How to Work With Your Intuition

a mental model

What is your personal definition of intuition?

Even more important: do you have one?

Go on, think about it. I’ll wait (it’s okay if the answer is no).

Years ago, I recorded over 50 interviews with entrepreneurs and leaders, asking them to share their experiences of intuition. I published about ten of those as podcast episodes and had great fun while doing it, right up until I had my kiddo and realized life was going to be a mess for a while (unfortunately, only three of them remain on Apple).

Each interview started with the participant defining intuition and what it meant to them. Those answers were pretty wide-ranging. But after a while, I started to notice a clear pattern. Their responses usually fell into one of four categories, even if they weren’t conceptualizing it that way. The four categories are:

1. physical

2. mental

3. emotional

4. spiritual

The experience of intuition that was often mentioned first was physical, even if the interviewee later realized they felt it more often in other ways. Physical intuitive hits can be experienced as a shiver up the spine or goosebumps. My friend Chris told me he felt the shiver moments before he realized he was in real physical danger on a wild trip through Mongolia. Others mentioned feeling cold sweats before they realized something was about to happen.

The most wild story came from a participant named Haley. Once, she was visiting her hometown and out with some old friends at a bar. The plan was to continue to another bar to meet more people, and her friends offered to drive her there so she wouldn’t have to bring her car. As she approached the passenger side door, something physically stopped her. She said it was as though someone stood behind her and held her firmly by the arms and across the chest for a moment. At that moment, she knew she should not get into that car, even though she didn’t know why. So she had to beg off. It was awkward…. she had no “good” reason not to go, she didn’t know how to explain her experience, and she hadn’t seen these people in years. She had every logical reason to stay. But she listened to her intuition and drove herself home instead of continuing with the evening. The next day she learned that they got into a terrible accident, and two out of the three women in the car died. This is an awfully hard and sad example, and it begs the question: what if she had told them what she had experienced? Would that have changed anything? This gets into the ethics of intuition, which I’ll explore in a later post.

Next, you have mental intuition. These are the folks who can look at data and instantly recognize a problem that would take others hours and hours to comb through, or those who can see behavior patterns in people incredibly fast. Daniel Kahneman talks about this kind of intuition in Thinking Fast and Slow (but he makes the mistake of claiming this is the definition of intuition, full stop, which is far too narrow and excludes so many other valid experiences).

Then you have the emotional folks who can feel what others are feeling or just have a general feeling of dread when they know something won’t work out. A friend of mine can look at her calendar and know when travel plans won’t work out — it’s an emotional feeling that tells her not to book the tickets. Every time she goes against it, she regrets it because her plans have to change. More friends than I can count can intuit the emotions of the people they come in contact with, whether they know them well or not.

And finally, you have spiritual intuition. This is a harder one to define because it fell across so many different experiences. Some folks described their “knowing” as something impossible to locate anywhere in the body, it was just a certainty that arose (but importantly, it did not seem to arise from the mind). Others see visions that seem to come from nowhere. Some define it as hearing the words or information as if someone is speaking to them. This begs the question: is it “intuition” if an unseen guide tells you? For my purposes, I lumped them all in with “ways of knowing,” but I acknowledge this is a weak area that should be explored.

As this pattern emerged, it was interesting to note how each participant felt certain about their definition, to a fault, because that's how they experienced it. I started telling the mentally intuitive folks—who tended to be very analytical, heady, and cynical about spiritual stuff—how the spiritual folks perceived it, and they would blanch as if it was so far-fetched they couldn’t grok the possibility. The spiritual folks had the same reaction when they were told that others perceived it as pattern recognition.

The other thing I noticed was this: the longer each participant was asked to think about the ways intuition had arisen for them, the more they started to identify other areas beyond their primary area. The more they were given examples of other kinds of intuition, the more they were able to see it in themselves. In other words, their personal definition and conception of intuition started to expand.

As all of these experiences came together, I started to see that intuition might fall on a quadrant, like the really sophisticated and expertly designed graphic image I have created below.

My theory is that we're capable of all four kinds of intuition, but we lean heavily on one or two, which means the rest of our abilities are likely underdeveloped or underacknowledged. We can develop our relationship with our intuition when we study how it arises for us now, and how we might have access to it in ways that we aren’t yet aware of.

