Do You Trust What You Know?

Have you ever known something before you knew why you knew it?

Something felt off.

A person seemed right for the job.

You knew it was time to make a change.

There wasn't necessarily a spreadsheet, a pros-and-cons list, or enough evidence to prove it.

You just knew.

And then...

...you talked yourself out of it. 🙄

I've been thinking about intuition lately. Particularly how often we have it, and how quickly we dismiss it. I see this a lot with high-level leaders.

We ask someone else what they think.

We look for more data. We wait. We second-guess.

Sometimes we simply don't decide at all.

Why are we so reluctant to trust what we know? To trust ourselves?

Maybe part of the problem is how we think about knowledge.

We tend to trust what we can explain. What we can prove. What we learned in a book, a classroom, or from the data in front of us.

But that's not the only knowledge we have.

Research on decision-making suggests that what we experience as intuition can actually be our brain recognizing patterns from years of experience before our conscious mind can explain what it has recognized.

Experienced leaders have seen things(!).

People. Patterns. Decisions. Mistakes. Outcomes.

They've accumulated thousands of pieces of information along the way. And sometimes the brain puts those pieces together before we consciously do.

How cool is that?

Maybe intuition isn't the opposite of knowledge.

Maybe intuition is knowledge.

Just not always the kind we can immediately explain.

Of course, there's a catch.

Fear can feel like intuition.

Bias can feel like intuition.

Ego can feel like intuition.

Old programming can feel like intuition.

Which means the answer isn't simply, Trust your gut.

It's knowing yourself well enough to recognize what and who is actually talking.

And that may be where self-awareness and self-trust meet.

Without self-awareness, we can mistake our programming for intuition.

Without self-trust, we can have valuable knowledge within us...and still hand the decision over to someone else.

Maybe strong leadership requires both.

Listen inward. Then get curious.

What do I know?

And how do I know it?

❤️ Heidi

P.S. Want to test this theory? Start tracking when you trust your intuition and the corresponding outcomes. You may find there's more evidence behind that inner knowing than you originally thought. 😉