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9 Ways to Master Intuition as a Career Advantage
Getting more intuitive has become a new career imperative. Too much thinking can prevent you from seeing the opportunities and advantages around you. Knowledge, in a competitive knowledge economy, can become overrated. Getting more intuitive about your career puts you back in the driver’s seat. As intuition gains new-found respect as a smart career skill, here are a few tips for you to take advantage of this mostly silent asset.
Intuition is, at its core, a primary knowledge. It occurs before the five common senses are engaged. To learn intuition there are usually two approaches. The most common way is to listen to the five interior senses, which are the inner reflection of the same five external senses — hearing, seeing, taste, touch/physical, or smell. The other more deeply effective way is to cultivate self-awareness through reflective listening, such as meditation, Zen or other self-awareness practices.
Both are important. The first way increases confidence, the second, power.
To understand a useful analogy about how intuition communicates, let’s look at the numbers. Numbers have particular meaning for everyone in the accounting field. But the numerals themselves have no particular meaning. It’s what we attribute to the numbers that give them meaning. And so it goes with personal meaning and the building blocks of intuition. It’s not the senses that bring intuition, it’s the meaningful information coming from intuition that the senses are trying to convey.
Intuition comes from the Ting!, the primary knowledge of intuition striking an open mind. Want to get better at intuition? Pay attention to your intuitive Ting’s.
In business, the intractability of intuition has long been the reason that its use as a business tool has been undervalued. Linkages between intuitive insight and their outcomes have been ambiguous and hard to trace. Yet, evidence continues to accumulate where intuition has played an important role in the development of new products, discoveries, and inventions. Just as unpredictably, our over-reliance on information and knowledge has often failed to produce the results we expect them to.
As a result, we have begun to take intuition more seriously in the realm of the real. Intuition is economical. Generating results by encouraging greater intuition doesn’t require a lot of capital or time. It frees our imagination and fits our sustainability models by enabling us to source from a wider set of variables than analysis. It generates outcomes far beyond its investment, often yielding results that are disproportionately large by comparison.
Also it links to the things we find increasingly important these days — meaning, wisdom and creativity. Doesn’t it make sense then, that it is a skill well worth our attention and investment to better cultivate?
When clearly apprehended, intuition is vastly superior to all states of intellectual knowledge. It brings holistic mind and heart intelligence that is beyond space and time. It dips into the unknown landscape of events and opportunities we have no way of knowing about. Intuition is, in fact, the ultimate renewable resource for imaginative potential and the source of imagination.
All truly imagined possibilities come from intuition. All our other ideas come from our memory of similar things. In an innovation age or a society where driving creative capability is increasingly viewed as a sustainable economic direction, it is essential.
Knowing all this, even the reasoning mind would say…”It pays to make friends with your intuition.”
Intuition skills add another dimension to your performance, both individually and collectively. It enables your sales team to respond better to clients and customers, lets your customer service team diagnose problems faster and keep customers happy. It facilitates communication with your production team and helps them to communicate better and proactively anticipate and resolve issues. Intuition can even assist your security and audit team to track missing details and keep on top of everything.
On a personal level, it’s useful to reduce stress and anxiety and enhance sustainable performance and helps people be more “present” with colleagues, clients and customers. Overall, intuition is a major factor that can increase personal and professional success.
Here are some questions we ought to be asking about how to use intuition in our career and in business.
- Do I have a plan for developing my own intuition skills and that of my management team?
- What kind of a culture do we need to have to support intuition?
- What are the best ways I can use intuition to recognize new career and business opportunities?
1. Recognize intuition as a smart-skill which can be developed
Most people have become familiarized with having an intuition deficit in themselves and in their environment. Make a commitment to become more intuitive. Identify what this might look like and what you would be doing differently. The first step, as identified in my business book Ting! A Surprising Way to Listen to Intuition & Do Business Better is to say “Yes!” to your intuition. It’s very easy to do and has a surprising effect. You’ll find you begin to notice more intuitive feedback almost right away. Make a personal learning plan to develop intuition skills and get some training.
Since intuition effects are synergistic, when teams learn together their intuition capabilities increase exponentially.
