our working life, just as with practice we get better at skating, horse riding, bicycle riding, or driving a car. We just have to make sure that we maintain an open mindedness about learning, seeking a diversity of experiences, and improve upon our domain knowledge over our areas of interest and beyond. Finally we have to maintain our awareness and sensitivity (which ebbs and flows over time) that influences how and what we perceive, enabling us to take multiple perspectives and enrich our thinking.

Remember all the major decisions you have taken in your life have been intuitive decisions, and in most cases have served you well. The things you regret show a sign of learning, but the other advantage of intuition is that it helps you adapt to these regretful situations and changes within the environment as well. Intuition is a good adaptive mechanism for your life journey. In this way intuition will help you make big leaps forward in your life that some of you will be thankful for. For others not satisfied, it may not have been that the intuition was wrong, but circumstances changed. Not understanding the characteristics of our intuition can hold us back in life.

Remember that intuition can be unreliable when our ego is strong and camouflages itself and influences us towards our emotional weaknesses rather than our strengths. Always search to see where our ego is. If you have to write down your thoughts on lists so you can see the emotionally influenced ego thoughts, this would be time well spent. Maybe your ego also carries many good aspirations, but at other times it may encourage you to over-extend yourself which may lead to disaster down the road. Remember no ego at all will result in a lack of personal drive to achieve anything – so ego is also a necessary part of the entrepreneurial journey.

Intuition is closely linked with creativity which is what the large multinational firms want within their organizations. Yes the trend in organizations is towards less analysis and more creativity, where people are trained to explore their own intuition to access greater creativity and imagination.

Remember don’t blindly trust your intuition, it is only as good as your personal experiences and ability to learn. Don’t get trapped into thinking that intuition comes from some divine source. This is a belief that may lead to devastating consequences.

Fate and luck are not random events as we generally believe. Being in the right place at the right time is not coincidental – it’s an urban myth. Without having your life experience and knowledge that you have learned throughout your life and the associated wisdom of your intuition, you will not see any opportunity in the first place. Thus fate is tied up with our knowledge and experience. As the old saying goes;

There are three types of people; those who make things happen, those who see things happen, and those who wondered what happened.

Intuition gives you both the perception to see what is happening and the energy to make things happen as well. Without strong intuition you will always be wondering what happened. Intuition helps you see that the proverbial glass in new ways;

”An Optimist Sees the Glass as Half-Full, A Pessimist Sees the World as Half-Empty.”  “There are people who always see the glass as completely full, even though it isn’t.  On the flipside, there are also people who see the glass as half-empty, dirty, filled with germs, possibly made from contaminated lead glass from China. The engineer sees the glass as twice as big as it needs to be, but the entrepreneur sees the glass as undervalued by half its potential.”

The author has taken you through some of the areas within a business venture intuition can be of great value. In addition the author has given you a number of tools that will prove of immense value during your entrepreneurial journey in life. These are;

·       The condition of mindfulness which helps you obtain emotion free thoughts that will enhance your perception of what is happening in the environment. Mindfulness can be enhanced in the person through the practice of meditation and bring a much calmer demeanor to the self and generally lower stress levels as well.

·       The idea of concept extraction which can assist you develop ideas into business models through the art of construction.

·       Seeing the big picture which helps you holistically evaluate all the aspects of an idea to determine whether an opportunity exists.

·       Creating your place in the market through going along a stepped path from the opportunity, back through the necessary strategies to exploit it, required networks, skills, and resources to support your strategy and your necessary goals that need to be set.

·       Developing you sales skills through role playing and learning how to empathize and read your customers emotions about your sales presentation.

·       How to play entrepreneurial chess so you can see the consequences of your actions and possible responses by your competitors, and

·       The advantages of using different lists to group ideas and information under within various thought frames like “factual information”, “aspirations”, “consequences”, etc.

Intuition can take you to a direct conclusion which later reasoning can confirm what you have already concluded. If this combination of intuitive reasoning can be empowered in your decision making, then true wisdom and personal mastery has been achieved.

Remember these simple intuition building tools you have learnt that can assist you through your entrepreneurial journey in life. Remember, “There are two kinds of failures in life, those who thought and never did, and those who did and never thought” – Dr. Laurence J. Peter – Author of The Peter Principle. I hope with this advice that you will now be able to harness your intuition to assist you in your future journey of life and enterprise.

Intuition is what makes things happen, not analysis – so throw away you’re the thinking rigidity that you learnt during your degree, some of the most successful entrepreneurs have come from the school of hard knocks and got through on their intuition.

Summary

·       Intuition as a thinking style speeds up decision making.

·       We must be aware of potential biases that may distort our intuition.

·       You as an entrepreneur must take full responsibility for your decisions and intuition is your best thinking tool.

·       Most major decisions you take in life are intuitive.

·       Intuition is closely connected to your personal mastery.

·       Don’t blindly trust your intuition – it’s only as good as your knowledge and experience – remember it took you some time to learn to drive a car.

·       Fate and luck are not coincidental.

·       Intuition helps the entrepreneur see things in new perspectives when you have mastered it.

·       Intuition can lead you to direct conclusions; reasoning can confirm your conclusion was right.

Some More Intuition and Success Tips:

·       Learn how to do meditation and try to do some everyday to relax and gain access to your default neural networks. With practice and some correct technique you will find that ideas and insights will start to flow like water. In addition to bringing new ideas and perspectives to the forefront, meditation also greatly assists in lowering stress and can even if practiced regularly lower blood pressure. Again I sympathize with type “A” personalities who will be skeptical and find it very difficult to get into this routine.

·       Another way of relaxing and opening up the paths of intuition is to take up some form of daily exercise like walking, running, cycling, swimming, or even playing golf by yourself. The art of exercise allows you to concentrate on the exercise take in new stimuli from the environment where you will be surprised how many new thoughts and perspectives come into your mind.

·       More on lists: Keep a white board in your office, kitchen or where you spend a lot of time, or carry a little dairy. Whenever a though comes into your mind, write it down. You will be very surprised how many thoughts you forget. The act of writing down thoughts somehow helps your mind focus on the idea and most often further elaboration on it will come over time.

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