It happened twice yesterday.
– First up, it happened during one of those tough and fairly long discussions with a friend that could have been averted. My gut had been telling me that there was an issue to be dealt with for a couple of weeks now and I still decided to avoid it. Bad idea.
– The second was a post lunch discussion with a friend which finally cleared some miscommunications that we had with regards to a process he was going through as a result of my insistence. In truth, I should have managed expectations a lot better. Again here, my gut told me 3 weeks ago that there was a high chance something would go wrong.
And in typical style, I decided to ignore it. Luckily, we dealt with it yesterday or it could have resulted in a rather unpleasant experience.
I am more of an intuitive decision maker. Every big decision I have made in my life so far has had a mix of logic and emotion. Logic helps me understand if the facts are okay but it’s my emotions that give me the final go-ahead, and hence, have the final veto. If it doesn’t feel right, I don’t do it. Over time, I’ve learnt to make friends with my heart and these days, I find it much easier to listen to it – despite the overarching noise from thoughts and other distracting noise.
Yesterday, it struck me that it’s high time I made friends with my gut too. My gut is typically quicker than my heart – if my heart tells me that a certain decision or situation doesn’t feel right, my gut has probably given subtle hints many weeks ago but for some reason, I just chose not to listen.
In fact, what I often find myself doing is actually fighting against my gut, trying to prove it is wrong. I guess it comes from a schooled aversion to making snap judgments – which is really what the gut does. From my experience over the past few months atleast, I’ve found this to be a big waste of energy because my gut’s warnings have been unerringly accurate. Maybe it’s a hint..
While I don’t think listening to my gut is the answer 100% of the time, I do think it has earned it’s right to be heard. Time to make a new friend..
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(Credit to Malcolm Gladwell’s ‘Blink’ as well for helping me understand the science of snap judgments a little better. If I were a reader, I wouldn’t take his book to be THE authority as he has a ‘news-reporter’ style focus on topics but he definitely does give some valuable insights!)
A Learning a Day 