The A-Z Guide For Successful Singles – “I” is for Intuition

Have you noticed how you have 20/20 vision with hindsight? You look back on a relationship and find yourself saying, “I thought his behaviour was odd at the time,” or “I felt a bit uneasy about something she said. “ As you say those words, you realise now that you had ignored a ‘subtle’ signal back then.

There are a lot of names for that ‘subtle signal.’

• A “knowing”.
• Gut Reaction’
• Unconscious Intelligence”
• The Wisdom Within
• A Hunch
• Sixth Sense
• Intuition

So what exactly is this intuition, sixth sense, knowing or gut reaction?

Your brain takes in billions of bits of information around you, yet you can only consciously attend to between 5-7 pieces of information at one time. To allow you to focus on a task before you, all information not relevant to the task gets filtered to your unconscious – it’s all stored out of your conscious awareness.

What’s really important to remember is that all that stuff stored out of your conscious awareness influences you without you realising it. A good example of how this works is when people experience a traumatic event.

I work a lot with people who have been in car accidents and when they come to me they cannot make sense of their symptoms and often worry that they are going mad. They hear, smell or see something and they suddenly find themselves having a panic attack. What they don’t realise is that their brains, through their five senses, has taken in every bit of information surrounding their car crash. All that information has been stored but it’s been stored outside of their conscious awareness. When they hear those noises or smells that the brain has stored away, their anxiety responses gets triggered.

So while we value logic, rational and conscious decision making what we have to realise is that we have a huge reservoir of knowledge and information, about all our experiences – throughout our whole life -that is stored outside of our conscious awareness.

“Intuition” – Rapid Cognition”

This links to how our brains use two different strategies to make sense of new situations we find ourselves in.

There is a conscious strategy which is a logical strategy. It’s a slow process and needs a lot of information in order to come to a conclusion about something.

There is an unconscious strategy which operates below the surface of consciousness. It operates much more quickly.
Psychologists call it the “adaptive unconscious” and it comes into play when you encounter a situation where the stakes are high, where things move quickly and where you have to make sense of information in a very short time. It’s a form of “rapid cognition” as Malcom Gladwell coins it in his book “Blink.” The brain ‘thin-slices’ through all that wealth of information that is stored outside of your consciousness.

Speed dating is a good example of this. You only have a few minutes with each person to decide whether you want to spend time with them and get to know them better after the event. You have to make a ‘snap’ decision. This is when your intuition or gut feeling kick in.

When we meet someone for a date our ‘rapid cognition’ is active. Something the person we meet or says triggers a response within you. It could be a physical sensation, a ‘sense’, a fleeting thought.

The question is are you aware of and are you well connected to your ‘inner wisdom’? Do you know when it is speaking to you? Do you listen to it when you do get a signal?

We all have this ‘knowing’ but often we don’t listen to it or we talk ourselves out of following it. We do this for lots of reasons:

• We desperately want this relationship to work.
• We live in a society that places a high value on logic, reason & conscious decision making
• We’ve been taught to devalue intuition through the education system
• We think our ‘intuition’ isn’t valid, if we can’t explain it in a logical way (that’s something I’ve certainly struggled with anyway)

The problem is that when we ignore this subtle ‘signal,’ we can get into troubled relationships and then months or years later find ourselves saying, “I knew better.”

While listening to your intuition can keep you out of difficult relationships, it also gives you the confidence to commit in to a relationship.

Some other benefits of connecting to your intuition include:

•  Being more effective when making decisions in all areas of your life
• Feeling a greater sense of ease with yourself
• Having a greater ability to work towards your goals
• Having better strategies for interacting with others
• Having a greater ability to make wise choices that really work for YOU
• A sense of inner harmony because your inner & outer worlds are aligned

Developing Intuition

To draw from this amazing resource within you, you have to be very quiet in order to still the voices in your head and let your intuition speak to you.

• Start noticing your inner reactions – what are they? When are they happening?
• When you make decisions notice how you do it. Notice how you made the decisions that were good for you.
• Notice how you made decisions that weren’t good for you.
• Pay attention to your 5 senses – Just ask: What’s going on? Wait for an answer. It may come as you wake up, when you are walking or staring out the window – don’t force it.
• Notice your patterns? Do you get sick feelings or headaches when things aren’t quite right? Do you become irritable? Do you feel full of energy when things are right? Pay attention.

Trusting your unconscious is about trusting yourself. Working with your unconscious is about working with yourself. It’s the most natural way of being a fully integrated and successful single.