Can’t Decide What to Do

Can’t Decide What to Do?string(26) "Can’t Decide What to Do?"

There have been many times in my career where I have struggled with making an important decision.  Do I go left or, do I go right?  Do I say “yes” or, do I say “no?”  I generally tend to look at things logically and try to make good use of the data I have at hand.  But still, there are times that I have continued to be torn about what to do next on some issues.

Over the years, I’ve learned to rely on my intuition when I’m struggling with a particular choice.  To assist with that, I’ve developed two techniques that have helped me make decisions that involve things I’m still unclear about.

Get Out of Your Head

The first one came to me more than twenty years ago.  When my children were young, we were in a Baskin Robbins ice cream store and the kids were completely undecided as to what flavor to get.  We were next in line and there were a lot of people behind us, and I knew that they had to decide soon.  So, I told them all to close their eyes and stick their tongues out and wave it around.  Imagine being in line behind us. There was an adult and three young children standing in a row with their eyes closed and their tongues out waving around in the air.  The other customers must have thought we were crazy.  But interestingly, each one of my children suddenly announced the flavor they wanted.  My hope was that they would get out of their head where all the choices were swirling around in front of them and go with their intuition and choose what their gut was telling them they really wanted. It worked.  They all immediately decided what they wanted (much to the delight of everyone behind us).

Now, full disclosure – when I’m in my office and I can’t make a decision, I do not actually stick my tongue out and wave it around (can you imagine someone walking in my office while I’m doing that?!).  However, I do mentally go there.  Once I have enough information – if I still can’t decide, I sit back and mentally stick my tongue out and wave it around.  That allows me to get in touch with my gut feeling or intuition.  More often than not, I am glad that I did.

The Coin Reaction

Here’s a second technique that I recommend when you can’t decide what to do about something.  Again, get all the information that you can relating to your choices.  Then, grab a coin and assign one choice to heads and another choice to tails.  OK, you’re probably thinking – seriously Ivan, you’re a Ph.D. and you’re going to suggest that I flip a coin?!  Hang on – listen to the rest.  When you flip the coin and get your result, sit back for a moment and check in with that intuition again.  If you feel frustration or dread, that’s the wrong choice.  However, if you feel relief or satisfaction, that’s the choice you should go with regardless of what side the coin landed on. This technique is a way to use something tangible to get in touch with your intuition and cut through the decision-making confusion.

Remember, I still believe you need to look at the data and consider the facts.
I am just suggesting that there are times (and ways) to also take your intuition into consideration.

Your intuition is your inner soul talking to you.  Don’t ignore it, embrace it.

Intuition in Business

Is There Room for Intuition in Business?string(40) "Is There Room for Intuition in Business?"

Is there room for intuition in business? Yes, most definitely. Decades ago, I may have thought differently. Over the years I have changed my opinion and believe that intuition can be another tool in the business tool belt. The definition of intuition is the “direct perception of truth or facts, independent of any reasoning process; it is an immediate apprehension or a keen and quick insight into something”.

The Intuits’ Intuition

Years ago, I read a science fiction book that talked about “intuits,” people in their society who seemed to understand things instinctually. Intuits were thought to have this incredible ability to have immediate cognition of a situation. But the truth was, the intuits developed the skill to quickly assemble the facts, analyze the data, and predict probabilities based on their field of expertise. The book was science fiction. However, it made a statement that resonated with me. It said something that flies in the face of the definition above. It said intuits trained for many years in very specific fields and that it wasn’t an instinctual understanding of an issue but it was about quickly using reasoning given their amassed understanding of particular issues. In the real world, that’s basically what predictive analytics do using computers today.

Instinctual Intuition

Having reconsidered my opinion on instincts, I noticed that as I acquired more experience in my field, I found myself better at assessing issues quickly and having a “gut feeling” about the direction I should go. What I had presumed was instinct was — at least in part — quickly assessing the situation given my amassed knowledge of a particular subject.

What some people think of as “instinct” might be this amassed knowledge applied rapidly. I recently had someone drop me a note about a particular challenge he was having. I gave him some advice and in an email response discussing the resolution of the issue, he said I had assessed a particular problem accurately and concluded by saying, “your gut instinct is amazing!” Truth be told, it was partly intuition but predominantly my years and years of seeing situations like this and quickly assessing the problem and offering a solution. In my very own narrow field, I looked like an intuit.

Follow Your Intuition

Can We Control How We’re Intuitively Perceived by Our Fellow Networkers?string(78) "Can We Control How We’re Intuitively Perceived by Our Fellow Networkers?"

Photo courtesy of stockimages at FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Photo courtesy of stockimages at FreeDigitalPhotos.net

In my book Masters of Networking, there’s a section on nonverbal networking written by Darrell and Diana Ross and I’d like to share an excerpt of it with you because it’s really important to consider how we may be involuntarily contributing to others intuitively perceiving us inaccurately.

 Human resource professionals tell us that they usually know within the first two or three minutes of an interview whether the candidate is right or wrong for the job.  The rest of the sixty-minute interview is taken up with confirming the first impression.  Similarly, upon meeting someone for the first time, most of us form a reasonably accurate assessment of his or her personality within the first few minutes, starting even before the first word is uttered.  It’s obvious that humans form these first impressions intuitively, not rationally.  We don’t say to ourselves, “That person is wearing a pinstriped suit and carrying a cane.  Therefore, he is fastidious about his appearance, likely to be flamboyant in manner, a perfectionist in dealing with details, etc., etc.”  We don’t think these things; we just feel them instinctively, almost instantaneously.

Of course, our experiences and our rational minds tell us that our first impressions can be off the mark and that we must be ready to change our assessment in light of new evidence.  But our “working model” is driven by intuition, at least in the beginning of a relationship.

How does this intuition work?  What is it based on?  Studies have shown that we communicate with each other in many nonverbal ways.  These forms of communication tend to be faster than a spoken language, because they don’t require us to pay conscious attention to and interpret a string of words that is being directed at us or others.

One familiar example is body language.  For years, professional communicators have studied and described how we communicate by our posture, gait, gesture, head position, eye movement, and other actions.  The signals we send are mostly about mood, emotion, and attitude, but more explicit messages, as well as more subtle ones, are routinely sent and received without the use of words.  Communication at this level can be controlled and managed if we are aware of what we are doing.

Another kind of message is chemical.  Like most animals, we emit pheromones that tell others of our species, and in some cases our friends in other species, a great deal about our current emotional state, our fears and desires, and our attraction to or repulsion from others.  These messages are largely out of our conscious control.  Different people react differently to these signals; some react strongly, others not at all.  If we are conscious of their influence, we can choose to react to them or we can ignore them.

Can these known forms of nonverbal communication account for all the knowledge and behavior we refer to as intuition?  Some popular authorities, such as currently fashionable spiritualists, hypothesize about mysterious, undetectable “forces” and “fields” which somehow fall outside the known laws of physics.  It is true that there are many aspects of human psychology that we have yet to fully understand.  But the history of scientific discovery shows that human nature, while mysterious, is accessible to the tools of science and that supernatural explanations are ultimately unecessary.

What we do know is that we communicate with people constantly, even when our mouths are closed.  The secret is to become more aware of our unspoken communications so the messages we send are true reflections of who we are and how we wish to be perceived.