Decision-making should not solely be a leader-centric activity. Facilitating decision-making should be. That means delegation and trust in your team members.
But when appropriate decision-making falls on your shoulders as a leader, would you ever consider extending that same trust to your gut? Your instinct? Your intuition?
Data-driven decision-making, engaged in through the conscious aspect of your mind, relies on hard facts and numbers, and has proven effective in high-impact business decisions. It’s the foundation of understanding your customers and measuring business performance and success. It also helps those making the tough judgments verify, quantify, and qualify issues that need rationality and informed knowledge to come to solutions. Use of data provides objectivity, transparency, and predictability.
However, as in life, not everything is black and white. Grey and abstract areas of high uncertainty often arise in the ever-changing business world, even in the presence of advancing technology that can help one sieve through the data. Sometimes the quality of the data is questionable, or the quantity is overwhelming, or insufficient, leading to delaying or putting off making decisions. The rigidity of data also usually leaves little room for innovative solutions.
This is when it would do you well to tap into your intuition intentionally.
More and more evidence has shown that good decisions require both data and intuition, two sides to one coin. It’s common knowledge that women have been blessed with this powerful inner compass called (or rather more ability to tap into) our sixth sense. However, we are often afraid of tapping into that at work because it is deemed as and feels irresponsible and irrational. After all, how can we base important decisions on something we can’t see or quantify?
What is Intuition?
Intuition, driven by the subconscious part of the mind, means understanding something instinctively without utilizing current logic or conscious reasoning. It’s experienced as a ‘feeling in your gut’ that indicates to you that something you’re doing/saying, or a situation/environment you’re in, is right or wrong. It’s also intuition when you instinctively sense something, an emotion or state of being, in someone.
This automated instant response or thought is a brain energy-economizing mechanism. It allows for a functional reduction in cognitive and processing load, making room for more intensive or newly acquired actions.
Our minds perceive and contain huge amounts of data, of which the conscious part only processes a minute fraction and the rest is stored in the subconscious memory bank. Intuition comes from the mind’s processing of the stored previously lived, witnessed, or learned experiences (which I opine include energetic experiences), utilizing its predictive processing framework to compare current information against those memories. It’s essentially pattern recognition intel created from past logic and reasoning.
In this sense, the more experienced you are, the more intuitive you get.
However, even the most experienced of us can differ vastly in opinion. Intuition, after all, is subjective. As such, I also encourage my junior teammates to learn to listen to and trust their intuition. Because apart from my belief in energetic experiences, there’s the ‘mystical’ type where no prior or tangible experience can be pinpointed, what we as Christians refer to as the Holy Spirit’s guidance and insight, and other religions also have a name for.
How do you explain someone who just senses that her friend is in trouble and calls her to find that she indeed is? How do you explain dreams (during sleep) that come true? On numerous occasions, I have had such experiences.
According to neuroscience, the female mind is highly optimized to enable communication between analytical and intuitive processing. Therefore, women leaders shouldn’t shy away from intuition but can capitalize on it as a power, whilst prudently taking data into account.
When time is of the essence, it’s worthwhile calling on intuition. It can help one ask the right questions of the data, and can alert us of any incompleteness and quality of the data. When creativity or innovation is required, intuition can help with new approaches that data can overlook.
How Can Women Leaders Tap into Their Intuition to Make Decisions?
To not be afraid of intuition means to not be afraid of your feelings, tuning into them, and sitting with the discomfort. I emphasize that because facing feelings is easier said than done. Women leaders are typically busy go-getters with no time to sit and listen to their bodies. I’ve also had women tell me they don’t want to face their feelings because it’s potentially a bottomless pit of tears. A rabbit hole they’re not ready to go down.
So then, how do we go down this necessary but uncomfortable path?
A. Acknowledge Your Feelings
We begin with taking the moment to recognize and name what we are feeling, and respect its presence in our bodies by acknowledging that we are feeling it. We don’t have to continue the traditional legacy of ‘pushing through the unpleasant feeling’ to just make the decision and keep it moving.
Reactive decisions are often made when someone just leads with an uninterrogated negative/bad feeling they are experiencing, or even the opposite. You may stop yourself from doing something because you feel fearful. But if you stop to acknowledge and question that fear, you may find that you feel that way because your ex is part of the top executive team of the company you wish to go into business with. Is that reason for you to buckle down? Or is your mind helping you avert a risky deal?
