Contrary to popular belief, Intuition is not your “gut instinct”. It doesn't work like a Magic 8 Ball and it isn't a mystical force. Intuition is actually a higher brain function. We did a whole video series on Intuition in my Performance Tune-Up, which you can check out HERE. Intuition is always working. The trouble is, sometimes it's working to create what you DON'T want. Intuition needs three key things in order to work: (1) Obsessive Focus (2) Emotional Importance (3) Time Investment.
Think of intuition like a flashlight that’s guiding us toward a destination. The flashlight is always on and it’s always looking for that destination, but if we don’t provide the coordinates, if we don’t give it importance, the flashlight will just bounce around, leading us on a wild goose chase. It may even take us down the wrong path altogether. Last time, we talked about the role Obsessive Focus plays in accessing intuition. If you missed it, you can check it out here. Today we’re going to explore the role of Emotion in getting your Intuition working for you. Because you can nail the Focus piece, but if you miss the Emotional Importance, it's dry, there's no power, no juice behind it, and you won't get the old intuition flywheel turning.
Aw man, you've got to make it important! Take a second right now and think about what's important to you. If you’re like most people, you probably immediately thought of your kids, your dogs, your business, your favorite sport or hobby, the cause you champion. And I’ll bet your system was flooded with feelings of passion, love, inspiration, pride, power, exuberance. What makes those people and things important to you are the emotions that are attached to them. So it would stand to reason that if we want to make something important, we need to attach those emotions to it.
Another way to look at it is through the lens of Thoughts, Beliefs & Values. A thought can come and go, it's just a thought, not a lot of emotion tied to it. A belief is more solid, more conviction behind it. We're invested in our beliefs and have strong feelings about them. And Values are no joke. We're willing to fight for them, go to war for them, even. There is a LOT of emotion tied to these bad boys. In order to get Intuition to kick into high gear for your vision, that shit has to be IMPORTANT! It's got to be Value-level important. Get the idea? You've got to light up that emotion tied to your vision and make it of gigantic importance so your brain knows to prioritize it and find ways to make it happen on your behalf.
A great way to observe this process is in kids. They’re bouncing around, trying different things, figuring out what it is that gets that fire burning. Maybe they try little league for a couple years, soccer in the off season. One might catch, the other might not. Or, in the case of Chloe and Evelyn, ten years old, it’s their local swim club. In particular, the dreaded 200 meter freestyle. 8 lengths of the pool. If they want to qualify for the state championships, they have to do it in under four minutes.
Both girls are focused on their goal: 200 meters in four minutes. At practice every morning they drill, building their stamina, working out their pacing for the long event. When practice is over though, Chole doesn’t give much thought to the upcoming swim. Except when her mom brings it up. Chloe’s mom is on the swim club parent committee, and the 200 meter is the most prestigious event. She really wants Chloe to nail it. So, even though Chloe is working toward it, she’s not emotionally connected to the race. She’s doing it because mom wants her to.
Evelyn, on the other hand, is not only laser focused on the race, she’s also lit up like a Christmas tree. In fact, if she could ask for anything for Christmas it would be to win the 200 meter in July. Evelyn had been gearing up for the 200 meter, knowing it would be a requirement now that she was ten. But she’d been a little afraid of it. Then she watched the Olympic trials on television and something clicked for Evelyn. That something that happens, for reasons we may never know, that just makes us stop and say, “Whoa. That’s cool.” It’s something different for everyone. For Evelyn it was watching those Olympic hopefuls, doing just what she was about to do, but on an even bigger scale. Those girls were swimming the 200 in under two minutes!
Seeing what those athletes were able to do opened a whole new world to Evelyn. She imagined herself standing on the podium at a future Olympics. She could see it happening, and more importantly, she could feel what the experience would be like. It became everything to her. And her intuition was turned on. She found herself studying Olympic swimmers, learning new techniques to cut her time, getting a summer job to pay for extra coaching, etc. That's what intuition does...it shows us the path of how to get from where we are to where we're going.
So on the morning of the big race, both girls showed up with their minds in the zone. But Evelyn had an extra arrow in her quiver. She had Emotional Importance that was driving her. It wasn’t just about beating some arbitrary number that was decided by some faceless committee somewhere. It was about doing the thing that would get her that much closer to creating the dream. It had driven her to work harder, to push herself further, to decide that it wasn’t a question of if, only when.
Evelyn beat the time. Four minutes was no sweat. She came in with ten seconds to spare, and in swimming, ten seconds is an eternity. Chloe missed the cut by just one second. Mom was disappointed (what would the other committee moms think?) but Chloe shrugged it off pretty quickly. Because it just didn’t hold the same emotional importance for her as it did for Evelyn. And that’s probably just fine. Competitive swimming just doesn’t float Choe’s boat like it does Evelyn’s. Mom can’t make it important for her, she’s got to find that for herself.
Like Evelyn, we’ve all had that moment when the lightning strikes and the skies part and we say, “That’s my thing!” Maybe it was the first time you made clean contact with a fastball right over the plate, or the sound of the audience erupting into applause at the end of the middle school play, or when you finally nailed that flying tornado kick. But here’s the thing: we don’t have to just sit around waiting for inspiration to strike out of the blue. We can decide to create it for ourselves.
See, emotions don’t live in our nervous system just for shits and giggles. We have them for a reason. They’re like road signs saying, “Danger! Stay out!” or “Go left at the fork in the road.” The thing is, we don’t have to wait for our nervous system to show us the signs. If we know what we’re doing, we can put ourselves in the emotional driver’s seat, so to speak. With some practice and determination, we can learn to intentionally attach emotional importance to the things we want to create.
Maybe you want to get the body into tip-top shape, but the whole process just feels like a drag. You know what you want, you’ve got your focus, but just the thought of putting on your gym clothes feels like reporting for a prison sentence. You’ve got to make it important! You’ve got to visualize, to see yourself at the destination, to feel the results! What will it mean? Strength, vitality, increased energy, being able to play hide-and-seek with the grandkids. Running circles around those other committee moms.
But look, it’s not going to happen overnight. You can’t just say, “Getting fit is important to me!” and then expect to be Arnold Schwarzenegger when you wake up the next morning. It takes some skill. It takes tools, techniques and strategies. And guess what? We’ve got ‘em! Join us for a Power Series program and we’ll get you schooled up on the components of Intuition and how they work together to light up that path and get Intuition working for you. Click HERE to learn more and sign up today!