Listen to intuition when making big decisions
Why Warren Weeks quit his job and started a business
In the early 2000s, Warren Weeks was rising up the ladder in the corporate communications world. After working a few different jobs at various agencies, he landed a role doing media relations for a big Canadian bank and crossed the coveted sixfigure threshold for the first time.
“On paper, it was everything I’d ever wanted,” Weeks says.
But Weeks had a nagging feeling: What he really wanted was to start his own business. “On some level there was this voice saying, ‘You need to be doing this on your own,’ ” he recalls. “It was almost like Field of Dreams — a little whisper.” For around two years, Weeks weighed his options and wrestled with his fears. Giving up a steady paycheque was anxiety-inducing, but the more Weeks appealed to logic, the louder his internal voice got.
So, in 2003, he finally listened to it, and quit his high-paying job to start the media training, speech writing and crisis management business he still owns. “Looking at the pros and cons, a rational person would’ve stayed at the bank,” the Oakville resident says. “But there was this distinct voice saying, ‘You’re going to make it work and you’ll be fine.’ It sounds a bit bananas.”
Bananas, sure, but it’s an experience so many people can relate to — that little voice inside your head, an unshakable “gut feeling,” some mystical internal energy guiding your decisions beyond logic or reason. In other words: Intuition.
While we often think of intuition as some otherworldly force, there’s a scientific basis for it, and it’s rooted in our own experiences and the subconscious decision-making happening behind-the-scenes. That means going with your gut can, quite often, lead you to make the right decision.
Even a century ago, Sigmund Freud was a supporter of intuition. When a friend of the Austrian neurologist asked him about choosing a career, Freud replied: “When making a decision of minor importance, I have always found it advantageous to consider all the pros and cons. In vital matters however . . . the decision should come from the unconscious, from somewhere within ourselves.”
In the decades that followed Freud’s oft-repeated advice, psychologists gained greater understanding of our brain’s unconscious processes, including intuition. So what’s really happening in our brains and bodies when we’re using that seeminglymystical force? A lot, it turns out.
When you’re faced with a decision, your whole brain goes to work. It acts as a “prediction machine,” connecting different patterns and images with behavioural responses, says Jacob Hirsh, an assistant professor of organizational behaviour and human resource management at the University of Toronto Mississauga’s Institute for Management and Innovation and the Joseph L. Rotman School of Management.
That comes in handy when you’re bombarded with new information while trying to make a decision. Picture yourself renting an apartment or buying a house: you’re evaluating the neighbourhood, the price, the floor plan, the number of bathrooms and bedrooms, the room layouts. You’re weighing a bunch of compet- ing factors — Is this our dream location? Can we afford the monthly payments? Will we need to renovate the kitchen? — while subconsciously exploring how you feel about the place and whether it makes sense to live there.
In these situations, people often get a gut reaction: this place either feels like home, or it doesn’t. “Where that feeling comes from is your expectations, your previous experiences, your best guess,” says Hirsh.
As your brain’s “best guess,” intuition may also sharpen with age, because it’s based on a lifetime of stored information about prior decisions and their outcomes. “One particular brain area, the basal ganglia, is a deep brain structure which stores the estimated value of different actions in different experiences,” Hirsh notes.
But according to Julia Mossbridge, a visiting scholar at Northwestern University’s psychology department, your whole body — not just your brain — is involved in the process.
Your white blood cells, for instance, are experts on your immunity. Your gut is an expert on the microorganisms living inside your body. And, of course, your brain is an expert on the emotions around you, what people mean and their tone of voice. “All the parts of your body are constantly gathering information and learning about the environment and putting things together and, at some point, it comes into consciousness,” Mossbridge explains. Researchers have long strived to pinpoint what’s happening during this process. Joel Pearson, an associate professor at the University of New South Wales — Sydney’s psychology department, considers his 2016 research the first scientific evidence that intuition exists, and that it boosts decision-making accuracy and confidence.
Published in the peer-reviewed journal Psychological Science in April, Pearson’s study — which included more than 100 participants — involved a new technique to present subjects with subliminal images while they made decisions.
In one eye, participants were shown bright, flashing dots, a bit like the static on old TVs, and were asked to determine which direction the clouds of dots was moving.
In the other eye, they were shown emotional images, both positive and negative — think puppies and flow- ers versus shark attacks — but were totally unaware of the images because they’d be rendered invisible by the flashing lights through a technique called “binocular rivalry.” The type of image, be it positive or negative, lined up with the direction the dots were moving, be it left or right.
“The brain is combining those two different sources of information,” Pearson says. By processing the unconscious emotional images to help make a decision, he says the subjects got better at determining the right answer over time. Pearson says the study highlights how we can train ourselves to use our unconscious emotions in decision-making.
“Let’s say you’re at a restaurant and you order a seafood dish and it arrives and, just for a moment, you hesitate before you eat,” he explains. “There’s no logical reason why you shouldn’t eat the dish, but you hold back for a moment. Then you think, that’s silly, and you go ahead and eat — and you get sick afterwards.”
Yuck. It’s an unpleasant experience that could’ve been avoided by going with your gut, since your brain was processing all sorts of subconscious information at the time — the subtle colours in the dish, the decor in the restaurant, the waiter’s body language — and led you to a visceral reaction: Don’t eat this.
On the flip side, psychology experts stress those gut feelings aren’t foolproof. “There’s a dark side to intuition,” says Hirsh. “It’s not a silver bullet. We’re not always right. It’s only telling you how you feel based on past experiences.”
And those experiences can be faulty. If you were raised in an unstable home environment as a kid, maybe you developed a notion that people are usually unkind and you’ll make decisions based on this narrow world view, Hirsh explains.
More dangerously, Mossbridge says relying on your brain’s “fast system” — the unconscious mind — can lead to big trouble. Say you’re attracted to a married co-worker, and your gut feeling is to kiss them at a holiday party. “Well, that’s not going to work for you,” says Mossbridge. In that instance, a pro-con list and some logical reflection might’ve come in handy.
The bottom line? It’s often best to involve your logic and your intuition.