how intuitive are you?

How intuitive are you?

Actually... before you answer that question, I think we should establish what intuition is because you can't determine how good you are at something or how much you use something if you don't know what that something is, right? And intuition isn't always particularly easy to define because people use the word to describe slightly different experiences. A gut feeling. An inner knowing. A sudden sense that something doesn't quite fit. A thought or message that seems to arrive before you've consciously thought your way towards it.

The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines intuition as “the power or faculty of attaining to direct knowledge or cognition without evident rational thought and inference”. Crystal clear now? You might still be scratching your head a bit, like me. Sometimes to understand the meanings written in dictionaries you need more dictionaries...

Over the years, though, I've developed my own understanding of intuition through experiencing it and becoming more familiar with the ways it communicates with me. For me, it's that knowing, feeling, nudge or message that seems to arrive without me consciously working through all the information first. And sometimes it really can arrive very quickly.

Thinking and ‘Blinking’

One explanation of this that I've always found interesting comes from Malcolm Gladwell in his book Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking. Gladwell contrasts the slower process of consciously analysing something with the rapid judgements and impressions that can arise almost instantly. He illustrates this with the story of the Getty kouros, an ancient Greek-style statue the Getty Museum was considering buying. After extensive investigation, the museum acquired the statue, yet when some experts encountered it, they experienced an almost immediate sense that something about it wasn't right.

The subsequent history of the kouros became complicated, with continuing questions around its authenticity, so I don't see the story as proof that intuition is infallible or that an immediate feeling will always turn out to be right. What I find interesting is the experience itself: that sense of something doesn't fit arriving before somebody has consciously articulated why.

And that's close to how intuition can feel to me. Which brings me back to my original question...

How Intuitive Do You Think You Are?

Rather than spending ages analysing your answer, take the first number between 1 and 10 that pops into your head, with 1 meaning ‘pretty crap, if I'm honest’ and 10 meaning ‘I notice and use my intuition all the time’. What number did you pick? And are you happy with it? There's no test behind this and I'm certainly not going to mark your answer. The number isn't an objective measurement of how intuitive you are, nor does choosing 9 or 10 mean every intuitive impression you have is automatically correct. It's simply an interesting way of noticing how connected you feel to your intuition right now.

If you chose a low number, I don't believe that means you don't have intuition. One of my core beliefs about intuition is that we're all born with it; it's a natural gift we all have. What can differ is how familiar we are with it, how much attention we give it and how confident we feel recognising the ways it communicates with us. If you picked a higher number, you may already be very familiar with your gut feelings, intuitive nudges or inner knowing. You may have spent years paying attention to them and learning how your own intuition tends to show up. Either way, there's still something to explore because connecting with intuition isn't about reaching a perfect 10 and then getting every decision right for the rest of your life. I'm not sure I'd trust any skill that came with that guarantee.

What Does Intuition Actually Feel Like in Everyday Life?

For me, intuition becomes much easier to understand when I bring it down from the big spiritual questions and notice how it can appear within completely ordinary situations.

Imagine you're travelling home and suddenly feel strongly drawn towards taking a different route. You may have no obvious reason for that feeling. Does that mean your intuition has magically detected a traffic jam three miles ahead? Not necessarily. However, you can notice the nudge and decide whether you want to act upon it. You might take the other route. You might quickly check the traffic information first. Or you might decide there's no practical reason to change course and carry on as you are. The intuitive part is the nudge. What you do with it is still your choice.

The same can happen with people. A friend introduces you to somebody they think you'll really like, yet when you meet them you feel slightly uncomfortable. You can't identify anything they've actually done wrong and you don't have any evidence that they're somebody you shouldn't trust. That feeling doesn't make them a bad person. Neither, though, do you have to talk yourself out of what you're sensing simply because your friend thinks you'll get along brilliantly. You can slow things down, remain curious about your reaction and give yourself time to discover whether there's anything behind it.

For me, that's an important part of learning to work with intuition: not turning every feeling into a prediction, but not automatically dismissing it either. And our practical senses and judgement don't suddenly become irrelevant because we're intuitive. If food smells strange, for example, I don't need to turn that into a spiritual message from my intuition. My nose has already given me useful information! We have all sorts of information available to us. Intuition can be one part of that rather than something that has to compete with everything else.

We're All Born With Intuition

When it comes to intuition, there's one belief I hold very strongly: I believe we're all born with it. You, me, your parents, your kids, your neighbour down the road... all of us. I don't believe intuition belongs to a special group of people who were fortunate enough to receive an extra gift that the rest of us missed out on. What I do believe is that our connection with it can become quieter or less familiar when we don't use it. We become accustomed to analysing, thinking, questioning and looking outside ourselves for answers, and that quieter internal nudge can become very easy to overlook amongst all the other chatter going on inside our heads.

That's why I tend to think of developing intuition as reconnecting rather than acquiring something completely new. The ability is already there. The practice, for me, is becoming familiar with it again.

Can You Develop Your Intuition?

I believe you can. Not in the sense that you'll practise for a few weeks and suddenly know the answer to everything, but in the same way that anything becomes more familiar when we start paying attention to it. When I began reconnecting with my own intuition, part of the process was simply noticing: What does an intuitive nudge feel like to me? How does my inner knowing tend to arrive? What happens when I create enough quiet to notice what I'm sensing before my mind immediately starts analysing it?

Over time, practising intuitive exercises and paying attention to my own experiences helped me become more familiar with the way my intuition communicates with me. It also gave me opportunities to look back at what I'd felt or sensed and learn from what happened next. And that's important because not every thought that pops into our head needs to be labelled intuition.

Part of strengthening my connection has been learning more about my intuition: how it feels, how it differs from all the other thoughts competing for my attention and when something feels significant enough for me to pause and listen. Sometimes I still need practical information. Sometimes I need to think something through. Sometimes I want to check the facts. And sometimes there's a quiet feeling underneath all of that which I don't want to ignore.

The more familiar I've become with my intuition, the more I've found myself feeling in tune with what I'm noticing within myself. That's what ‘flow’ means to me now in relation to intuition. It isn't a promise that I'll avoid every traffic jam, choose every relationship perfectly or somehow arrange for life always to work in my favour. It's more about being in conversation with another part of myself rather than automatically drowning it out.

So I'll finish where I started. How intuitive are you? Not according to a test, a scientific measurement or even the number you chose earlier, rather according to your own experience of yourself. If your connection with intuition doesn't feel particularly strong at the moment, I don't believe that means you weren't given the gift. You may simply not know its voice very well yet. And voices become much easier to recognise when we start listening.