The Intuitive Leader
As I sit down to write this blog, I can’t help but to wonder what intuitively led me to write this post. Where in my body do I feel this intuition that says, Write about being an intuitive leader today, right now before you this inspiration is gone! And is that even intuition? Or just a voice in my head calling into action? How do you know what is intuition and what is the mind? More importantly, how early and often does one check in with their intuition, and for what purpose?
These are the questions that were on my mind today, however intuitive they may or may not be, born out of a response to a post on LinkedIn calling leaders to “suspend your intuition” and “delay making that decision.” In the case of leadership it seems, the purpose of intuition is for making good decisions. But not until the end of your fact-finding mission, which begs the question, is it really intuition speaking or just your interpretation of the knowledge itself?
If you’re not using intuition to drive the fact-finding mission in the first place, how useful can you intuition possibly be by the time you need to use it? How much more useful would it be to have your team all share where their intuition is calling them to begin their fact-finding mission, and then go out and fact-find, report back, rinse and repeat, until someone in the group (or perhaps several) have a gut-intuition that X is the most logical step given the information at hand?
BEING intuitive about every decision you make is arguably* your MOST RELIABLE DECISION MAKER!! To dismiss or prolong intuitive hits along the process, which are arguably running your brain in the background anyway, separates humans from their intuition, making it harder to access when the timing is considered ‘right.’ Scientifically speaking, if you were to track yourself as a leader using only common sense and intuition to guide all of your decisions, you would statistically make better decisions than yourself as a leader using your brain to override intuition and keeping searching for more data to drive your decisions. Similar to picking a random answer on a multiple choice test versus sticking with always picking the same letter.
Sure, data-driven decisions (or instruction in the case of educators) sounds logical and the most scientific way to make decisions…but historically speaking (I have a degree in history) intuition and common sense beat data every, single, time. Just ask Jeff Bezos or any business owner whooo’s successfully built a company, myself included. First things first, break all the rules and let your intuition guide the process.
The greatest lie data (and your brain) ever told was that you can rely on it (brain) and data. For every rule, there is an exception. Take Amazon for example, so many data points suggested this Amazon online book store wasn’t going anywhere…exception to the rule. I’m not suggesting you throw the ‘baby out with the bath water’ and forgot about reviewing data. I happen to LOVE data and pattern recognition, and intuitively I know which data is irrelevant and/or should be considered, but not used to determine the final outcome of a decision.
It is my intuitive curiosity that sets me apart from every other executive coach—I intuitively know exactly the right question to ask, the empowering phrase to say, to pierce right to the root of what is holding you back. Throw your ‘data points’ (stories and problems) my way, OWL intuitively laser in to the heart of the matter, which is the only data point that truly matters…but I digress.
How do I know that this is intuition? Perhaps I’m just really good at pattern recognition and am actually using data and logic to drive my questions…which I suppose are occasionally true. It is the client responses that I hear over and over again, and the random, seemingly out of nowhere question or summary of what I just heard that could have only come from intuition. Phrases like, I was just talking about that earlier this week or my personal favorite:
It’s funny you should say that….I hear this in OWLmost every single one of my sessions. My intuition leads me to say the seemingly random thing and connect that hidden dot that perfectly aligns with experiences my clients are already having that week that I don’t know about, hence why my client finds it ‘funny.’ I call these moments synchronicities created from my intuitive curiosity that is just guiding the client where the client intuitively wants to go, but is in some way resisting, usually do to logic or data they read in a book once…
In my coach certification program, Co-Active Training Institute, my instructor spoke of intuition as something random that doesn’t make any sense, like pulling the number 13 out of thin air and blurting it out. This is about how I would describe beginner intuition, intuition that has begun being allowed, but only for specific purpose or outcome, similar to how leaders use intuition today to drive decisions when there isn’t enough time to gather all the information. In those cases, their ‘intuition’ might be wrong from time to time, which is how you know it was never really intuition in the first place! Or it may be right, hurray! But it may leave you wondering if it truly was intuition?
The truth is, I don’t know if it is my intuition or my poor navigation skills that often lead me to the ‘wrong’ destinations, and yet so often a synchronicity occurs as a result of this inability to follow directions on a map that lead me to believe that perhaps my unconscious is intuitively making decisions on behalf of ‘us.’ It is these little ‘side quests’ that lead me to take in new information, like the Water Into Wine sign that led to a chance encounter with an OWL in Knoxville that ultimately contributed to choosing this city as my home or the accident I avoided the day I accidentally got in the wrong lane and then a car accident happened right in front of me in the lane I was ‘suppose’ to be in...OWL let you decide.
Intuition, when allowed free-reign to guide the decision-making process every step of the way, often leads to the exact piece of information you need to make the BEST decision. As long as the leader stays curious about where their intuition leads them…If I were to immediately course correct every time I made a wrong turn, well then I wouldn’t have ended up with the trail of information picked up as a result of this intuitive mishap, I.e. intuitively getting lost so you can learn the landscape of a new city and stumble upon a cool establishment to check out where you’ll serendipitously meet your future COVID best friend. Yes, these are stories that really sum up how I live my life. It’s the on foot vs. driving stories that are the most interesting. Imagine it, Katie out in the ‘wild’ just bumping into people around the world, leaving little sparks of inspiration where she goes. But I digress.
The Intuitive Leader deeply trusts themselves, and the process. When you cultivate intuition as part of the process, the Team learns to deeply trust themselves, and each other. The Intuitive Team becomes its own self-organizing algorithm that has fun playing with their own intuition and curiosity, no longer a victim to the self-imposed limitations of data and logic. Being a realist requires acknowledging that magic (miracles) these intuitive hits DO happen!
I would offer that this empirical data is strong enough to suggest intuition and common sense are OWL you need to be an effective leader. Well, that and some OWLstanding listening skills. Your intuition instinctively knows what to listen for—when you stay present and truly hear what your people are saying. This is what makes the OWL experience so transformational!
Intuitively I knew that just being me, free of the self-imposed limitations of coaching ‘rules’ and ‘research,’ Whooo I am is the magic! Watching leaders learn about their own magic and how to trust their own intuition, well that is transformational!
How often do you use your intuition to inform your decisions? What would that life bring you if you did? More importantly, whooo will BE your strategic partner in developing this skill? Is it me? Click the link below and see if OWL is right for you! Sometimes 1 session is OWL you need to intuitively SOAR into whatever is next for you!