How to Use the Model

If you’ve stuck with me this long, you’ve probably already started to think about how intuition arises for you. Let’s get specific. Start by listing out the stories you have that detail your experiences with intuition. Some of you might have just five examples off the top of your head. Others will have pages. You don’t need to write the whole story out; just use a word or two so you know which experience you’re referring to.

Look at the stories and start to get specific about how each one of them happened. Did you feel something? See something? Did your hair stand on end? Did you know something that you had no way of knowing? Write that down next to each story.

What patterns do you notice in each of these stories? Where do your experiences land on the quadrant? What does this tell you about the way intuition works for you right now? Do any of your stories have multiple layers? I once felt a spiritual knowing in my stomach (I’ll share that story another time). I would describe that as both spiritual and physical. Do any of your stories pull in multiple quadrants at one time?

Are there any empty quadrants? What does this tell you about the areas in which you could strengthen your intuition?

Over the next few weeks, start to track how intuition arises for you and write those down too. What you’re doing is building your library of experiences and developing the language of your unique intuition.

Often, we don’t realize that something we use as intuition could be classified that way. For example, for a long time, I didn’t think of my cooking skills as intuitive. Now I know that I’ve developed somewhat of an intuitive pattern recognition when it comes to using spices. It occurs to me as a knowing (and no joke, sometimes I wonder if my dead Italian grandmother stands over my shoulder and shouts tells me what to do), but I instinctively know what to add to make something better. I didn’t always have that skill—it’s a pattern-recognition form of intuition.

Honing this skill and developing your own language is also helpful for discerning what is not intuition. Given our terrible governance and gun control laws, I sometimes get panicky sending my daughter to school. This experience was far worse when she was younger. I would get terrible images in my head, and I would worry that this was an intuitive hit and that I needed to go pick her up early or not send her to school at all. This feeling was incredibly stressful and disruptive, and would completely upend a day.

After working with my intuition for a while, I finally realized something. The most important intuitive hits never came from my mind in that way. They were not repeatable like a thought… they did not loop on endless replay and I could not replay the message in my mind or body if I tried. They were received once, and that was it. You either acted on it or you didn’t. In contrast, these terrifying thoughts almost always came in response to some kind of external stimulus, like a bad news headline or a stray comment that reminded me of other school shootings.

Once I recognized that, I was able to interrogate each “intuitive hit.” What was I doing just before it happened? Where did it come from in my body? What emotions preceded it? Did it occur using the language of my intuition, or my anxiety? With the exception of one time, I could directly trace it back to something in my environment that triggered me into those anxious thoughts. It made it easier to let go, not engage with the anxious thoughts, and trust that if there is a real threat to my kiddo, I will have a greater likelihood of intuiting it because I did the work of sussing through what’s intuition and what’s not.

And that one time…. I was hugging my daughter goodbye and had the image out of nowhere of a shooter. It was a teenage boy. It came and went, and it had the distinct feeling of “distance,” like not an imminent threat. Despite knowing that this was not an anxious thought but an intuitive moment, I looked at her, told her I loved her, and could let her walk out the door. About 30 minutes later, I learned that there had been a teenage boy shooter at a high school about 40 minutes away. That was a spooky moment, but I trusted what my intuition told me: the threat was not near. And I filed that feeling away: that’s one more piece of data for me to use when I get intuitive hits.

There’s a lot more to discuss here and I’ll expand more on the topic in later posts, but I’ll leave you with this. We’ve gone through some pretty heavy examples, and that was mostly on purpose. I personally believe that in an age of increasing deception and misinformation, not to mention manipulation and fear-mongering, our ability to use our intuition is going to become even more important than it is already. You are going to have to learn a different way of trusting yourself. Intuition might be derided in the public, but it is not a light and fluffy exercise (nor is it exclusively a heavy burden or task!). We need to approach it with the intent to teach ourselves how to hear what’s true to us in the ever-increasing noise.

Let me know what you discover.

Note: There’s a whole lot more to cover here, including many more examples, ideas, and flaws around this model, and I’ll do my best to develop these ideas more over the next few weeks and months.