Intuition is defined as the ability to understand something immediately, without the need for conscious reasoning or a thing that one knows or considers likely from instinctive feeling rather than conscious reasoning.
Imagine you just ended a team meeting where everybody is on board with launching a new process. Well, it seemed like everybody was on board, but your instinct is telling you that something is up with one of your colleagues. In this fictional example let’s call him Dan.
Was he more quiet than usual?
Was it that he was very excited about the idea just two days ago but now it seems different?
You can’t quite put your finger on it, but your instinct is telling you that you should check in with Dan.
But, then things get super busy and you’re pulled into a million other directions.
As your day gets more hectic, you convince yourself that you’re reading into it too much, and by the end of the day, you’ve decided that you don’t need to check in with Dan.
Two weeks later, Dan resigns from the company. He cites that one of the main reasons for his resignation is that he often felt unheard and invisible on the team, despite efforts to contribute.
While there could be many contributing factors that led to Dan’s resignation, could things have been different if you used your intuition differently to check in with Dan?
We all have intuition, yet the question is whether or not you listen to, trust, or act on it.
Listening to your intuition. In the example with Dan, your intuition was telling you something about Dan. Listening to your intuition is noticing your instinct.
How good are you at listening and noticing when your instinct is telling you something?
Trusting your intuition. As the day went on and got busier, you started doubting your intuition. Instead of trusting your intuition, you convinced yourself that checking in with Dan was not important.
What is your level of trust with your intuition?
Acting on your intuition. Because you got busy and decided not to trust your intuition, you also made the decision not to act on it. What could have been different if you decided to trust and act on your intuition to check in with Dan?
How often do you act on your intuition?
In coaching, we train coaches to trust and act on their intuition during coaching sessions.
Being an effective leader is no different.
But it’s important to understand that one of the most important elements of acting on your intuition is not being attached to the outcome.
Let’s say you checked in with Dan to see if he was okay.
Maybe he would have genuinely said that he was fine, which meant that your intuition was incorrect. In this case, hopefully if there is psychological safety on the team (which is a topic for future discussion), he would have honestly answered that he was not okay and shared what was bothering him.
Whether or not your intuition is correct is not the point, which is why it’s so important not to be attached to the outcome.
The point is focusing on the process of listening to, trusting, and acting on your intuition, which is a skill set that anyone can learn or improve.
The more you hone your intuition, the more effective you can be as a leader, coach, or many other areas of your life.
Sometimes listening to, trusting, and acting on your intuition can be uncomfortable.
But, as we saw in the case of Dan, not doing so can often have far more costly consequences.
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