In your career, how much of what you do depends on training and how much on your gut decisions? According to Bishop T.D. Jakes, there's a disparity between intellect and instinct, and one undoubtedly trumps the other.
In an appearance on "Oprah's Lifeclass," the spiritual leader and author shares his lessons for unleashing the power of your instincts and explains how failing to do so can hold you back, especially in your career. "A lot of us have been crammed into positions for which we have been trained, but we don't have the instinct," Jakes says. "If you don't have the instinct, you won't be as prosperous as you could be."
You don't necessarily have to have the training for your ideal career to rise in the ranks professionally, Jakes says. "If you have the instinct, you can hire the intellect," he says. "We have been trained to know how to do something, but not the why of it... The people who know the why hire the people who know the how."
Jakes says we can learn from the trailblazers who relied on instinct to make them successful -- and we shouldn't be afraid to acknowledge what our own instincts are saying.
Even if you're feeling trapped in a job or career, powerful instincts still lie beneath the surface, just as they do for a caged lion that has never been in the wild. "If all of his experiences have been in the cage and that would be his natural habitat to him, then why do they lock the cage?" Jakes says. "They lock the cage because even though his experiences do not validate it, his instincts tell him there's something else out there."
Similarly, too many people are feeling caged by their own experiences. "The reason so many of us are frustrated today is that we are pacing around in the cage of a job or a life or a situation that has limited us," he says. "We may not have the background for it, we may not have the training for it, but our instincts tell us, 'I belong out there.'"
A new episode of "Oprah's Lifeclass" about conscious parenting with Dr. Shefali Tsabary airs Sunday, May 18, at 9 p.m. ET on OWN.
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