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A how-to guide to following your intuition
By Scott Fusco | July 18, 2007
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Ever wonder how to tap into your intuition?
This post describes how we ALL have intuitive skills and details how to understand, recognize, and trust them more easily. But first, to clear up some confusion:
If you are at all like me, you have wondered what people mean when they talk about following your intuition. Some people call it intuition, a sixth sense, clairvoyance, divine intervention, your soul, your unconscious mind, your spiritual guides, your gut, your heart or your higher self. Whew! I’m sure there are more words that are used but these are the ones that I have heard most frequently.
It can be challenging to read about these topics because many authors use these words interchangeably and often use a different word as their “dominant” word to describe intuition. However, for me, I will define it simply as speaking and acting from the heart. It is whatever resonates with your own personal integrity. Your intuition is whatever feels right to you in a particular moment in time. There is nothing rational or logical about it. It is the opposite of writing a pros and cons list. It is making a decision, perhaps even instantaneously, based on whatever feels right to you in that moment. For example, it could be as simple as picking up on someone’s energy the moment that you meet them and instantly deciding whether or not you want to do business with them.
I write this post about intuition because learning to harness it is unbelievably important for all of us and for the growth of the collective consciousness of the planet. The consciousness of the planet is growing, however, there are still many people that are not doing what they want to do. They are denying what feels right to them because of various barriers that are imposed on them by others, society, or that they impose on themselves.
The danger of listening to these barriers is that you will never be able to feel whole or achieve any state of lasting happiness unless you listen and do what you want to do from your heart. That is your intuition. It really is that simple.
It isn’t easy to turn off your logical brain and start living “whatever feels right.” You may feel like doing so is being selfish or that it is foolish and impractical. It is actually none of those things.
Consider this: your heart tells you what you need in a certain moment in time. It could tell you what you need emotionally, physically, intellectually, etc. if you learn how to listen to it. Consider if you have been working for a long time, you might notice your body having a hard time concentrating. This is your body’s way of telling you to take a break. Your intuition in that moment in time is to take a break. If you are feeling intellectually bored, your intuition would be to seek out something more stimulating. If you run a few miles, your intuition will tell you to rest.
Another important thing to note is that your intuition never lies. It doesn’t have the capacity to lie. You can leverage this power by trusting in it and following it without feeling the need to question it. Some of our intuitions are very obvious such as the examples that I have listed above, but it also gets much more subtle than this.
If you practice honing your awareness of your intuition, then you will be able to pick up on some of the subtler signals from your heart and body. Psychic people are very in tune with these subtle energies.
I enjoy talking about intuition because I never considered myself to be a particularly intuitive person until within the last year and especially after I first experienced God consciousness. During my first two years of college I studied mechanical engineering at Boston University. My modus operandi for decision making was to dissect everything into its components and create pros and cons lists.
And this was a difficult time for me. It was a time when I felt disconnected from my family, my friends, and even my old self. I didn’t believe in God at the time and I hated my school work. In retrospect, that was one of the darkest periods of my life.
In hindsight, I realized that the main reason that I was so unhappy is because I had so little awareness of myself. After all, the process for being happy is to figure out what makes you happy and bring it into your life. That’s it, it’s that simple. But without the awareness of what you’re looking for, all you can do is flail in the dark and hope that you find it.
If I could go back in time, I would have followed my intuition more. I would have followed my intuition that told me to get out of my chair, stop studying, and take a walk. I would have followed my intuition to visit home more often and re-connect with my family and friends. I would have followed my intuition to switch majors before completing two long, agonizing years.
And this is the phenomena of intuition - it is always there with us. It is always telling us what we should be doing, whether or not we choose to listen to it. It doesn’t go away. For some of us, it may be more developed than others, however, regardless, it always knows what is best for us in that moment in time.
This is living from your heart, from your integrity. It is a powerful way of living. It is a massive shift that will change your life in many ways once you complete the shift. Just consider that your heart knows what you really want, whether or not you are consciously aware of it. And your heart never lies.
Consider that your heart never lets something like stress affect how it makes decisions, like we sometimes do. It doesn’t let a feeling of obligation or of being overwhelmed cloud our true integrity of what we really want for ourselves. Our heart always knows what we want, that is it’s power.
So in order to access this power, we have to really get in a state of trusting it. We have to tune into and listen to our bodies, because our bodies don’t lie. If we feel sick after we eat a food, our body tells us to stop eating it. That is our intuition. Likewise, if we feel sick after doing ten hours of engineering homework, our body tells us to do something else - take a break, take a walk, whatever… just something else.
In some instances, it can seem perfectly natural for us to follow our intuition such as when we decide to not drink milk that smells like it may have gone bad. Yet this same power we avoid in other situations when there is more at stake, such as our happiness or living our life’s purpose. Yet it is these exact decisions that are the most important for us to listen to our intuition. It is these situations that will have a massive impact on the course of our life.
