How to Trust Your Gut in Business
What on earth does it feel like to trust your gut? And is it a good strategy to trust your gut in business?
It feels a little different for everyone when they follow their intuition and trust their gut, but when you choose to trust your gut in any aspect of your life, it can help you ask the right questions, get clarity, and move forward in the right direction for you.
How to Trust Your Gut
Trusting your gut is a rather subjective experience and everyone feels a gut sense a bit differently.
Some feel it in their stomach, others as nausea, butterflies, a twinge, or heaviness. Typically a gut feeling or intuition is a body response, rather than your head or emotions.
When you do get a gut sense or intuitive feeling, you can check in with your brain and heart and use the three together to choose your next steps.
Your intuition is often influenced and formed by your past experiences and accumulated knowledge, even subconscious experiences. So, it’s important to remember that you want to approach any gut feeling from a lens of questioning to ensure this isn’t just fear or a negative past experience reminding you of why you shouldn’t take an action step, or trigger a flight response.
Listen to what your body is saying, and then move to your brain to start asking questions.
For example, if you have a gut sense that something is taking place in your company that may affect you and your position, don’t just ignore it. Pay attention to the clues, and start asking questions.
Dive deeper and be curious and aware.
You can use your gut feelings and intuitions as complementary tools to your brain as well as outside data and information to make decisions. When you couple analysis and the gut together, the outcome is well-researched, informed, and intentional.
Examine Any Biases
It’s important when trusting your gut in business and your personal life that you examine and cross-check for biases that can influence what you’re reading as your gut. Our judgments can be influenced by our cognitive biases and of course our own personal beliefs, feelings, and emotions. Take time to reflect on why you feel how you feel and ask yourself whether or not you’re leaving perspectives off the table so you can make a balanced and informed decision.
Evaluate How to Take Appropriate Action
Your gut may be telling you that your work environment isn’t going to be one in which you want to stay and you might very well choose to trust your gut. This may not mean taking instant action and quitting your job today!
It may mean leaving your job, but it may not be as simple as that. You can take this time to look critically at the pros, cons, other options, and evaluate how you want to take your next steps to move forward.
You might begin looking at other possibilities and other opportunities, enroll in training or education in another area, and reach out to others in your network to start seeing what else is out there.
It’s important to consider the appropriate timing for you when trusting your gut and following your intuition.
Learn From Successes and Failures
Reflecting on past decisions and outcomes, both good and bad, can help you refine your decision-making skills over time and your own perfect blend of heart, mind, and gut. It also gives you a sense of how and when to take action when trusting your gut, and when to seek out additional information or support.
Recap: How to Trust Your Gut and Use Your Intuition
Learn how YOU experience a gut sense or intuition.
Ask questions and get curious.
Examine yourself for biases disguised as gut feelings
.Evaluate how to take action (and when).
Review past experiences to help hone your decision-making skills
Are you undergoing a career or personal transition in life? Need help navigating to more stable ground? I’d love to give you guidance and support so you can step into your next step effectively and with confidence.
Book a Discovery Call with me HERE!
Not ready for my help but want to keep learning? I recommend reading my blog, “How to Cope with Changes in Life” for my strategies around navigating transitional times and seasons with ease and grace.
