How to Listen to Your Intuition to Make Better Decisions: 3 Quick Tips

As business owners and leaders, we make decisions every day that impact our clients, our teams, and the future of our business. Small and big, short-term and long-term, prioritizing and re-prioritizing, making decisions into fire-drills and putting decisions on back-burners. Over and over, day after day. 

Whew. I have decision-fatigue just thinking about it.

In a world inundated by data, we often turn to the quantitative to gain understanding and help us make decisions. I’m personally a huge fan of using data to make decisions.

But if we’re doing something new, we might not have data yet. Or, if we’re a small business, we might not have the data we need. And, in some larger businesses, the data is there but not in a way that means anything. In some cases, data alone may not help us make a decision. 

According to Harvard Business, our intuition can be a powerful tool to inspire us to make better decisions - especially when the risk is high.

Tuning in to your intuition will not only help you make a better decision in the moment, it also serves as a north star that can guide you from a higher place and really eliminate a lot of decisions.

Which sounds great, except… have you ever thought you did listen to your intuition - and then it turned out all wrong, so you figure it wasn’t actually your intuition (maybe just indigestion)? 

Or have you ever wanted to use your intuition to make a decision, but didn’t feel anything (except the stress of having to make a decision)?

If so, I want to help reduce your decision fatigue by offering up 3 quick tips to make listening to your intuition - and making decisions - easier.

Get still & Listen to your body

When we’re making quick decisions, it’s easy for ego, anxiety, biases, or behavioral patterns to jump in the driver’s seat. In the moment, it can be hard to tell the difference between something that “comes naturally” and our intuition. To combat your other instincts shouting over your intuition, get still and listen to your body. 

This is a time to slow down so you can speed up.

First, ask yourself this question: Am I forcing this decision? It might be a decision that can actually wait, but you are the one making it urgent. You might have more control over the timing than you’re admitting to yourself. 

If it is truly a decision that needs to be made quickly, take a deep breath and do a body scan. Where do you feel tension or even pain? Keep breathing deeply and start releasing any thoughts and any tension. (Hint: indigestion will feel tense, while intuition will feel expansive.)

Sit in this silence and keep releasing thoughts and tension as they arise. Your intuition will be able to speak to you - in words, images, or feelings - once you’ve made space for it. 

If you’re in a situation where sitting in silence with your eyes closed for several minutes would be awkward or dangerous, don’t close your eyes. You can still breath and scan your body without closing your eyes. If other people are around, communicate that you need a few moments to think before you make your decision. 

Leverage your Human Design type

Not everyone experiences intuition in the same way. Something I’ve learned recently that has been extremely helpful is my Human Design type. Human Design is a powerful guide that can help you understand how intuition works for you. 

If you’ve never heard of Human Design, it’s a combination of quantum mechanics, Kabbalah, the Hindu-Brahmin Chakra system, astrology, and I Ching. You can learn more here. It’s complex, so I highly recommend finding someone in your network or in your community who can provide a reading for you. 

Here’s an example of how this helps me: Because my Human Design type is a “spleenic” Projector, I know that the best way to access my intuition is to ask myself strategic questions and wait for the invitation. My intuition aligns with feeling seen and respected, and I almost always need to practice step 1. to get clarity before being able to really hear my intuition.

Practice & Reflect

Pausing in the moment - especially when we feel pressed to make a decision - is not easy. Start practicing with smaller decisions and make it a habit.

To make it easier: do the work to release people-pleasing or limiting self-worth beliefs. You will never allow yourself time to listen to your intuition if you don’t believe you are worthy of it.

Also take time to reflect on your decisions. Start with decisions you made a long time ago, to strip away some of the emotion. Did you hear your intuition and ignore it? Did you rush through the decision without stopping to listen to your intuition? If you listened to your intuition and the decision came out “bad” or “wrong” think about what happened next - was it actually for the best in the long-run, or provide you with an opportunity you wouldn’t have otherwise had?

I found something really interesting when I reflected on how I have - or haven’t - used intuition to make decisions in my life: I have listened to my intuition much more than I had given myself credit for. There were moments when it was extremely strong, and pushed out any doubts or worries - just me on a path doing the thing I knew was meant to happen. There were other moments when I heard my intuition, but reasoned my way out of it. Sometimes for years. And I’m starting to understand why. Reflection has helped me become more confident in following my intuition, and allowed me to be more forgiving of my past self when I didn’t follow it.

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If you haven’t been making decisions using your intuition, you’re not bad or wrong. Every decision you made has led you here, and made you the person you are. You’ve had a billion experiences that have given your life meaning and created the memories you cherish. Intuition doesn’t change that.

Using your intuition is just a new tool in your toolkit. A powerful tool that will help you make decisions and live your life with more ease. A way to take your life to the nextlevel.