During our everyday life’s we come across situations where we often struggle to find solutions for a particular problem or problems, keep working on it again and again and still fail to come about a solution which works out well. And suddenly when you are doing something else this idea comes up in your mind which works out as the perfect solution to what you were struggling with for so many days.
In can also happen that the same problem that you have struggled to find a solution with you go and bounce off this problem to someone else and he gives you a radically different way to address it which till then hadn’t occurred to you at all.
You prepare a lot for an important presentation and when you are making it your boss, or your leadership team immediately identifies some gaps or something that you had overlooked or hadn’t thought about even though you had gone through the presentation or plan multiple times.
You prepare the best of plans for a new market or product supported by the most detailed analysis, but your mind keeps telling you are going in the wrong direction.
You suddenly get these random thoughts about something which our analytical mind dismisses as not logical, but we later find that things unfolded on similar lines as what we had thought.
Do all the above scenarios sound familiar? We sometimes call the solutions or thoughts that we get as intuitions or extra sensory perceptions, or insight and these capabilities are often treated as some special gift that we have.
What’s also interesting is that many of the greatest discoveries and thoughts are also credited to have come about through intuition like Archimedes jumping out of the tub calling Eureka or of the many radical thoughts and discoveries that Tesla had most of which were after he went off to sleep with a particular thought and woke up with answers to many of his thoughts.
What has also been understood through various studies is that intuition is enhanced by the following situations and practices.
- Altered states of consciousness and deep relaxation causes the brain to produce alpha and theta wavelengths which enhances intuition capabilities. This would probably explain how Archimedes and Tesla were able to come up with such discoveries and thoughts while being in relaxed state of mind. This could also explain why great sport persons try to relax themselves totally before a very important match.
- Keeping all channels of the body open for receiving information whether it is seeing, hearing smelling. One of the challenges that we face as human beings is that we tend to cut ourselves off when we are in serious thought or work and hence tend to miss out on such information which is being picked up by our senses.
- A strong desire to arrive at the outcome despite the continuous stream of challenges that are coming up.
- An open and positive mind looking to arrive at different ways and approaches to a solution. This approach prevents us from ignoring different approaches which are put forward particularly while working as a team.
- Self-awareness to fully understand and capture one’s deepest thoughts
- Immersion and Reflection – This involves getting more and more into what we are doing and into why some things worked out the way it finally did. Reflections can include some simple things like reflecting on a particular day or watching a recording of your talk and presentation or like what sports persons do watching their own games repeatedly to further understand and break down the way things worked out the way it did.
- Contemplate and understand the surroundings which will also lead to the solutions.
This is something that we tend to forget as we are all only result oriented and focus only on the actions that we did which led to a particular outcome. So, while these would have been the controlling factor, we tend to miss out key factors in the surroundings which also led to the above result. This leads to challenges when we try to replicate this success or learnings in a different geography or segment as the learnings and reasons for the success are not fully understood by us.
Unlike what we often make ourselves to believe Intuition is something that can all of us have. The levels of intuition can be further enhanced and developed by practicing some of the steps listed above. Among those factors listed above Immersion and reflection is what we can work on to further develop our intuition skills.
We are often taught to ignore our intuition capabilities and focus on data and analysis to arrive at our various decisions. But in a lot of situations there aren’t any previous historical data that is available which can be based for arriving at critical decisions. Also, in several situations the consumer habits and needs and requirements vary from market to market and just copying the learnings from one market in the exact same way into a different market will not lead to the desired results which is where we will have to bank on our intuitive skills.
To continue getting more details about intuition and ways to further improve your intuitive capabilities do subscribe to my new LinkedIn newsletter Rejo’s Biz Bytes and visit my website www.rejofrancis.com
