How To Connect To Your Intuition

What fabricated you decide to read this article?

Perhaps y'all saw the championship and merely had a gut feeling that it would show useful to you lot.

We often make these sorts of quick decisions, without a lengthy analytic procedure, guided by our intuition. Until recently, in that location was little compelling scientific evidence supporting the very existence of intuition.

Lufityanto, Donkin, and Pearson (2016) aimed to address this, conducting experiments that found that nonconscious emotional data can boost decision accuracy and speed up response times.

If using our intuition tin be a helpful way to make decisions, is there anything we can practice to develop or improve our intuitive process, or is this just a superpower some individuals possess?

This commodity will expect at whether intuition can be learned, suggest some ways to develop our intuition, and potentially aid our clients do the aforementioned.

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Can Intuition Exist Learned?

Over contempo years, this topic has garnered interest in various fields, with many websites and bestselling books extolling the virtues of tuning into our intuitive processing and using it to guide decision making.

Yet, scientific research in the area is still relatively limited, and information technology can be challenging to establish the hard facts.

While differing definitions of intuition abound, it is common to understand that it is a course of information processing singled-out from analytical reasoning.

Daniel Kahneman, in his book Thinking, Fast and Irksome (2011), expands on psychological research that distinguishes between System ane, which is automated and quick (intuition), and Organization 2, which is slower and involves deliberate and effortful mental activities.

Decision making is likely to be most effective when nosotros apply both systems. This is specially true in unfamiliar and loftier-stakes decisions. Only while at that place is no dubiousness we can meliorate our belittling thought processes, is the same truthful for our intuition?

There is general consensus that intuitive processing is an innate process (e.1000., Kahneman, 2011), just nonetheless, many working in the field propose that it can be adult and improved upon.

Your intuitive learning systems are always operating and accumulating information and behavior, more often than not without witting awareness (Hogarth, 2008).

To this end, ane way to develop intuition is to actively seek out environments that provide desirable learning opportunities (Hogarth, 2008). Examples of this might be attending seminars and conferences equally part of continued professional development or a placement rotation in a professional setting.

An area of particular relevance to therapists is social intuition, which involves making (largely nonconscious) decisions about others' emotions, attitudes, and intentions (Lieberman, 2000).

Nonverbal decoding, or the reading of body linguistic communication, plays a vital role in intuitive processing. Not only do we read other people's nonverbal cues to make judgments, but nosotros are also constantly communicating our ain internal land, usually without conscious attention.

The skill of social intuition improves from childhood to adulthood (Lieberman, 2000), which indicates that it can be learned. Equally with other skills, the suggested route to improvement is paying attention, exercise, and reflection (Gore & Sadler-Smith, 2011).

Over again, we should exercise caution; while intuitive social judgments tin be accurate, they are also prone to errors and biases (Kahneman & Frederick, 2005). For more on that, read our commodity on cognitive biases.

5 Helpful Exercises

In addition to exposure to favorable learning environments and situations, several techniques have been suggested that may encourage intuition development.

Although to be clear, there is little scientific evidence currently available to verify their utility.

ane. Prioritize your intuition

Today we alive in a world where we are constantly bombarded by data. When you add together into the mix the fact that modernism prizes a focus on rationality and scientific discipline, information technology is understandable that information technology tin can be hard to listen to our intuition and simply let it flow.

According to some of those writing on the topic, this is exactly what nosotros need to do. Yous need to recognize that intuitive processing tin can aid decision making, and let time and space for answers to come up to you without overanalyzing a situation.

Make fourth dimension each day, or even several times a day if yous have an important determination to brand, to tune into your intuition.

2. Get to know how your intuition 'speaks' to you

People experience intuition differently. For some, information technology may manifest every bit an epitome; for others, equally a physical sensation (the classic 'gut feeling'); yet others identify a more emotional response. Ho-hum downwardly and attempt to sense how, or where, you experience your intuitions.

three. Go on a reflective journal

Endeavor writing downward your hunches in a journal and observe how they are experienced. This is particularly benign if you can capture them before the analytic procedure takes over.

