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Valuing Your Intuition

Have you ever found yourself in the completely unexpected situation of realizing that being aware of our intuition and being compelled to act upon it can be two different things?

Awareness for some is enough to change behavior but for others something more is needed…as many people are aware of their intuitive responses and are still unable to follow them.

Why would that be?

In any situation in life, we have several possibilities and/or choices in front of us. The choices that we pay the most attention to are the ones that we perceive to be the most significantly linked to our needs and wants (as in general this determines what people value).

For many people developing their intuitive abilities, intuition is not yet linked to anything, so while they can see it, they can’t really perceive it as a choice. This due to how our brain categorizes our experiences.

Categories and Experiences

When we make the decision to develop our intuitive abilities, we reach success by engaging a process that creates an awareness of our intuition and how we personally experience it. This is what allows us to cue into prompts from our Higher Selves, Angels and Spirit Guides.

The first step of this process involves creating a space (or category) within ourselves that houses our criteria for intuition. We then sort through our experiences (matching this criteria to the memories that fit) and place them into our category of intuition. This in essence, gives us an awareness of how we experience intuition. It tells us what to look for so that we can identify when we are having an intuitive experience.

Going through this process allows us to discover (now that we are clear about what we are looking for) that the voice of our intuition has always been there in the background, it was simply running outside of our conscious awareness because we had no framework in place through which to internally reference it.

As we go along with this new reference point of intuition clearly defined, we add more experiences to our category and it gets larger…expanding our view of our intuitive responses to life.

So how do we link our intuition to our values so that we can see it as a viable choice?

One of the best ways to do this is to watch what we are attending to when we are faced with making a choice. We are almost always attending to one of three things, the cause & effect of making the choice, what it means to make the choice or what the relationship is between our behavior and the choice. The following questions are useful in determining what we are paying attention to:

1. Cause & Effect – What do I believe listening to my intuition can/will make happen in this situation?
2. Meaning – What does it mean about me to make the decision of listening to my intuition?
3. Relationship – What is the relationship between using my intuition and the situation I’m thinking of?

Once we know what we have been paying attention to that is preventing us from being able to act, we can quickly re-frame the experience so that we are now paying attention to something that allows us some freedom and mobility within our thoughts about being intuitive.

Our thoughts about the situation will tell us exactly what our brains are looking for, and where the links to our intuition that carry the most impact, can be made.

For example, Cause and Effect:
Lets say I’m getting the intuitive impulse to start a business and my immediate thought is that all new businesses fail…this is a generalization that would make my intuition hard to follow but my mind is telling me exactly where to go here.

So I would challenge this assumption with. Since new businesses often fail, you want to be sure that your business is a success.

This structure is very different and invites me to explore my intuition rather than ignore it.

Example # 2, Meaning:
If I think listening to my intuition to open a new business is irresponsible, I’m not likely to want to align myself with this idea because it is most likely against my value system to be irresponsible.

I could serve myself much better by saying, Since opening a new business is a large responsibility, gathering information intuitively gives me a larger pool of knowledge through which to make the best business decisions possible.

Example # 3, Context:
If I’m thinking that using intuition in (business situations) means people won’t like me, then I might stop myself from accessing my intuition in these situations in order to avoid isolation.

A good re-frame would be, So using intuition in business makes you think that people won’t like you, but your intuition is often very useful in creating connectedness with your friends.

All of these responses start to link our intuition with valued resources. In the above scenarios these resources were represented as success, responsibility and connection with others.

The more we link our intuition to the things that we value in life, the easier it is for us not only to access but also to act upon and the stronger a resource it becomes!

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