Learn 9 Ways to Hone Your Intuition to strengthen your inner connection and make more empowered decisions so you can regain control of your life and work!
Discover easy ways that you can implement today to quickly tap into your inner guidance. Create clarity, squash overwhelm, and start moving forward again.
Just the word, intuition, alone can conjure up many beliefs, judgments, connotations, etc. This word carries a lot with it and it can be a trigger for many people.
So before we jump into how to hone it, let’s demystify it a bit:
Intuition is defined as the ability to understand something immediately, without the need for conscious reasoning. And since our society often values conscious reasoning--typically requiring physical or scientific proof before we can trust it or believe in something--using our intuition as a guide is often frowned upon.
And if we get really honest with ourselves, I would argue that we’ve all experienced our intuition attempting to guide us.
(I say attempting because whether or not we actually listen or follow it is another story.)
I’ve observed that people feel more comfortable saying they had a “gut feeling” or in hindsight, they “knew” the choice they were being led/nudged to take, because, on the surface, these words perhaps feel more socially acceptable than using the word “intuition.”
The word intuition can be interchanged with phrases such as “woo-woo,” “woo,” guidance, inner wisdom, gut-feeling, sixth sense, etc. In my view, it’s all basically the same.
Intuition is an indescribably deep knowingness.
We all have access to it. We’ve all experienced it. And when we follow it, we discover (perhaps immediately or possibly years later) that it was guiding us toward what we most wanted or needed. And if we trusted it and followed it, we often find it has protected us from a more difficult and/or prolonged path.
How our intuition works with us or communicates to us, varies. Some may hear it, some may sense it, some may see it, some may feel a physical sensation, some may just know. And some of us may experience a combination of cues.
Many of us have ignored the cues or allowed this muscle to atrophy and so we aren’t able to detect it. We may have stories we tell ourselves about how other people can access it, but for some reason, we’re lacking in this “gift.”
Some of us may believe it’s just easier to allow the external noise and daily distractions to take over. We can find temporary or false comfort in “checking-out,” as we perceive that it may just be easier that way. From here, we often make rushed choices based on reaction, fear, self-judgment (aka should-ing on ourselves[link to blog post]) and not allowing ourselves a moment to “sit with it” or to “check-in” with ourselves before we act.
The good news is that our intuition is always here for us, ready to guide us at any moment. All we need to do is begin to trust it, trust our ability in accessing it, and start to strengthen this muscle.