Your heart, your sixth sense, your gut. Call it what you want, but as women, our intuition plays a big role in shaping the decisions we make from day to day. We rely on it when we’ve already looked over the facts and need to make a decision. But sometimes we ignore it or we can’t hear it because there’s too much noise. Below are five things that can get in the way of our intuition.
1. Our Head
The biggest obstacle that your gut could ever have is your head. Sometimes your head and your heart wage wars over a certain topic. You feel one way, but the evidence points in another direction. For example, you are going out for a night with girlfriends. You stand in front of the mirror trying on dress after dress. At some point, there’s a dress that just clicks. What you should do is wear that dress, but most of the time, we’re so busy critiquing each outfit that our head is making so much noise, we can’t even hear our heart. It’s a slightly superficial example, but you get the idea.
2. Our Emotions
Our intuition and our emotions often run in tandem with one another, but on occasion, our emotions can say one thing, while our intuition says the other. This is perhaps the trickiest bit of noise, because we often mistake our emotions and our intuition for the same thing. Many authors have written about the crazy things that people will do for love and a lot of these things would go against our natural intuition.
3. Our Past
Hopefully as we go through life, we learn from our mistakes. As we build up a big store of them, sometimes, when a new problem arises, we’ll look back at a past problem and compare it with a new problem. Our intuition may be telling us to do one thing, while the facts from the past say another. It’s our responsibility to figure out why our gut tells us one thing and, seemingly, the fact point in another direction. Is it because the cases are not as similar as we think? Are we gun shy to actually make a decision based on the outcome of the last problem? Take time to answer these questions in order to overcome the dissonance between the past and your intuition.
4. Our Friends and Family
We love and trust our friends and family and often value you’re their opinions and their advice. Many times, we may end up listening to our friends or a family member, rather than listening to what our own intuition has to say.
5. Our Superiors
They’re in management for a reason, right? They must know what the right decisions are, even if your gut says it’s the wrong way to go. This is not always the case. Many times our superiors are relying on their gut response as well. However, sometimes we take the decisions that our executive bosses make over our own instinct.
