associates, inc.Business Coaching Secret #5 – Your Gut Knows
Trust Your Gut
You’ve heard all the legends of brilliant college nerds sitting around a dorm room in Stanford or Harvard and conjuring up the Googles, Facebooks and Instagrams of the world. These ideas came out of the gut, or if you want—from intuition. They might be written on the back of envelopes or napkins in a restaurant. Sure, an idea still gets fleshed out and rationalized, but the stimulus, the big-bang idea itself comes from that gut. Trust your gut because it knows the truth intuitively. During my training to become a professional life and executive coach I learned to put people in touch with their feelings because the body never lies. Men especially will say they have no idea what they are feeling. Some men are so dependent on thinking that they lose touch with their feelings and, more importantly, their built-in antennae to detect authenticity, good behavior, and brilliant ideas. Women are famously more comfortable with trusting their intuition.
Your Mind Is the Enemy
Your fine mind can figure out some impressive stuff, but it is of absolutely no value when it comes to change. That is because your mind is an operating mechanism based on habit. It will seek out the most familiar and logical solutions but fail to comprehend new information or changed circumstances. And change is usually what clients are looking for with coaching. Change allowed Roger Bannister to push past that four-minute mile barrier that stopped every man before him. He just trusted in his gut that he could do it. There was no evidence or proof. In fact, the existing hypothesis said it couldn’t be done. In his case (and in most of yours) your first thought is the right one because it comes from the gut. You don’t have to take it from me—Malcolm Gladwell devoted his best seller, Blink, to the concept.
What If You Knew What Your Gut Was Telling You?
Clients frequently tell me that they are not sure of what to do or they just don’t have an answer to a conundrum they are dealing with. Usually it is a longstanding issue that they have been thinking about for quite a while. I ask them to access their gut intelligence and get their complicated mind out of the equation. See, the answer is often not the thinking. It comes from a different source. It’s like when great solutions occur after a night’s sleep or while in the shower when you’re not even thinking about the issue. Because while your mind is working so hard to come up with a solution, your gastrointestinal brain is working too, trying to tell you what to do if only you’ll pay attention.
What is Your Gut Anyway?
Your gut is that non-verbal, non-articulated, non-left brain, non-intellectual, non-self-critical voice. Your gut is close to your real self, the real authentic you. In psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s great book—The Happiness Hypothesis—he explained how the mind is like the rider on an elephant. Think of the elephant as your gut. It is much stronger and more powerful than your relatively puny rider-mind, especially when it is determined to go in its own direction. But you can use that power to your advantage if you know how to access it. We now know from science how your gut strongly influences your mood because 90 percent of the nerves in your gut deliver information to the brain rather than receiving messages from it. When I work with executives, particularly those in marketing and advertising, I use exercises to allow them to get used to being in touch with their gut, so they can access their innate wisdom for critical decision making.
Business Coaching Tip #5
Start every day from the gut. When you wake up in the morning, check your gut to see what solutions to the stuff you’ve been pondering have emerged overnight. What does your mood or feeling tell you about a situation you’ve been dealing with? You can place your hand on your belly and speak to that part of your intelligence. Learn to notice the subtle, intuitive messages and inklings and try going with them. Solutions happen all day when you are open to them. Check in with your gut and most importantly, trust it. Your gut knows.
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