Follow Your Gut, Your Instincts Are Seldom Wrong

I read an article many years ago, that has suck in my mind ever since. It was about a Harvard study on how the best business leaders make decisions. It went on to describe how they would collect data, test hypothesis, do research, ask others opinions, do the numbers, etc, but in the end universally after doing their best research and evaluation, they all said then they would lean back in their chair and trust their gut instinct...

Wow, I thought, with great excitement, in the end the best decision makers of the time, the leaders of successful corporations trusted their gut instinct to make the most important decisions.

I was both amazed and very excited as I have had a life time of making intuitive, gut decisions, because I get that feeling in me when I know I am onto something good. It is difficult to explain, my wife calls it the ping of truth, it is a sensation, an energy, a feeling, but when it happens I know it, when it is not happening I feel its absence and know that as well.

Very recently I was interested in a building that has been for sale for a while and I have been eyeing it with great interest and I called the broker who informed me it was under contract. I asked him to call me if it fell apart. It did and he called me back. It is an exceptional deal presumably perfect for in many ways for my intended use and I should have been very excited...but I wasn't. I did not have that gut feeling of excitement, my onward through the fog I go feeling...no yay!...no feeling of exhilaration, no sense of destiny, no ping of truth, no inner belief it was the right decision despite every logical analysis screaming buy, buy, buy!

So I have stepped away, and am not acting on this opportunity. Will I be remorseful when someone else buys it? No! Do I have any reason not to buy it? No, not one! I simply do not have that gut feeling telling me to do it....so I will not.

I am following my intuition, my gut feeling, rather than deciding by empirical evidence, numbers and any other analysis one may use. In fact all other evaluations scream buy it, except the one I deem most important my intuitive, unexplainable feeling of yes.

I believe this is the soul of entrepreneurial decision making, instinct, gut, intuition. I believe the Harvard study I reported about above had it right. The execs used empirical evidence to evaluate and analyze and then rested on their intuitive feelings to make the final decision. If empirical evidence said no, there may not be a reason to go further, if the empirical evidence said yes, then check the gut and decide based on intuition.

If you're good at this, irrespective of empirical evidence, research or numbers, do whatever your gut says despite what the more traditional evaluation process says...If you are good at this skill.

If this is foreign ground, you can learn to do this. Start with small decisions and try and feel the right decision, Experience success get familiar with the feeling so you can identify it when it happens again, and continue to experiment with it, and see the results. It works. You can develop this skill. It may be a skill you have but have ignored because you did not understand its power.

Now you do, do it, it works.

Trust your gut...it knows.