How to trust and use your Gut
Learning how your gut works, recognising patterns, and trusting your gut can help you make better decisions. "Trust your hunches. They're usually based on facts filed away just below the conscious level."
Introduction
This post describes how gut reactions work, the link with intuition and how experience and practising trusting your gut can help you make better decisions.
The old saying "trust your gut" refers to trusting your feelings, your intuition, trusting your inner voice, with the "gut reaction" or "gut feeling" being more profound than your conscious mind. Gut feeling is intuition, which can be a valuable tool in some circumstances. It seems gut feelings do mean something, and they can often help you make good decisions if you know how they work. Trusting your gut takes practice to get good at it. When people talk about having great intuition or being good decision-makers, it's because they've worked at honing their gut feeling skills.
What is your Gut?
Your brain is delicately linked to other body parts through your nervous system and chemical signals such as hormones and neurotransmitters. Some neuroscientists assert that the mind is comprised of the intertwined brain and body parts. This, then, helps explain why physical reactions frequently accompany intuitive feelings.
You may sometimes get an unusual feeling in the stomach, other times in the throat, and other times on the skin. Gut feeling is your ability to instantly understand something without needing to consider additional information or take time to think it over. It is your inner feeling about something.
Gut feelings often arise when dealing with scary situations. It can be difficult to precisely identify why someone makes you uneasy, for example, in a meeting with someone you find unsettling. What is most likely happening is that your subconscious picks up signals that your conscious senses are not. Those signals manifest themselves in your gut to let you know that something isn't quite right. A gut feeling can be a beneficial signal that sparks creative or entrepreneurial thinking.
How does a gut feeling work?
Gut feelings or intuitions come from patterns we've identified in our past experiences. Your subconscious mind continuously processes information that you are not consciously aware of, not only when you're asleep but also when you're awake. This helps explain the "aha" moments you experience when you see, feel, hear or learn something that you already knew. The revelation of the obvious occurs when your conscious mind finally learns something that your subconscious mind had already known.
Gut feelings or intuitions occur when your brain makes a substantial match or mismatch between past experiences and current experiences. We notice patterns based on past experiences; we store these patterns and associated information as long-term memory and then retrieve the information when we see these patterns again in our everyday experience. These patterns we can envisage as rows of data being populated in a never-ending spreadsheet. In the left-hand columns are the patterns, the bits of information that we notice across similar situations. In the right-hand columns are other various bits of information - outcomes, expectancies, goals, and actions; we have learned things associated with those patterns. The next time we detect one of these patterns (or something similar), our brain finds it in the spreadsheet and delivers the corresponding outcome information to us.
Current research suggests that a brain is a predictive machine constantly comparing new experiences and against previously stored earlier experiences and, as a result, can predict what will happen next. Therefore, the more experience you have in a particular field, the more accurate and reliable your intuitions will be. Gut feelings or intuitions, therefore, improve with experience, especially their breadth and depth.
The more years of experience you have under your belt, the more likely a solution will simply automatically materialise before you. The key is not to overthink it and just trust your gut.
Bruce Henderson, the founder of the Boston Consulting Group, may have put it best when, in 1977, he called intuition "the subconscious integration of all the experiences, conditioning, and knowledge of a lifetime, including the cultural and emotional biases of that lifetime."
Experience improves your gut feelings
To use and trust your gut feelings, you need practice. Our gut feelings are only as good as the patterns we draw them from. So, you need to have had sufficient experience noticing and changing patterns in order to have built up a spreadsheet that is accurate and extensive.
A poker player with years of experience and an amount of trial and error will have built up patterns as to what a winning hand looks like. So, when they peek at their cards and are struck by a feeling of joy, they would be wise to take that intuition seriously.
Both quantity and quality of practice in establishing patterns equate to the reliability of intuitions. The best form of practice, which most reliably leads to accurate intuitions, is known as deliberate practice. Deliberate practice isn't just repetition; it involves constant refinement based on feedback. It means noticing your gut feelings, thinking about them and the situation that has prompted them.
Then there is the cross-indexing system, which is the ability to see similar patterns in unconnected fields; this ability increases a person's intuitive skills from good to brilliant. The power of cross-indexing increases with the amount of material that can be cross-indexed. In general management, people with varied and diverse backgrounds will be more valuable probably and will learn faster because they'll recognise more patterns.
A survey conducted in May 2002 by executive search firm Christian & Timbers reveals that fully 45% of corporate executives now rely more on instinct than on facts and figures in running their businesses.
This means we're likely to have reliable gut feelings in certain situations and unreliable ones in others.
Case study – IT Infrastructure Manager
I have held the position of IT Infrastructure Manager several times, it's fair to say that I am very experienced in that field. I have seen many infrastructure outages like ATMs and Server farms being down that, in turn, cause significant business and service disruption, which is measured in minutes. As a result, the pressure to restore services as quickly as possible is enormous, as is the risk of making the situation worse.
