How to Develop Intuition and Increase Your Confidence

Hi, I’m Paul Krismer, I’m your happiness expert, and this week, I’m talking to you about intuition. It’s that gut feeling, this hunch, this sense that I just know cause because I do. And when we have intuition, it resolves for us this anxiety about whatever it is that we’re confronting. There’s a certain amount of certainty and it’s a wonderful feeling when we’re confident in our intuition. Science would suggest that, although difficult to study, it’s very real, and it leads to pretty good decision making most of the time. It feels spontaneous, almost instinctual, like you just simply know what to do. So, if intuition has all these great things going for it, and it does, this video is about how you can get more of this amazing skill, faculty, ability. Stay tuned.

As a coach, public speaker, and best-selling author, I teach topics just like this one all around the world. So, stay tuned and I’ll give you practical tools that you can use to make both yourself and those around you both happier and more successful. So, we’re talking about intuition, this capacity we have to almost automate decision making. And when scientists have studied it, they basically look at this sort of the same way that we have recognition of something. If we see somebody across the street, we go, “Oh hey, there’s Bob,” and it all just comes to us, click click click. Bob may be out of context, we may not have seen him for a long time, but something in our brain, and what we know a little bit about the science, is that multiple parts of our brain work simultaneously to give us this instant sense of recognition.

Well, intuition is a lot like that. It feels spontaneous. By contrast, new learning is something that feels cognitively deliberate, deliberative. We think about it, we put connect the dots, and we say, “Okay, I figured out how X, Y, or Z works.” And when you consider that in anything that you’re learning, say learning to drive, we repeat the process over and over again, and we’re concentrating and thinking about what we need to do, speedometer, foot on the gas pedal, signal lights, and all that kind of stuff. As time goes by, we become more skilled at this driving, where a lot of the things that we need to do feel intuitive, right? We get in a rental car if you’ve been driving for any length of time, and for the most part, you can just get in and drive.

Well, that’s through this process of neuroplasticity that I’ve talked about before, where we lay down enough neural networks that we can automate certain complex behaviors, like driving. Well, intuition is thought to be a lot like that. It may be intuition coming from multiple sources in our lives. Maybe it’s on meeting new people and I haven’t, I have a gut feeling that this person isn’t so, so trustworthy. And that intuition is taking all kinds of neural inputs that I put together over my lifetime, and then having this gut conclusion that I don’t trust this person, or I do, or I really like them, or this circumstance looks good, or this product I want to buy feels good. And we don’t can’t really explain it in a detailed way, often if we do, we’re rationalizing the intuition rather than really just trusting our intuition.

But intuition is real, and it makes our lives easier. It’s powerful, it reduces the cognitive demand to burden through figuring stuff out and instead we just know stuff. And it’s proven that intuition is fast, generally accurate, and it provides us this emotional additional benefit of confidence that we feel good about the decisions we make when we really trust our gut. Now, I do not want to pretend that it’s infallible. Clearly, we make sometimes the wrong judgment on first impressions, and so much of marketing is all about creating a first impression, and then the substance beneath the first impression may not be all that good. So we know our intuition is not perfect, but it’s great when it’s great. And so, this last little bit on the video I want to share with you today is how we can grow this capacity just to make our lives less burdensome and make faster, more accurate decisions.

There’s four ways. The first one is to listen to our bodies. Quite literally, we have three brains. The one that’s cognitive and thinks, it generates the prefrontal cortex and it’s our brain inside our heads. But the very same kind of neuronal networks exist in our hearts and in our guts. They are brains for the most part, except they express themselves in feelings. And since we become aware of our feelings and our conscious mind through thoughts, we often deny these parts of our body, and I’m guilty, guilty of this too. But they really are information master workers. The heart and the gut, they’re genuinely accurate in a lot of what they are producing in terms of neurotransmitting inputs to our brain. And in fact, more information is communicated from our gut and our heart to our brain than in the other direction. So, listen to your body. That gut feeling you have, it means something. That the sense you have in your chest, it means something. It’s genuine information. It just doesn’t express itself in the way that we value in Homo sapiens, we think it should come out as language and thinking, but the body is reliable.

And similarly, the second place that we can look to grow our intuition is to survey our energy. So if you’re meeting someone, and after a few minutes, you’re finding that the encounter is taxing, that it’s tiresome or challenging from an energetic perspective, well, listen to that. There’s something there. By comparison, if you meet somebody and immediately you feel uplifted and energized, well, there’s something that your body, your energy, is telling you. And it’s accurate information for the most part.

Thirdly, we can do this, and that’s act on our flashes of insight. Often they feel like they’ve got some conviction. “Hey, you know, so-and-so, my buddy John, just comes to my mind. I’m going, ‘I should really call John.’ Well, often we talk ourselves out of those kinds of intuitive senses because, well, we want to trust instead our intellectual, speaking minds, our conceptual, verbal minds, and not just our gut. And there’s all kinds of things that we would probably hugely benefit from if we could just trust the instinct, see the conviction, go with the feeling, and do it. And you’re going to find more often than not, not only was it a good call to make that intuitive action, but in addition, as you learn to trust this acting on your instinct, you’ll find that you act more frequently on your intuition, and the sense of intuition, the skill, if I can call it that, of intuition will grow.”

“Finally, meditate, meditate, meditate. It’s my fourth tip, and you know, I always am talking about meditation, but this one has some really clear and obvious connections. Meditation is often about silencing the prefrontal cortex, the verbal, conceptual part of the brain, and listening, standing still with the other aspects of our awareness. And so, for our body, our energy, and our instincts are what intuition is made up of. Then to silence the talking part of our brain, and get a little bit of space where we can listen to other parts of our body will increase and naturally grow our intuition, even outside of our formal meditation practice.”

“If you like this video, click the like button, share this video with your friends and family, and subscribe to my channel. You get a new video every Sunday morning. Use your intuition to get more happiness. Thanks for watching, we’ll see you next time.”