Intuition. Everyone knows they have it, although some choose to ignore it. But what exactly is Intuition?

It is a fast response that your brain can do, to react to a current situation by calling on learned rules from your internal database of past experiences. In fact, it's a faster response than thinking. It probably evolved to help keep early humans alive in the face of overwhelming natural odds and predators. It is not magical, it is just a hack our brains have developed.

It's definitely not foolproof and lead you to wrong conclusions. Since its based on rules you've learned from past experiences, its possible you've learnt the wrong rule and your brain recalls that. This is the definition of a bias - a recalled rule that might be unfairly applied to the current situation, or could be a hindrance.

So. Here is the deal. You have this thing called Intuition, if you like it or not. May as well learn to use it to your advantage in your modern life. Here's some lessons I've learnt to help tap into my Intuition in my career.

Create space

I can be a very task-focused person, and sometimes to a fault. If my schedule is too tight, the deadline too soon, the task list too long, I can't help but only focus on that. Let's say task one of twenty today is a walking 1on1. If I'm still worried about the twenty other tasks I have to do today, I'm just trying to cross off this 1on1 instead of really being present. As my brain speaks to me like "hey, your dev seems really worried about this new project", I'll end up subconsciously ignoring that thought because I don't want it to become task twenty one for today. That's me ignoring my Intuition.

So instead, I've learned that I need to create space around my tasks. I need to give myself breathing room where I can focus solely on the present, on what my Intuition tells me, and to make sure I act on those thoughts. Its a hard thing to do, especially for a manager when some days you feel like a pinball bouncing between meetings, but it's worth every second invested in creating space. Also makes me feel less stressed and pressured, so that's a bonus. Parts are also a great way to help give goals the space they need.

Plans are not goals

If I have a busy day, I'll build a plan for the day in Trello, then I'll try to execute it all. I've had to learn not to confuse the plan itself with the goals that the plan is there to help me accomplish. In the past, I've doggedly tried to complete the plan even though the situation had changed and the plan didn't match the new goal. No. Not ok.

Never loose sight of the why, the goal. The plan is a mutable construct you can change, redraw, scrap, restart. It just a means to an end. It's just there to help you get to the goal. I find that if I focus on the goal, I can hone my Intuition to help react in ways to keep me moving towards it in creative ways.

Here's an example. Recently, one of my devs was building a feature for a release deadline one week away and hit some large engineering blockers. Instead of sticking to that feature, we pivoted the tiger team to a new feature we knew we could complete before the deadline. This way, we had new content in the current release and the next release - after some extra time to solve the engineering blockers. If we did not keep the goal in mind of serving our users, we would have ended up shipping both features in the later release.

Know yourself

Sometimes your Intuition is wrong or unfair. For instance, let's say in the past I've had a couple of disagreements and heated, somewhat unfriendly encounters with a colleague. When we work together in the future, my Intuition would probably be screaming at me "Guard up! Get ready for a fight!". If I listen to it, I'll enter our discussion already on the offense, and if he picks upon my intent, then we might create a disagreement where there otherwise would not be one.

Self awareness is such an important skill. You need to be aware of what your biases are and counter them if appropriate. I know I'm not in any physical danger in a work conversation, but my Intuition still tries to set me up to fight as if I am. I need to logically keep those biases in check.

Do all the hard things

So if Intuition is a mechanism that relies on the rules you've learnt in the past, then that means the quality and quantity of your brain's rule database matters. The more experiences you have, the more memories and past you'll have built up for your Intuition to call on. But its not just about more, its about having high impact, high quality rules in there too.

In order to grow your intuition efficiently, you need to do lots of hard things, not just things. Difficult experiences that push your boundaries will grow your rule set with higher quality inferences for you to call upon in the future.

It's hard to get out of your comfort zone, its something you need to learn to balance, but the reward is great. Sometimes I get tired and start veering to my comfort zone. It's natural. One thing that helps me keep pushing on a challenge is that by doing this, I know I'm expanding my Intuition. Which means next time I encounter the same problem it will be easier and faster for me to solve. It's like making sure you're lifting the right weight in the gym. You need a load to grow. If its too small, you're only maintaining, not growing. If its too large, you'll hurt yourself. You need to balance the load of life.

Consume art

The problem with the above tip is that it takes time to accumulate experiences. It would be great if there was a way to accumulate experiences faster. Like if you're building a machine-learning system, you can train your rule sets on training data. Luckily, there is.

Read. Watch. Listen. Talk. Learn.

Consuming stories from others is a great way to grow your brains database. Read books on solving problems. Talk to more experienced people. Even watching movies or TV shows which are usually stories of heroes overcoming challenges is a way to grow.

Of course, its not an actual substitute for doing. You don't read a book on how to swim and then jump straight into the ocean with confidence without at first practising in a pool and doing it. But every hack you can do helps.