Peak Potential

Developing Accurate Intuition

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Intuition includes but goes beyond listening to our feelings. It involves quickly sizing up what is so based on the limited data available and using this information to guide our subsequent actions. Whilst this sizing up is by its very nature less precise than a rigorous analysis of all the facts, it is often what the situation demands and you want to hone your intuition to be as accurate as possible. This article outlines two different ways you can use journaling to develop the accuracy of your intuition over time.

One way to increase the accuracy of your intuition is to practice bringing forth the lessons from the past. In addition to helping you with immediate situation at hand, it helps to train you to habitually see similarities between the challenge you face now and challenges you have faced in the past.

• What are some similar situations I have faced before?
• What did I do?
• What worked? What didn’t?
• What lessons did I learn?
• How can apply those lessons to the situation before me now?

This strategy should be routinely employed each time you need to make an important decision. In addition to helping you with the challenge at hand, the repetitive use of this strategy helps you develop the ability to intuitively look at any situation without consciously trying to do so. While you are developing this new mental habit, you may want to also use it on less critical decisions simply for the practice.

The second journaling strategy you can use is called imaging. The complexities in any challenge you face can be teased out through comparing it to an image. For example, “feedback is like fruit, it works best when it is fresh and nourishing”. A more thorough example can be viewed in our description of how the complex notion of leadership is like a tree. To use imaging:

• Think of 5 random images (eg chair, road, holiday, mountain and ocean)
• How is the challenge at hand like each of these images?
• What insight does each image ad?
• Have other images sprung to mind? If so, what value do they ad?

The process of imaging is more ‘left field’ than the lessons from past strategy, yet it adds significant value because it engages you in looking at things from a variety of angles – something our normal linear way of thinking does not do.