Think of your intuition as a supercomputer that has in it a prioritized list of all of your values. Whenever you take an action in your life, your intuition has the ability to tell you whether or not it feels right to you. It does that because it has an unprecedented awareness of what is important to you. It knows your values better than you yourself know your values in your conscious mind.
If you have difficulty “trusting” your intuition, begin making a conscious effort to shift away from that type of thinking. It shouldn’t be that difficult to trust if you acknowledge the truth - that is, that your body and heart always know what is best for you more than your conscious mind does. If you embrace the idea of your intuition being like a supercomputer, then that should make complete sense.
It is when we get confused between trusting what feels right and what our mind tells us is right that we start feeling negative emotions.
Begin to let go of the notion that your intuition is something ethereal or something that is of another world that only psychic masters understand. If you have a heart you have intuition.
If you begin to listen and live by your intuition, I promise that the following things will happen. First, all of your needs will be met. Living an inspired life means doing what you want to do at all times. You use your intuition as the mechanism that tells you when you are doing what you should be doing and when you are doing something that you should not be doing. When you are doing something that you should be doing, you feel happy and connected. When you are doing something that you shouldn’t be doing, you feel disconnected, depressed, or various other negative emotions. Your body, your heart, your intuition is telling you: “Hey! Wake up! We gotta do something else!”
So begin to use your intuition as your own personal “map” of your needs. Consider how your body is a divine creation - when your stomach growls, it tells you that your body is hungry. It can never lie about this information. It never growls when it is full. You trust this information pretty easily. Begin to trust the information from your heart with that same ease because information from your heart and body is information from a divine source, it doesn’t have the capacity to lie. Your conscious mind on the other hand can easily be led astray and can be used to convince yourself that you want many things that are decidedly unspiritual such as power or control over others. You may dedicate years of your life chasing something only to realize that you never wanted it in the first place. Don’t do that.
So ask yourself, is trusting your intuition really that unreasonable? Would it be such a leap of faith to listen to your nose that tells you not to drink the milk that’s gone bad? No? Then why should it be such a leap of faith to listen to your heart which tells you what you should be doing with your life?
If you are interested in reading more about intuition, read this post about knowing when to follow your heart vs your mind.
Cautionary notes (edit 10-24-07 )
There are four more important considerations when it comes to your intuition:
1) Your intuition can and does change frequently - Because your intuition represents your moment-to-moment truth, expect it to change frequently. For example, you might initially feel good about something and then a week later you realize that you no longer feel good about it. This is natural and part of the process of following your intuition.
Don’t fight this, just accept that this is the way it works. Your intuition changes. Have the flexibility to recognize that and the willingness to adapt to it and you’ll be okay.
2) People have different levels of intuitiveness - Your level of intuitiveness has a lot to do with your overall general awareness and how much experience you have listening to it. I meet some people that are astonishingly intuitive and other people that are not very intuitive at all.
Intuitiveness is just like any other skill set, it takes practice. We are all not naturals at it but it is something that can be honed if you work at it and stay open and flexible.
The intuitiveness that I talk about in this post has to do with general, basic intuition that is pretty simple to pick up on for novice intuitives - things like having the awareness to recognize when you feel stressed and making adjustments by doing what you want to do versus what you perceive you “should” do is one example.
How much you want to trust your intuition in matters that are much less personal and “objective” is entirely up to you. There are some psychic and spiritual teachers that swear that intuition is the end-all for decision making skills. At this point in my life, I am not one of those people. I view intuition as a tool that is helpful for some things (such as moving towards happiness, inspiration and fulfillment), and practically useless for other things (such as optimizing a business, anything that is technical or analytical, and sales and marketing). And this leads me to point 3:
3) Balancing intuition and your mind - I talk about this in my post “knowing when to follow your heart vs your mind.” Just like everything else in the world, there is a balance to find between your intuition and your mind. This is a personal and subjective thing. Have a read of that post to gain more insight into what I am talking about.
4) Sometimes your intuition is wrong. This is one of the things I learned from my poker days. You may get a vibe like you have the best hand for example, but you end up flipping your cards and find out that you are almost a guaranteed loser.
The way that intuition works doesn’t lend itself to 100% accuracy. Many of the examples that I use in this post are nearly 100% accurate to illustrate how basic intuition is and how we use it every day but not all situations are this clear-cut. Learn to identify which situations are clear-cut and which are not and you’ll be ok.
It might help those that are puzzled by intuition to think of it as a supercomputer that “sizes things up” quickly based on your past experiences. The more experience you have in certain situations, the more data your mind has to “size things up” with and therefore your intuition will be more accurate.
People who are criminal profilers will have a more accurate “gut” feeling with reading people than would someone who doesn’t work with people as much. Try to figure out where you are on this spectrum and that will help you decide how much stock to place in your intuitive vibes.