These events are time-critical; they are an example of crisis management. I know from my own experience that as the years went by and my exposure to these events increased my gut feelings about the right solution definitely improved. What also improved was my ability to evaluate different advice and options that were presented, namely solutions, where I often made a decision based only on gut feel as other information was either unavailable or untested.
Benefits of trusting your gut
When making business decisions
· It can be a way to help you make effective decisions in unfamiliar, changing or complex situations.
· Intuitions use subconscious energy, reducing the amount of conscious energy you need to apply when making decisions. As a result, your choices are based on a higher, deeper intelligence and wisdom gained from personal experiences making you more comfortable trusting yourself.
· Executives routinely rely on their intuitions to solve complex problems when logical methods won't do. The consensus is that the higher up on the corporate ladder you climb, the more you will need well-honed business instincts.
When you do not trust someone
· Conscious actions and words will rarely reveal someone who is being untruthful. However, body language can be a clue as this can be picked up by deeper primal parts of your brain.
· Lying is pretty difficult for most of us, although it seems to come naturally to some people. Body language can betray words being spoken by giving off micro-expressions that reveal an underlying truth. Consciously we may not realise that we have spotted them, but our gut does spot these subtle cues. So, if your gut says that someone is being deceptive or lying, then there is a good chance you are right.
When something is potentially immoral
· Business situations can raise the dilemma of what is profitable and what is right. Decisions such as making an investment or recruiting can all fall under this category. Moral judgements aren't easy to rationalise, and some things just don't have a good outcome, yet you have to choose between the best of sometimes – bad options. These are situations when all you can really do is trust your gut feeling.
When something feels right
· Intuition can be highly useful for driving creativity and innovative thinking to otherwise conservative business practices. Or sometimes when you are interviewing a candidate who doesn't tick all the boxes but feels right.
Ralph S. Larsen, chair and CEO of Johnson & Johnson, explains the distinction: "Very often, people will do a brilliant job up through the middle management levels, where it's very heavily quantitative in terms of the decision-making. But then they reach senior management, where the problems get more complex and ambiguous, and we discover that their judgment or intuition is not what it should be. And when that happens, it's a problem; it's a big problem."
Case Study - Dr Joyce Diane Brothers
Dr Joyce Diane Brothers was an American psychologist who coined the phrase "Trust your hunches. They're usually based on facts filed away just below the conscious level." She became a famous television personality in 1955 for winning the top prize on the American game show The $64,000 Question. She won by trusting her hunches, her gut feelings when presented with multiple choice answers to questions. Often not knowing why she picked answers that just came to her as being correct and, as a result, got the right answer virtually every time.
You can see the gut feeling in action
Watch a Game Show (like The Chase) where contestants are presented with multiple choice answers to questions. The people who win most are those who go with their gut feeling, saying things like "B just stands out to me" or "C just came to mind". Then you will hear losers often say, "Oh – I thought it was A, that's the first thing I thought of". But they selected D instead, not going with their gut. In game shows, those contestants that go with their gut are right 99% of the time, even though they often say they know nothing about the question. It. is a perfect example of a pattern of information in long-term memory known to the subconscious but not the conscious mind. I personally believe we remember (like a long video recording) everything we have ever seen or read and that it is all stored away, only accessible by our subconscious memory.
Why should you trust your gut?
Today we are so focused on analytical and rational thinking that intuition or gut feelings have largely fallen out of favour. Still, your emotional responses to things should not be ignored.
It's difficult to imagine that CEOs make essential decisions based purely on their intuition. Big decisions usually require deliberate and rational thinking. However, your emotions should not be ignored, being overridden by logic or ignored altogether. Your emotions are evaluations of what you have experienced, what you intrinsically know. They are a part of your internal information processing system.
It's easy to ignore your emotions, your intuitions, preferring instead to rely on good quantifiable data, but you can be unintentionally cutting off a precious source of information. Sometimes, we are so data-driven that we can't see the forest for the trees, and we ignore our insight. Presented with data and insight options, often the best way to go is just to trust your gut.
More than 40% of CEOs say they make decisions based on their gut feeling (or intuition) despite having access to troves of data, analytical tools and experts at hand.
Conclusion
Intuitions or gut feelings occur when your brain makes a substantial match or mismatch between past experiences and current experiences. We form and notice memory patterns through the process of past experiences; we store these patterns and associated information in long-term memory and then retrieve the information when we see these patterns again in our everyday experience. To use and trust our gut feelings, we need practice. Our gut feelings are only as good as the patterns they are based upon. Therefore, we need to have had sufficient experience noticing and changing patterns to build up a spreadsheet that is accurate and extensive.
Being experienced in your field allows you to rely on your gut feelings more. If you have years of experience under your belt or you've performed extensive research to deal with a problem, the solution will automatically materialise before you. However, many companies and their executives find themselves in increasingly turbulent waters. Thanks to rapid technological advances, business models in some markets are changing seemingly overnight, and new competitors are emerging from everywhere. There is no way you could have the time to thoroughly analyse every one of the options or alternatives available to you, so you have to rely on your business judgment; you sometimes just need to rely on your gut.