Master your gut feelings

Have you also come across people who have very solid and admirable analytical skills, cognitive abilities and even academic prowess but they simply cannot make appropriate choices and good decisions in real life? What is missing for such incredibly able people to excel? Today, we want to explore solving this puzzle.

Imagine a young man trying to choose the lady that he wants to spend all his life with—the woman that he wants to call ‘wife’. Or on the other side, imagine a young woman that is trying to choose a man she wants to call ‘husband’. Will young people in such a scenario use formal logic and cognitive skills to make the choice? Of course not – they use something else. This is where gut feeling comes in —the extra-factor in making the right choices, beyond cognitive skills, formal logic and critical analysis.

I had a cousin to my grandfather who was a very successful business person when I was growing up until a few years ago. He had an abundance of effective gut feelings. In expanding his businesses as well as in leading communities around him, he never did market survey, number crunching or business cases. Instead, he would simply ask a few questions to gather a little but critical information and then he would think about the opportunity or risk at hand and most importantly, he kept quiet to ‘listen to his gut feeling’! Then he would decide whether to proceed or not. In the vast majority of cases, he made the right choices and correct decisions. He had mastered his gut feelings. He had perfected this art over time. This is where long experience pays dividend.

Not everything in life can be reduced to numbers and analytical trends and frameworks. Some things make a lot of sense in intangible ways—ways not easy to explain to others. That is why good leaders will sometimes request or demand that they be given the benefit of the doubt to make a call based on how they feel. When they feel it is right or wrong to take a certain path, that feeling informs the choice that they make for themselves and for their followers.

So, what are gut feelings? Gut feelings act like automatic alarms that call our attention to potential dangers that may arise from given courses of action. This means that gut feelings will in effect steer us away from paths that are deemed risky or dangerous, based on our reservoir of life’s experience. It may not be immediately clear why we are deciding in certain ways but with time, we may be able to understand backwards why we made certain decisions. This works as a testimony for the importance of being very active in life so that we gather as much experience as possible which can enrich our reservoir of experiences that we can count on when challenged with situations that require effective gut feelings.

To master your gut feelings, you need a deliberate exercise. You need to learn from both the successful as well as failed choices, decisions and other life’s experiences. The failures in particular give us very important bases on which to count when exercising our gut feelings while choosing which way to go. This means that as we seek to optimise our gut feelings, we should be ready to experience failure along the way. We should not be condemning ourselves when we fail. Rather, we should spend time and effort trying to pull out key lessons that we draw from life’s experience be it positive or negative ones.

For those who already excel in cognitive thinking, critical analysis and formal logic, we do not mean that you cannot have effective gut feelings but that you are at risk of viewing the world from the structured framework points of views only like logical deduction. This way, you will not optimise your character. You need to also master gut feelings. In fact, when highly logical and cognitive people master the softer skills, they become the best possible leaders. Good luck!