The renewed trust in intuitionI have always thought of myself as an intuitive person, someone who is in close touch with what she and others around her are feeling. Long ago, in 2016, I used to publish tiny pieces on a micro-blogging app, and one of the quotes the 25 year old me wrote was called 'The one line life story', in which i described myself as a 'Sum total of choices, each made after hours of contemplation and comparison, followed by seconds of connecting with my gut'. I repeat, the 25 year old me wrote this, while processing some very atypical choices i had made in the tiny but intentional life i had designed up until then.
But somewhere along the way, i stopped letting my intuition be my primary guiding force, and my left brain happily took over and started enjoying the field day it had been waiting for.
Were all my decisions completely against my intuition? No, they weren't. But i had stopped consciously paying attention to what it was trying to tell me, and instead started articulating perfectly smart sounding reasons wrapped in logic and bow-tied with analysis for me to go against what i was 'feeling' like.
The word feeling is where all the problem is. Feelings are temporary, short-lived. To give you an analogy, Feeling is the current weather, right now, and intuition is the accumulated forecast built from every storm you have been through. And because feelings change so frequently, I started discarding it while taking decisions. But feeling also happens to be the primary language through which our intuition speaks to us, so by ignoring my feelings, I was quietly ignoring my intuition too.
Over the last few months, though, intuition has decided to jolt back into life. Until couple of months back, I was in a job that i had been planning to leave for a year, and my reason to leave was something very non-analytical - non-alignment with my inner self. My left brain and my intuition were in a tense war for over a year which finally ended when my current role got eliminated in layoffs. For me, this was the loudest way of Universe telling me: you were right, this is not for you. And since you are not trusting your decision enough, let me take the decision for you, along with a freebie of monetary runway to go find yourself again.
And more recently, my partner and me almost booked a trip that we would have had to rush back from, in a day - an impromptu Nepal trip which we were very convinced we needed. We were planning this from Delhi, so we were anyway halfway there. But something was not feeling right about the trip's timing - we reached the payment page twice but did not proceed. There was no real reason stopping us, so we were contemplating and articulating reasons that we normally discard. We were both dejected and surprised in the moment, almost like we were letting ourselves down. But we let that feeling pass and looked forward for tomorrow to be a fresh day. 2 days later, while we were returning back home in Bangalore, a family situation emerged that required us to be back home, almost immediately. And everything suddenly made sense now. The undefined, unknown force that was pulling us away from the decision was nothing but our intuition. No, i am not saying that our intuition can forecast future, it cannot. But when you are unable to move ahead with a decision, its usually one of the three things
a) anxiety - who is anxious about a mini-holiday? b) Ordinary Indecision - up until we sat to book our tickets, going was the only decision in front of us. There wasn't a competing choice we were even thinking about c) Lucky avoidance - Had our flights been booked and then cancelled, i would term it as lucky avoidance, but this felt more deliberate in nature.
That left us to conclude that it was our intuition telling us that the timing for an impromptu international trip wasn't right for us, or that we were trying to be more ad-hoc than what our personalities could accommodate. Some may call this self-serving and mystical, but for us this was our intuition recalibrating us back to our most natural way of operating.
Either ways, i am now system-resetting my decision arc to its default state: Hours of contemplation and comparison followed by consciously connecting with my gut :)
The renewed trust in intuitionI have always thought of myself as an intuitive person, someone who is in close touch with what she and others around her are feeling. Long ago, in 2016, I used to publish tiny pieces on a micro-blogging app, and one of the quotes the 25 year old me wrote was called 'The one line life story', in which i described myself as a 'Sum total of choices, each made after hours of contemplation and comparison, followed by seconds of connecting with my gut'. I repeat, the 25 year old me wrote this, while processing some very atypical choices i had made in the tiny but intentional life i had designed up until then.
But somewhere along the way, i stopped letting my intuition be my primary guiding force, and my left brain happily took over and started enjoying the field day it had been waiting for.
Were all my decisions completely against my intuition? No, they weren't. But i had stopped consciously paying attention to what it was trying to tell me, and instead started articulating perfectly smart sounding reasons wrapped in logic and bow-tied with analysis for me to go against what i was 'feeling' like.
The word feeling is where all the problem is. Feelings are temporary, short-lived. To give you an analogy, Feeling is the current weather, right now, and intuition is the accumulated forecast built from every storm you have been through. And because feelings change so frequently, I started discarding it while taking decisions. But feeling also happens to be the primary language through which our intuition speaks to us, so by ignoring my feelings, I was quietly ignoring my intuition too.
Over the last few months, though, intuition has decided to jolt back into life. Until couple of months back, I was in a job that i had been planning to leave for a year, and my reason to leave was something very non-analytical - non-alignment with my inner self. My left brain and my intuition were in a tense war for over a year which finally ended when my current role got eliminated in layoffs. For me, this was the loudest way of Universe telling me: you were right, this is not for you. And since you are not trusting your decision enough, let me take the decision for you, along with a freebie of monetary runway to go find yourself again.
And more recently, my partner and me almost booked a trip that we would have had to rush back from, in a day - an impromptu Nepal trip which we were very convinced we needed. We were planning this from Delhi, so we were anyway halfway there. But something was not feeling right about the trip's timing - we reached the payment page twice but did not proceed. There was no real reason stopping us, so we were contemplating and articulating reasons that we normally discard. We were both dejected and surprised in the moment, almost like we were letting ourselves down. But we let that feeling pass and looked forward for tomorrow to be a fresh day. 2 days later, while we were returning back home in Bangalore, a family situation emerged that required us to be back home, almost immediately. And everything suddenly made sense now. The undefined, unknown force that was pulling us away from the decision was nothing but our intuition. No, i am not saying that our intuition can forecast future, it cannot. But when you are unable to move ahead with a decision, its usually one of the three things
a) anxiety - who is anxious about a mini-holiday? b) Ordinary Indecision - up until we sat to book our tickets, going was the only decision in front of us. There wasn't a competing choice we were even thinking about c) Lucky avoidance - Had our flights been booked and then cancelled, i would term it as lucky avoidance, but this felt more deliberate in nature.
That left us to conclude that it was our intuition telling us that the timing for an impromptu international trip wasn't right for us, or that we were trying to be more ad-hoc than what our personalities could accommodate. Some may call this self-serving and mystical, but for us this was our intuition recalibrating us back to our most natural way of operating.
Either ways, i am now system-resetting my decision arc to its default state: Hours of contemplation and comparison followed by consciously connecting with my gut :)