Your Intuition is Your Soul Speaking to You

As figures like Howard Gardner and Daniel Goleman explain, trusting your intuition would help you make better decisions.

Written and verified by the psychologist Valeria Sabater.

Last update: 16 October, 2023

Albert Einstein believed that the only truly important thing was intuition. It’s not a magic quality but the subtle ability that makes you tip the scales and decide, in an instant, whether someone is trustworthy or not.

There’s a great deal of literature dealing with intuition in the psychological sense. In fact, it’s a subject that’s been widely studied and analyzed by the scientific field.

A notable specialist in the theories of the mind, Howard Gardner, mentions the need to develop a type of intuitive intelligence, one with which we can be more receptive to our inner worlds.

The study of intuition has always interested us because it guides many of our daily decisions. Taking one path and not another, distrusting someone, declining a job offer, accepting a project… Some people reflect on things a great deal while others let themselves be carried away by their intuition.

Intuition: the path from the unconscious to the conscious world

You can’t ever guarantee that, by following your intuition, you’ll make the most successful decisions. However, you’ll be acting according to your own essence, values, emotions, and evaluations that you’ve acquired thanks to your previous experiences. In effect, you’ll be able to take a properly balanced step.

One of the most knowledgeable figures on this subject is the sociologist and essayist, Malcolm Gladwell. Through his studies, he shows how stockbrokers, doctors, psychologists, publicists, mechanics, and housewives are capable of making the right decisions in a few seconds. So, are we facing a type of power that goes beyond ordinary psychic abilities? Not at all. We explain it below.

Essential characteristics of intuition

As we mentioned earlier, there’s a tremendous interest in the area of intuition. The Center for Applied Intuition (CAI) was created in the United States 40 years ago. This body is headed by Dr. William H. Kautz of the Stanford Research Institute. The purpose of the center is to study intuition in a scientific and valid way.

Currently, there’s agreement on the following conclusions:

• Intuition is part of the ‘adaptive unconscious’. Each thing learned, felt, internalized, thought, and experienced creates a unique and particular pool of wisdom that defines us. It’s our essence, a ‘mental capital’ that we use every day, almost without realizing it.
• The power of the intuitive person lies in knowing how to use this capital as a channel. The good intuitive will know how to separate all the branches of the forest to find the way when they’re facing a crossroads in their life. After all, deciding is the art of discarding, and intuition is a formidable tool.
• Some people are more intuitive than others. The difference lies in the approach, in who’s carried away more by their internal mental capital rather than by the filter of logic and conscientious analysis of reality.
• Intuition appears suddenly. It’s instant and doesn’t involve the individual’s reasoning. It’s a reaction that occurs before a certain stimulus or situation. Often, these types of answers are advantageous, especially when quick decisions are required.
• It can be developed. Thanks to brain neuroplasticity, it’s possible to learn intuition. Experts have proposed different ways to achieve this. Some proposed techniques include meditation and relaxation.

How to develop your intuitive intelligence

Before you learn how to enhance your intuitive intelligence, you may be wondering why you should do it and whether it’s useful. Therefore, you need to first remember how traditional intelligence works, through reflection and more logical processing.

Thanks to Howard Gardner, we know that there are many more types of intelligence and that they’re all equally useful. Intuitive intelligence allows you to bring out your consciousness and emotions to be able to make faster decisions. Or, at least, to allow you to possess another type of ‘more intimate’ information that you can contrast with your more rational or convergent views.

A study conducted by the University of New South Wales (Australia) led by psychologists, Galang Lufityanto, Chris Donkin, and Joel Pearson, claims that daring to develop and enhance intuition can help us make more accurate decisions. If they’re not successful, they’re at least connected with our genuine needs, which is really important.

Keys to developing intuitive intelligence

Intuition is felt more than thought. Therefore, it’s necessary to know how to listen to your emotions and understand what’s happening in your inner world if you want to find calm and balance.

• Daniel Goleman states that, once we control and understand our emotions, we allow ourselves to adopt a Zen perspective. This is nothing more than reaching a mental state of deep calm in order to be more receptive to your interior and, in turn, to your environment.
• The messages that your intuition usually sends you are sometimes rather complex. They’re sensations, shapes, and words. You need to know how to interpret them. The more freedom you give your mind, without prejudices or barriers, the more your intuition will emerge.
• Give credibility to the hunches you have. Trust enough to at least take them into account. These physiological reactions are signals that your body sends you to either be careful or take risks.
• Differentiate between prejudice and intuition. If your intuition tells you not to trust someone, you must weigh up to what extent that signal is interfered with by certain prejudices and stereotypes that you may have against that ‘type of person’. A preconceived idea that guides behavior isn’t intuition, it’s just prejudice.
• Practicing mindfulness has clear benefits for your intuition. It makes you more aware of stimuli and information, even things that you previously didn’t notice. This meditation technique also improves your emotional balance.
• Visualization is a technique that could stimulate your intuition by generating states of tranquility and silence so that you can listen to your emotions.
  • Close your eyes and focus on your breathing. Settle down in a comfortable space.
  • Visualize a landscape that transmits safety. Observe it carefully and try to notice all the details about it. For instance, the atmosphere, aromas, colors … every little detail, in fact.
  • Breathe slowly and deeply and then open your eyes again. How did you feel? What emotional messages did you receive? What did your sensations invite you to do?
• To develop intuition, it’s important to learn to believe in it and in its capacity, even though you can’t fully understand it by reasoning.

The importance of developing your intuition

Intuition helps you relate to the world through your own values, past experiences, and the information stored in your unconscious. This type of knowledge involves sensations, emotions, and ‘hunches’ which represent invaluable contributions when it comes to assessing reality.

Intuition is a capacity that allows you to make quick and automatic decisions. In addition, it allows you to solve problems based on your own characteristics while aiming at personal development and the search for your well-being.

Since intuition is an irrational source, it’s often distrusted, disregarded, or relegated in favor of intellectual knowledge, which is usually conceived as being more reliable or correct. However, it’s important to bear in mind that intuition serves as a guide for decision-making, and implies having the confidence and self-esteem to trust and believe in it. That said, it’s always a good idea to balance it with information that comes from other sources.

Finally, you can train your intuitive intelligence every day, as long as you allow yourself to be more free-thinking and, at the same time, receptive to your emotions. Intuition is for everyone. We all have those bursts of mental light, those hunches that guide us toward a specific option that, in the end, could be the right one. Indeed, it’s well worth letting ourselves be guided by the special language of intuition.