Have you ever had a situation where you followed your intuition and things didn’t work out? Did you feel confused and even doubt your intuitive ability?
Author Gary Klein explains why intuition can be the source of significant errors in the course of making a decision. Here are a few of them:
- Inaccurate information – Intuitive decision makers tend to respond quickly to inaccurate, insufficient, unreliable, or incomplete information based on patterns from previous experiences.
- Short-term emotional bias – Cognitive research has shown that even experts’ decisions are frequently influenced by unrelated emotions while making a decision.
- Insufficient consideration of alternatives – Intuition generally relies on pattern recognition, and will point to solutions that have worked well with the current perceived pattern. This limits the number of options you may consider when dealing with a new decision about a scenario that is entirely unique.
- Prejudices – Emotions are a part of intuition and can allow flawed experiences to overrule sound facts and evidence.
- Overconfidence – People who have good experience and intuition in one area can become overconfident and all too willing to apply their intuition in an unfamiliar or unrelated area as well.
If you’re intuition has failed you, it’s time to examine the true cause of it. Perhaps one or more of the above causes were the culprit.
Intuition alone doesn’t work in our best interest if it’s accompanied by inaccurate information, strong emotions, not being open to different options, preconceived opinions not based on fact, and being too sure of our intuitive abilities in areas that we’re not familiar with.
Is your intuition usually correct? If not, why not? Highly sensitive people tend to be highly emotional, which could cloud our ability to accurately assess our gut feelings. As an example, have you ever been in love with someone when you started to notice red flags? Your intution clearly told you that something wasn’t right, but you chose to discount those gut feelings because of your strong emotional attachment. What other obstacles have impacted the accuracy of your intuition?
I believe that once you understand your highly sensitive nature and the potential pitfalls of intuition, you can work to fine tune your natural intuitive capabilities. I’m interested in any thoughts or comments that you have.
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