I have some bad news for you.
All of those self-help gurus who have been telling you to trust your intuition, to listen to the voice inside your head, have been giving you bad advice.
Intuition is knowing without thinking. It is the ability to reach a decision without having all of the facts and information that you need, in order to make that decision. It is a non-analytical ability to make decisions.
Recently, there has been a great deal of research surrounding intuition. And that research is helping us gain a finer appreciation for exactly what intuition is.
In a nutshell, intuition is a subconscious decision-making process that is not based on reason, logic or analysis, but based on your subconscious ability to recognize patterns.
How good you are in recognizing patterns, depends on how experienced you are with respect to the thing you’re making a decision about.
For example, if you are a 25-year old engineer, with 3 years of engineering experience under your belt, your intuition is just going to suck.
If, however, you are a 55-year old engineer, with 33 years of engineering experience, your intuition is almost always going to be correct.
You see, intuition is like wine, it improves with age, because intuition grows out of experience.
Even for the most seasoned, experienced individual, intuition is not infallible. Your experience may not be sufficient or comprehensive enough and, therefore, your intuition may mislead you into making mistakes or poor decisions.
Because everybody has different experiences, even within the same field, industry or profession, it is imperative to seek out the intuition of others who do what you do, before making important decisions. Those others will see patterns, that are invisible to you, which will lead to better decisions.