For this reason, it might be helpful to go on the periodical with you during the mean solar day. Making a note of your gut feelings most a state of affairs or determination also means you lot tin check them later, to appraise how authentic or helpful they were.

Writing downwardly words and phrases as they come to you lot when considering a problem may also provide y'all with a different insight. As an alternative or complementary approach, information technology tin be useful to draw pictures or doodles. Cartoon tends to slow usa down and may tap into more intuitive modes of thinking.

4. Apply mindfulness techniques

Mindfulness encourages us to discover feelings and thoughts without attaching to them. This can be particularly useful if you are trying to develop your intuition. Watching and accepting thoughts without judgment will allow you lot greater admission to intuitive information.

Another useful mindfulness technique, the trunk scan, can assistance yous notice sensations in your trunk, which might relate to intuitive processing. A body scan tin exist washed whenever you have an important determination to make or proficient daily to better intuition.

Being present and mindful of our surround is too likely to help develop intuition, by providing the unconscious with rich information to inform decisions.

5. Make a note of your dreams

For the last technique, I turn to Freud himself, who famously said:

The interpretation of dreams is the royal road to a cognition of the mind's unconscious activities.

Dreams can provide usa with a wealth of data about our unconscious processes. Writing them down upon waking will aid with recall, and the content tin can be explored to give clues to whatever difficulties or dilemmas y'all might be facing.

7 Questions to Assist Develop Your Clients' Intuition

The techniques outlined in a higher place can all be used with clients and to develop your own intuition, and can provide useful fodder for therapy sessions.

Some questions that might help clients access and develop their intuition are as follows:

1. "Does it feel similar the correct thing to do?"
2. "Does it seem similar the right reply?"
3. "How do yous experience when you think about x situation?"
4. "What was your gut reaction?"
5. "Do you have a hunch nigh that?"
6. "Where in your body do you notice a reaction?"
7. "If yous did know the answer, what would information technology be?"

A Look at An Intuition Game

National Geographic, as role of their Brain Games series, has produced 'The Intuition Game,' which provides a fun mode to explore and explicate intuition.

An instance of an intuition game is an app called 'Extra Sense,' which aims to assistance train intuition by playing simple meditative games.

Available for Android users.

Assessing Intuition: Three Valuable Tests

There are numerous popular-quiz style tests available on the internet that claim to assess or measure out your intuitive capacity. For obvious reasons, I take steered clear of these and looked at some of the most well-utilized and most scientifically valid intuition measures.

one. The Types of Intuition Calibration

The Types of Intuition Scale (Pretz et al., 2014) is based on the theory that at that place are three distinct types of intuition (Pretz & Totz, 2007):

• holistic
• inferential
• affective

The measure assesses all three types in one questionnaire. Previous efforts had failed to differentiate between these different constructs.

Yous can admission the scale questionnaire on folio 3 of this PDF.

2. The Rational Experiential Inventory

The Rational Experiential Inventory (Pacini & Epstein, 1999) is a cocky-report instrument designed to assess individual differences in thinking mode. Information technology measures the caste to which people written report they accept intuitive or rational/analytical thinking styles.

This instrument has been subjected to rigorous testing and has been shown to accept structural validity and satisfactory psychometric properties (due east.g., Björklund & Bäckström, 2008).

The questionnaire tin be accessed hither.

iii. Myers-Briggs Type Indicator

The most well-known of the tests that purport to measure intuition is the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI; Myers, McCaulley, Quenk, & Hammer, 1998). The MBTI is the most widely used personality test globally, and over 2 one thousand thousand people consummate it annually, normally in corporate settings.

The iv scales (extraversion–introversion, sensing–intuition, thinking–feeling, and judging–perceiving) are based on Carl Jung's theory of personality types.

However, despite its widespread appeal and utility, criticisms have been levied, and researchers accept demonstrated that the MBTI does not meet rigorous theoretical criteria. It lacks testability and has internal contradictions (Stein & Swan, 2019).