Your feelings, either way, are not necessarily unreliable, if your ex was not an unscrupulous and unethical you-know-what, they may be pointing you to unaddressed residual issues of rejection within yourself about your ex, which may be a hindrance to your business success.
More neuroscience good news is that women have superiority in sensitivity and responsiveness to, and processing competence of emotional cues and information, meaning all that is required of you is to just give yourself the time and the space to make room for this natural power you possess.
B. Believe Your Feelings
Trusting our intuition means trusting our own feelings. Trusting our feelings starts with understanding that they serve a purpose. Your body is engineered to preserve energy and itself, so bodily processes are not willy-nilly.
Emotions and feelings are evolutionarily intended to serve as an inner guiding system for the body, informing you of the state of your mind, thoughts, thinking, and being, in response to current stimuli (the response may have been learned from previous stimuli). This purpose has biological and social significance.
Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio discovered that decision-making gets much worse in people who have had brain injuries that knocked out their emotions, and that they also interestingly waste time over-reasoning and over-rationalizing for and against given choices.
Nevertheless, these feelings that we’re to tap into and trust need to be channeled, balancing emotion and reason, so that we make responsive instead of reactive decisions.
C. Channel Your Feelings
Cheryl Strauss Einhorn, an expert and author in decision sciences, stipulates four steps on how to channel those feelings:
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Identify the decision to be made.
Questions and issues may come flying at you, but figure out what exactly the decision to be made is. Get crystal clear on the options before you.
2. Identify your feelings about that decision.
Pin-pointing what you are feeling helps you contextualize and figure out what about the decision makes you feel that way and why. Are you feeling fearful? Anxious? Worried? Excited? Overwhelmed? Frustrated? Etc. Is that based on your previous experiences or other sources? Why exactly are you feeling that way?
Are these feelings contrary to the known data about this decision? If yes, dig even deeper. Do you sense some risk that the data is not showing? Are the numbers revealing something you hadn’t thought about? How do you feel about your potential partners? Keep in mind, complex decisions come with complex emotions. Try to unravel them all.
3. Visualize your success and how it feels.
Imagine that you’ve gone with decision A instead of B. How does it feel sitting/living in that decision? Do you feel accomplished, at ease, or at peace? Is there a sense of relief? Do you feel excited or exhausted by it? What makes you feel that way?
4. Apply emotional bookends.
Emotional bookends are the emotions you feel at the beginning in step 2 and the visualized end in step 3. By re-assessing how you framed your decision, you may often discover that there’s a deeper (and truest) decision to be considered, one that has more aligned alternatives for you.
D. Document Your ‘Aha’ Moments
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve grappled with a decision in the morning (or even several days prior), left it unresolved, and forgotten about it, only to have an epiphany of a solution in the afternoon. Comfortably now past 40, I always document such. Not that I’m saying you’re old😆, you also should document those. We have a lot of decision-making to do and a lot on our minds, and such golden nuggets of insights should not fall through the cracks.
As a Christian, I firmly believe the ‘aha’ moments are Holy Spirit gem drops, leading and guiding, and I trust those. I simply express gratitude for them and choose to go with them.
There you have it, the ABCD of tapping into intuition.
You may ask, is intuition always right? Yes and no. Yes, in the sense that the mind operates in the context of its truth, it’s always true to itself. If it ‘perceives’ (imagined or real) current potential danger based on previous experiences, it computes danger signals and calls on danger responses. No, because it obviously will work against you when there’s no real threat, but that’s where the channeling comes in.
Data-only decisions alone may often be rigid with no room for innovation. Left to their own devices, unchecked, and without interrogation and data, our guts can fail us. But when we understand that intuition is our mind’s processing intel, we’re then empowered to tap into it and work with it. Thank God, we women have a superior ability to simultaneously process both, and should capitalize on that instead of running away from it.
Dr. Shibu Selatole
Dr Shibu Selatole is a Femininity Mindset and Lifestyle Coach certified in NLP Life Transformation Coaching. She helps women leaders embrace their womanhood and femininity so they can attain harmonious success at work and at home. She firmly believes that it's unnatural and unhealthy for women to continue succeeding in hyper-masculine patriarchal ways, and that this is why they experience more burnout than men. She has 20 years of forensic pathology practice, holds an MBA(cum laude) and is an award-winning Head of Unit, also overseeing clinical governance in her province and training of residents. In her dreams, her memoir is titled ‘Renewal, Decaff & Dresses’.
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