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When
Not to Plan I’m 100% convinced that there are times in our lives when planning can be effectively replaced with the act of following intuition – our gut. Over the past year I’ve found articles about intuition showing up in publications such as; The Harvard Business Review, Inc. Magazine, Fast Company, and Wired. Prior to these publications, scientific work connected intuition and emotion to success. You can find the research in books like Daniel Goleman’s Emotional Intelligence, and Primal Leadership as well as in Antonio Damasio’s Descartes Error. We are certainly in an era where both professional and personal awareness is open to the notion of understanding the insights available through our intuition. In fact, just off the top of my head I can think of at least three situations where intuition outperforms planning. Intuition is extremely helpful when: In the past two months I’ve had at least three urgent phone calls from clients who were in the middle of upheaval. In all three cases the day-to-day scenarios were confusing and filled with stress. Each client desperately needed clarity on now to navigate through the confusion, strife, and/or politics. Had we metaphorically flown up to the 30,000 foot level to look over the situation, and had we created a plan as to how to get from point “a” (where they were) to point “b” (where they wanted to be) and then come back down to implement the step-by-step plan, we would have missed the mark of effective action by light years. The reason for this is simple: the elements were morphing so quickly no plan could have anticipated all the risks and shifts involved. By the time the client would have taken the first step, the plan would have been obsolete. We spent our call eliciting the client’s intuition to serve up one simple, relevant next step. Each client took that “next step” and reported back later that they had successfully generated a series of similar intuitive gut checks that served up other one-step actions. By repeating the process they eventually found their way through to resolution or clarity. Herminia Ibarra recently published a book titled, Working Identity, Unconventional strategies for reinventing your career. The book presents in-depth research to support the idea that career transition is not a straight, planned-out path towards some predetermined identity. Instead Ibarra illustrates this transition as a “crooked journey along which we intuitively try on a host of possible selves that we might become.” I use her theory along with transition models as I work with clients who are literally reinventing themselves. Intuition is the main ingredient utilized when crafting the “doing and experimenting” activities suggested for successful career transitions. Further, most of us have been conditioned from childhood to look to outside sources of authority for our answers and direction rather than our own intuitive sense. How many times have we said these words; “I knew this was going to happen, I just knew it. Why didn’t I listen to myself?” Since intuition operates in a moment-by-moment fashion, the following activities are simple ways to quickly get engaged with your own process. Please note that it is best to postpone making major life/work decisions using intuition until you are fully in command of how your own intuition works.
The more we practice and use our intuition, the sharper
and more accurate it becomes. Practical Intuition for Success by Laura Day Both books are reviewed and available through amazon.com when you visit at www.soulsalt.com and click on the books of the month. Just for kicks, see if your intuition can guess what topic next month’s newsletter will highlight. My best!
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