PositivePsychology.com Tools

The Connecting to Your Intuition tool in the Positive Psychology Toolkit© provides further helpful ideas for connecting with your intuition.

The goal of the do is to establish consequent confidence in connecting with your intuition. The exercise utilizes mindful and middle-focused psychophysiological coherence building. Clients can then acquire to pay closer attention to their intuitive sensations and be more confident in their choices.

This introductory article to intuition and why it is of import is too a practiced read.

If yous're looking for more science-based ways to help others develop their strengths, this collection contains 17 forcefulness-finding tools for practitioners. Use them to aid others improve understand and harness their strengths in life-enhancing ways.

A Take-Home Message

Intuition is a natural process, and it is widely agreed that we all have some inherent intuitive ability.

When we harness and utilize intuition, we tin can make decisions faster and more than comfortably.

However, information technology is important not to overestimate the accuracy of intuitive decisions. Most experts concord that while unconscious processes play an of import role, decision making is well-nigh effective when both analytical and intuitive reasoning are employed together.

While the topic of intuition has garnered much interest in pop culture, psychological enquiry in the surface area is somewhat limited. This means we should approach both the most popular assessment methods and the suggestions for developing intuition with some healthy skepticism.

Nonetheless, at that place would announced to be advantages in taking time to understand our intuitive processes meliorate and encourage clients to hone theirs.

We hope you enjoyed reading this article. Don't forget to download our three Strengths Exercises for free.

• Björklund, F., & Bäckström, M. (2008). Individual differences in processing styles: Validity of the Rational–Experiential Inventory. Scandinavian Journal of Psychology, 49(v), 439–446.
• Epstein, S. (2010). Demystifying intuition: What information technology is, what it does, and how it does it. Psychological Inquiry, 21(four), 295–312.
• Gore, J., & Sadler-Smith, E. (2011). Unpacking intuition: A procedure and outcome framework. Review of Full general Psychology, 15(4), 304–316.
• Hogarth, R. (2008). On the learning of intuition. In H. Plessner, C. Betch, & T. Betch (Eds.), Intuition in judgment and decision making (pp. 91–105). New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
• Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, fast and slow. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
• Kahneman, D., & Frederick, Southward. (2005). A model of heuristic judgment. In One thousand. Holyoak, & R.K. Morrison (Eds). The Cambridge handbook of thinking and reasoning (pp. 267–294). New York: Cambridge University Press.
• Lieberman, Thousand. D. (2000). Intuition: A social cognitive neuroscience approach. Psychological Bulletin, 126(1), 109.
• Lufityanto, G., Donkin, C., & Pearson, J. (2016). Measuring intuition: Nonconscious emotional information boosts decision accuracy and confidence. Psychological Science, 27(5), 622–634
• Myers, I., McCaulley, M. H., Quenk, N. L., & Hammer, A. 50. (1998). Manual: A guide to the development and employ of the Myers–Briggs Type Indicator (2d ed.). Palo Alto, CA: Consulting Psychologists Press.
• Pacini, R., & Epstein, South. (1999). The relation of rational and experiential information processing styles to personality, basic behavior, and the ratio-bias phenomenon. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 76, 972–987.
• Pretz, J. E., Brookings, J. B., Carlson, L. A., Humbert, T. Thou., Roy, M., Jones, M., & Memmert, D. (2014). Development and validation of a new measure of intuition: The types of intuition scale. Journal of Behavioral Conclusion Making, 27(5), 454–467.
• Pretz, J. E., & Totz, K. S. (2007). Measuring individual differences in affective, heuristic, and holistic intuition. Personality and Private Differences, 43, 1247–1257.
• Stein, R., & Swan, A. B. (2019). Evaluating the validity of Myers-Briggs Type Indicator theory: A teaching tool and window into intuitive psychology. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 13(ii).

Source: https://positivepsychology.com/intuition-training/

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