Silence
How to listen to your own intuition?
Go quiet to listen, write down what you feel before deciding, check intuition against facts and track your hits. Intuition is experience speaking softly.
bairogonzalez.com team, drawing on Bairo's story · Published
Everyone has had the feeling of knowing something before being able to explain it: a deal that "doesn't smell right," an idea that won't leave your head, a person you don't trust. Sometimes we're right, sometimes not. Learning to listen to intuition is learning to give it its proper place.
What to do now
- Go quiet so you can hear. Intuition speaks softly. Amid notifications and opinions, it gets lost. Set aside moments without stimuli, especially before important decisions.
- Write down what you feel before deciding. Write your first impression of the decision before researching and asking for opinions. Then compare it with what you found out.
- Notice your body. A tight chest, relief, fatigue, excitement. The body usually reacts before reason does. It isn't proof, but it is information.
- Check intuition against facts. Intuition is a starting point, not a finish line, especially in decisions about money, health and contracts. Research, ask for documents, listen to specialists.
- Tell intuition apart from fear and desire. Fear shouts "no" to everything new; desire shouts "yes" to whatever is easy. Intuition tends to be calmer and more persistent.
- Review your hits and misses. From time to time, reread your notes. You'll discover in which kinds of matters your intuition tends to be right.
- When many people say "no," ask why. Sometimes they're right. Sometimes they've just never seen anything like it. The reason behind the "no" helps you decide whether to follow your intuition.
When it happened to Bairo
Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez says that many of his choices followed his own senses and his own intuition, including in the spiritual search he went through after reaching rock bottom.
His intuition was right early on a few times. He wanted to bring artificial intelligence and augmented reality into the business when no one was talking about it; years later, it became a trend. He bet on natural-based cosmetics at a time when few people were betting on them; it worked and became a trend too.
But there was one time when he heard other people's "no" louder than his own intuition, and he gave up. He kept the lesson: being right ahead of time doesn't pay the bills, but it shows the eye is true. The next time, he didn't stop at the first answer.
The path
Intuition is accumulated experience speaking in a low voice. It needs silence to be heard and facts to be confirmed. Bairo learned both in practice: to follow what he felt and to build carefully what he saw before others. Listen. Check. And, if the voice keeps insisting, test it small.
Intuition can also be educated. The more you study a subject, talk with experienced people and watch the results of your own decisions, the sharper it gets. That's why a farmer's intuition about the weather or a salesperson's about a customer is so often right: it is made of years of attention. Feed yours with experience, and it will speak more clearly.