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Related Posts:
- Knowing when to follow your heart vs your mind
- Useless rules and restrictions
- Right or wrong vs. Right for you
- Is the sky actually blue?
- My personal experience in a state of God consciousness
Topics: Awareness-Consciousness, Decision Making, Inspiration, Intuition, Logic-Intelligence, Personal Development, Spirituality |
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So my intuition is telling me my husband is being unfaithful…do I listen to it??????
Posted by: Shannon on October 24th, 2007 at 11:28 amShannon,
Thank you for your comments. I have edited the post (something I was hoping to get around to anyways) and hopefully the new information will provide some tools for you to look at for your situation.
Here are some questions to ask yourself:
1) How confident are you in your intuition?
2) Do you normally follow your intuition or is this something new to you?
3) Do you have any real, concrete evidence that supports your intuition?
It is important to listen to ANY information that your intuition/body tells you but how much stock you place in what it tells you is an entirely different thing.
What you talk about isn’t as objective as when your body feels tired after you run a few miles - that information is 100% reliable. This on the other hand is a vibe that you get about someone else doing something that you didn’t witness. See the difference?
So I would be careful to not be too rash with your conclusions without evidence (especially if you are a newbie intuitive). Psychic masters might be able to just go with whatever they feel in cloudy situations such as these, but personally I do not have that type of commitment to my intuition (nor do I ever think I ever will because I am too logical and analytical).
Note that you have the feeling, try to determine if it is rational or irrational and go from there.
Good luck,
Posted by: Scott Fusco on October 24th, 2007 at 8:50 pmScott
I have a dilemma. After reading your site something that I have been dealing with makes more sense. I have been seraching for a career path and trying to figure out what to study. I have been torn, as I want to make a lot of money, but yet there is almost like a tugging feeling inside telling me to go in a different direction. Is this the intuition you are talking about?
Posted by: Dan on May 10th, 2008 at 4:32 pmHey Dan,
Thanks for the comment. I have a few things you may want to consider because I have dealt with the same issue that you are dealing with.
Yes, the intuition is when something grabs you. So the idea is that you don’t pick it, it picks you. This is how things have always been with me and music - it has always picked me. Yet it took a while for me to embrace that - I studied engineering in college before switching over.
That said, the things I want you to consider are the following:
1) It’s possible to have what is called a composite career or to be bi or even tri-vocational -especially if you work hard, have a lot of interests and a good deal of ambition. I have had careers in the fields of music education, music performance, sales, and coaching. In the future I plan on doing a lot more things as well. Recently I’ve been drawn to the idea of being a professional golfer. New things seem to pop up for me all the time.
The “what will I do for a living” is actually a bogus question for this very reason - it presupposes that we will only do one thing for the rest of our lives. But almost no one actually does that. People switch careers all the time. This is something I was going to post about at a later time.
2) If you are VERY good at what you do and there is any type of market for it at all, then it is possible to make a lot of money (100k+). A lot of people say that it is almost impossible to make money in the arts but that is not really true for everyone. If you for example, are a fantastic well-rounded musician, you will have many ways to generate income including playing in a band, playing at weddings/corporate events, teaching pupils, recording session work, recording tracks for local artists, working as a booking agent for local artists, recording and selling your own cds, etc. You could even engineer a product that fixes a certain problem that musicians are having (if you have that skillset).
If you get the proper education, you can become a teacher or professor and make a decent salary while working 20-40 hours a week. So the point is that if you are incredibly good at what you do and are willing to put in that kind of work, and assuming that there is any type of market for the type of work that you like to do, then you will be able to make money doing it.
Some general advice would be to go speak with different academic advisors who have worked in the fields that you are considering and ask them about all the different possible ways to make money. You want to be *absolutely* certain that you are aware of all of these possibilities before you make a decision. One possibility that I was unaware of while in college is doing contract work. Certain skillsets allow you to work as a contractor and have more control over your life. Is this possible for the careers you are considering?
There is more for me to say but it is not as straight-forward as what I have already said and without knowing your exact situation, it may not apply to you. What you are considering is a serious and important decision -the implications of which will affect the rest of your life- and I wouldn’t make it simply because your intuition tells you to do so. Your decision has to be based both on your mind and your intuition - there is a balance there.
There is a lot more to consider and I think I could help you do that in a free phone coaching session. At a minimum, after a coaching session you will find yourself aware of more things to consider than you were before and experiencing greater clarity as a result. Coaching is not about giving advice or telling people what they should do. It is about helping people become more aware of all of the possibilities surrounding a situation and becoming more aware of what they are looking for. If we can get you really really clear on what you want and make sure that you are considering all the possibilities, then the “correct” decision for you will present itself naturally. We should be able to uncover and get to the core issues in under 30 minutes. If you are interested, send me an email through my website and we can set that up.
Posted by: Scott Fusco on May 11th, 2008 at 9:27 am