Intuition Is The Tool By Which Mastery Shows Itself
Can you be an effective entrepreneur in only 60 minutes? YES!
When I started coaching entrepreneurs on their conflicting priorities starting, building, and optimizing their ventures it caused me to come up with one question to unblock them. “If you only had 60 minutes this week to focus on your business. What would you do?”
In this week’s edition, I explore intuition and what it can tell you about your mastery.
We’ve all had those experiences where our intuition is guiding us in one direction, we dismiss it, and later when we’re reflecting on the situation we say things like “hindsight is 20/20”. When was the last time this happened to you? How often has this happened to you?
What is intuition?
If you’re like me you have had a hot-and-cold relationship with intuition. At times when it shows up I’ll follow and embrace it and other times I ignore it and even worse scoff at it. Because intuition has provided me valuable guidance in the past I wanted to explore it in more detail and discover what I could learn about it and myself in the process.
Let’s start with a look at the definition of intuition from the Oxford Dictionary:
Intuition /ˌint(y)o͞oˈiSH(ə)n/ - the ability to understand something immediately, without the need for conscious reasoning.
I’m sure you and I have both read the definition before. For me, reading it again provides new understandings whereas before I would have thought of it more as a feeling and less tangible. I then read the definition more closely and let it sink in. Doing this it became clear to me intuition is an ability; when I think of ability I think of ability as a skill. Seeing intuition as a skill it’s a certain type of skill; it is a skill where the understanding happens immediately. The final part of the definition was crucial to me understanding intuition and its implication in decision making. Because when our understanding occurs it happens without our conscious reasoning.
Intuition Is The Tool By Which Mastery Shows Itself
With a better understanding of intuition, I began to think about skills and what it can tell us about ourselves.
It’s important to recognize we all have skills we’ve mastered in our lives; some examples might be language, movement, business, etc. When I look at myself and think of my journey as a runner through the eyes of mastery I remember the early stages as a child, to the goal of running my first marathon as an adult, and later to the ambitions of a seasoned runner wanting to finish a marathon in under 3 hours. From this perspective of mastery I see the areas of growth and improvement, I see the dedication and deliberate practice, and I see the mastery I achieved as a runner. As a runner, I rely on my intuition to hold back or push harder and at those moments making a decision intuitively I take action built on a foundation of mastery.
It was when I started to see my journey to mastery as a runner and the same patterns presenting themselves in other areas I was able to see:
Intuition is the tool by which Mastery shows itself.
Reflecting on the connection between intuition and mastery I also realized the times I scoffed or ignored my intuition I was really ignoring or dismissing the level of mastery I had achieved. This insight allowed me to see how I could embrace my intuition in decision making rather than ignore it. To be very clear, I see how intuition can play a part in decision making and honored as a skill of mastery and not that intuition is the only tool when making a decision.
Intuition and Mastery Exercise
Looking at intuition as a tool of mastery I wanted to explore areas of mastery I have achieved, but may not openly recognize. To do this, I came up with 3 steps to discover those areas, and here it is. You will need a piece of paper and a pen for this exercise.
Make two columns on the paper and label the left-hand column Intuition and label the right-hand column label Skill.
Think of at least 3 occurrences when your intuition presented itself and write them down in the Intuition column.
Finally, for each of the moments in column Intuition reflect on the Skill it represented and write it down in column Skill.
I hope this edition has presented intuition and mastery in a different light to you and left you with a better understanding of the skills you have mastered. For all the skills you’ve identified you have the opportunity to further build and strengthen them. When you’re ready to begin that journey then contact me here and see how I can help you with that process.