The Business of Intuition

Today's market requires that you use all of our skills to compete. It is an exciting challenge and one that creates a need to discover parts of yourself that in easier times, you overlooked. In the long run, this will allow you to enrich all areas of your life.

Intuition and the acquisition of wealth have a lot in common. There are many ways to arrive at each, and every individual has their own unique gift in doing so. In fact, it is the homogenization of the path that often impedes an effective strategy.

As with intuition, the acquisition of wealth is mystified, when in fact, it's based on realistic evaluation, data, self knowledge (whether yours or your company), adaptability and foresight. Both adaptability and foresight are the gifts of intuition. Where the budget dollar is spent on market research, it might be better spent on using the human resources you already have to acquire an accurate evaluation of your product or skills and a precognitive sense of the market in the future. This is especially valuable in your international market where the tools to evaluate a given "value" have not proven especially accurate.

When you don't have time for research or even an educated guess, intuition -- that flash of accurate knowing -- is your most reliable resource, especially if you train it. Usually, your intuition functions in emergencies, it's the right decision you made in a split second, with little or no information that saved you. However, you don't need to wait for an emergency to use it. In fact, the appropriate use of intuition will make you proactive enough that problems are solved before they occur.

Scientific experiments demonstrating the ability of the human mind to both send and perceive information at a distance date back over fifty years, yet intuition has been cloistered in the realm of mysticism and scientific institutions. Where it really belongs is in the day-to-day structure of our life and its various endeavors.

In How to Rule the World from Your Couch, I train your brain to get accurate, appropriate, actionable information in an efficient way, a way you have used inefficiently in the past. Intuition is not a strange skill acquired due to a vegetarian diet or a near-death experience. Intuition is the first capacity our brain had as babies and small children to survive in the absence of experience or reason. It can be redirected very easily to both gather and send information that will give you the edge in any market as well as helping you to find the niche where you and your company organically excel.

How to Use Your Intuition to Create a Future "Market Map"

1. Know your goals. Question your goals. People have a tendency to get stuck in a personal or corporate identity that calcifies and becomes vulnerable to market changes. If you cultivate a willingness to adapt and reinvent yourself, you will thrive. That said, if you don't know your target it's hard to hit it. So, know your goals.
2. Forget out-of-the-box thinking and brainstorming. The reference point for each of these activities is something isn't working. Throw away the box and allow perception to wander and document where your attention goes without editing.
3. Odd as this may seem, write down a question, such as "how will our market change in the next year?" Ask your entire company (or all your friends) to write one page that will take place over a twelve month period. Tell them not to worry about the story or the writing, but to allow their attention to wander anywhere without editing anything. DO NOT TELL THEM THE QUESTION! Simply tell them you have an idea and this will help you fill in the blanks. Ask them to do it with a timeline. It sounds strange and uncomfortable at first, and it is. But, what you yield will amaze you when you apply it to the question you wrote and use a bit of interpretation to apply the data.
4. Once you have your intuitive data, look at the other information you have available and come up with a plan. Nothing is the entire answer.

Laura Day is the New York Times best selling author of PRACTICAL INTUITION and HOW TO RULE THE WORLD FROM YOUR COUCH. Newsweek named her the "$10,000-a-month psychic" and The Independent called her "The Psychic of Wall Street". Laura has been featured on Oprah, CNN, Good Morning America, ABC News and other national and international media. Laura teaches mainstream professions how to integrate intuition into their process to create greater success. Laura teaches and lectures all over the world. HOW TO RULE THE WORLD FROM YOUR COUCH is her textbook on using intuition effectively.
www.howtoruletheworldfromyourcouch.com

 

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Comments

[jcaunter]

12:54 AM on 06/15/2010

My intuition is telling me that the entire economy is going to collapse soon--kind of like the 1930's, but worse. How would you suggest using intuition to be successful in a world where only the top 1% of Americans have money, and the rest of us starve in the gutter?

[Stephen Herrington]

11:34 PM on 06/14/2010

Intuition actually springs from experience. You can't call on it to make a miracle. It just happens in an order that defies conscious description. The most accurate description of intuition is found in the expression "mind like a steel trap". As you experience things, unanswered questions accrue, answers trigger the next question.

Intuition is the cornerstone of the mind. Science is a discipline made to channel and record the intuitions that drive investigation. Logic is just a rigorous test of your intuition. Intuition is not an untapped resource for anyone, you use it all day every day. It is a guess at an outcome of observed events in motion, a prediction, a question, it is mind.

There is no magic to be discovered. You already possess it. Science and logic are still required to validate and communicate it.