2. Shift away from proving intuition to sharing capability
Break away from trying to prove whether or not intuition is real or whether it works. It’s a waste of time and will keep you stuck in the argument. Instead save your energy and get better results by going straight to building capability and learning through use. As in the book Ting!, contribute to create a climate where your organization’s stories and connections from intuition to results are recognized. Encourage experimentation.
Metrics? Sure. Measure these results and compare them to other results. You might be surprised to find where intuition results in a measurable return, even profit.
3. Pay attention to what your intuition is telling you
If the numbers say yes, but your intuitive Ting’s say no, you’ve got some investigating to do. To find out why, ask questions and gather intelligence. If a project feels sluggish or the energy isn’t right, this is an intuitive cue. You might be lacking support from the top or some other fundamental is not in order. It’s messy these days out there and your intellect cannot possibly know everything. Look for positive signs. Enthusiasm is often a predictor of future success and potential pathways.
4. Look for new ways to provide value using your intuition
Pay attention to your dreams and daydreams and intuitive hunches. Often they show you ways to solve problems or new directions, people to contact, new arrangements, or sequences of approaches to issues and opportunities.
5. Get intuitive about you — ask yourself what’s really going on
If you’re enthusiastic about your career, everything is fine. If you’re not, let your intuition show you the real truth about why you aren’t. Then, once you know what that is, let it help you source new opportunities to be happy, growing and vital in a way that makes sense for you.
6. Practice creative surge. Focus less on analytical information and more on intuition and imagination
Technology, information, tasks and role demands on the job always compete for our attention. The more "noise" there is, the less clear and effective we become. Change the way you mentalize data — taking lots of information, then sorting, categorizing and sifting it until a few workable solutions emerge. Intuitive clarity is like a tuning station that cuts through the noise and meaningless information. This way, intuitive solutions emerge in a non-linear way, sometimes through surprise and opportunity, and thrive in change. Self-aware people are more intuitive and tend to be better listeners, change agents and relationship builders who are more anticipatory, proactive and open to new directions.
7. Recognize your heart as an instrument of superior intelligence and perception
Your heart is the barometer of true intuition engagement. Try this short experiment. Experience in your own senses the thought of "having an intuitive culture" vs. "working as you do today." Feel the difference in your heart. Which one gets you more inspired? How do you think this would impact the others you work with? Heart intelligence is superior to intellectual knowledge. We can no longer afford the luxury of dismissing this vital knowledge. Instead we need to be "guided by rightness" and cultivate emotional investment and personal meaning by having good heart-sense.
8. Get specific with innovation capital — Innovation starts with innovators
Organizations don't innovate; people do. Innovation starts with people who become innovators and develop core innovation capabilities like intuition and understanding how true creative power works.
The future is all about unleashing innovation and invention capacity. First we dream, then we create. We need to learn the important role we have in moving a concept from the unimaginable to the imaginable, to the conceivable, and finally the created. So, we turn people into innovators, and ideas into inventions and results. Then we support them with innovation strategies, innovation capabilities and learning plans. This requires new skills and an understanding of intuition’s permanent companion, the creative process.
9. Shift from inherited visions to new visions
To attain new visions we need to actively engage imagination. Right now we mostly perform adaptive innovation and implement incremental improvements on the past. But if we dream only adaptive dreams we encourage limitation and discourage invention. Pure innovation is something else entirely. It is a new dream; a fresh vision. Ultimately everything was made from nothing.
Where to start? Everything starts with a Ting!, when intuition strikes a receptive mind. By saying yes to intuition, we open up a lot of doors for greater success and creativity. By learning how intuition occurs for us, we gain command of our abilities to recognize it as more than a fleeting experience. Once we understand, we can create.
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Arupa Tesolin, a Trainer, Speaker & Innovation Coach, is the author of Ting! A Surprising Way to Listen to Intuition & Do Business Better, the innovation book Spark – Raise Your Mind to the Power of Infinity & Create Anything and one of the world's leading authorities in developing intuition skills in business. www.intuita.com, intuita@intuita.com, 905.271.7272
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