Intuition is like Google search. Here’s how to access it.

“Something is very wrong here.”

I’m in a meeting with my manager. I’ve now interrupted the flow of conversation, blurting out the vague but urgent sentence that’s been emerging in my mind for weeks.

It has kept me up at night. I’ve started to feel sick. There’s a horrible knot in my stomach. I have begun to hate the project I’m working on. I dread every meeting. Something is very wrong here.

And yet, I hadn’t been able to place what exactly. To me, it felt like you could cut through the tension in the meeting rooms with a knife. Every step of the process felt arduous. At times, I felt myself walking on eggshells. I felt myself caught between something. It all just felt… weird. But why?

Even in that one-on-one meeting, as I finally let the statement tumble out of my mouth, I had no idea what would come next. I still didn’t have clear reasons to articulate. Only the increasingly unbearable sense that something was very wrong.

My statement caught us both off guard. But my manager, expert as she was, responded with curiosity. “I wonder what it is.”

Over the course of a few conversations, we did find the why. We uncovered an insidious form of discrimination that was taking place just under our noses. It was poisoning the process and the work itself. It was making everyone miserable.

Giving voice to my intuition—even when I didn’t know where it would lead—was a new practice for me. But from that moment forward, I began to try it more and more. I began to feel more free and less stressed. And the practice itself started to feel less fraught. Often my hunches led somewhere important. Occasionally they didn’t lead anywhere obvious. But sharing them started to feel less scary. And unleashing this valuable source of information changed the way I live and work entirely.

What is intuition?

Your intuition is a treasure trove of information, and it’s available to you 24/7. It plays an essential role in all sorts of decision-making, like what to eat for lunch, when to talk to your manager, and whether to have kids. Here I’ll share what I’ve learned from hundreds of hours of leadership coaching, to help make intuition more accessible.

I like to refer to intuition as “inner knowing,” a term I’ve borrowed from my dear friend Amber Blandford, psychic medium, intuitive guide, and former hospice chaplain. Intuition is normally separate from logical reasoning and external sources of information.

It’s that feeling where you just know, but can’t necessarily explain why, at least at first. Here are some examples.

The first time you met a dear friend or partner. Sometimes you meet someone, and you just know it’s the start of something wonderful.

Or, perhaps you interview for a job that originally seemed dreamy to you. After a day of onsite interviews, you have a bad feeling in your gut, even though you haven’t quite pinpointed why.

Intuition often shows up with physical symptoms. You might feel a heaviness in your chest, a tingling in your gut, or chills on your arms. Or you might hear a voice in your head saying something simple and direct, out of nowhere, like, “Don’t do it.”

The initial “hit” of intuition sometimes passes quickly. We often brush it off, or move on to thinking.

You might, for example, start to argue with your intuition. In the dream job example above, you might start to reason with it: “But everything went fine! And this is exactly what I’ve been saying I wanted!”

Or, you might start to make sense of it, searching for reasons. In the example of meeting your future partner, you might start to think, “Maybe we clicked because of how much we both love yoga. And you know, I did think from her photo that she had kind eyes.”

When is intuition helpful?

Intuition sometimes comes up in stories of crisis situations and heroism. For example, someone on a rescue mission just has a feeling that they should keep searching in a particular direction that they already covered. Then it turns out that there really was someone over there, waiting for help.

But intuition is also really useful for everyday decisions, and yes, even business and management decisions. It’s not definitively better or worse than other sources of information, such as research or expert advice. It’s just different and valuable in its own right. And the context and circumstances determine how highly to weigh intuition against other inputs.

Intuition is particularly useful as a starting point for further investigation. Sometimes it’s a little scary to start paying attention to your intuition, because there can be an unfair assumption that you have to trust and act on intuition immediately.

In fact, intuition is an invitation to get curious. And in most cases, it is totally fair and possible to take the time you need to validate your intuition, just as you might validate research findings or a design idea.

How to access your intuition

Your intuition is always available to you. It’s kind of like Google search.

Back when I first started college, I had only ever experienced dial-up internet. Accessing it was a whole process, so I didn’t just do it on a whim. But at school, the speeds were lightning fast—you could connect instantly anytime you opened your laptop!

I kept asking classmates for information. Do you know where’s the nearest office supply store? Any idea when the post office opens?

They’d give me a “duh” look and say, why don’t you just google it? It took a little shift in habits and perspective, but pretty soon, I realized there was a portal of answers available to me 24/7, right at my fingertips. In fact, I could ask it anything!

Your intuition is always available too—it’s just a matter of learning how to access it and getting into the habit of accessing it frequently.

You can access your intuition anytime and anywhere. But with some experimentation, you can learn what practices or conditions help you access it more easily. Here are a few starting points.

Let your mind relax

Intuition, much like creativity, thrives when the mind is at ease. Try these things to get into a more meditative, relaxed state of mind.

• Take a walk outdoors.
• Do a guided meditation or yoga flow.
• Do a calming breathing exercise.
• Put all of your screens and devices away or turn them completely off for a specific period of time.
• Do something physical that you find relaxing, like washing dishes, folding laundry, knitting, dancing, or even just taking a shower or bath.

Address your intuition directly

Find a name for your intuition that feels right to you. Here are some examples:

• Intuition
• Inner knowing
• Inner wisdom
• Inner guide
• Future self
• Higher self

Then address it directly in your mind, aloud, or in writing, and ask a question. It can be anything from “what should I eat for lunch” to “what do I really want for my life?”

For example, you could open up a journal page and write, “Dear Future Self, what would you like me to know?”

Don’t rush it

There’s no right way to access your intuition. Let the ideas above lead you to playful experimentation.

Challenges to look out for

Your intuition may require some parsing

Just like Google search, intuition doesn’t always serve up a single, clear, complete answer. It often takes some practice to learn to parse the language of your intuition, and to filter out irrelevant results.

The inner critic is one of the most common things that pops right up when you try to access your intuition. You can think of it like one of those Google results that’s just highly popular and appears right at the top of the list. Just like some of those popular Google results, the inner critic is often drenched in fear.

The inner critic is just doing its job: trying to protect you from any risk-taking that could lead to uncomfortable feelings like shame, regret, lack of control, or disorientation.

Intuition, on the other hand, is unemotional. It’s neutral. It may spark emotion for you in reaction to it, but it doesn’t generally come with emotion. And it tends to point you in the direction of greater fulfillment, wellbeing, growth, and learning.

To help make the distinction, you can have a simple dialogue with the things that rise up in you.

A conversation with your inner critic might go something like this:

You: Should I move to the city I keep daydreaming about?

Inner critic: No way!

You: Why not?

Inner critic: Too scary! Who knows what will happen there? Maybe you’ll be lonely! Maybe your career won’t work out there! Maybe people will think you’re stupid!

And with your intuition, it might go something like this:

You: Should I move to the city I keep daydreaming about?

Intuition: Absolutely!

You: Why?

Intuition: [shrug]

Sometimes your intuition just won’t serve up a complete answer for you, or all of the reasons you wish for. It might just be pointing you in a particular direction. The rest is up to you. It’s up to you to muster the courage and curiosity to find out what’s beyond the horizon.

The distinction between intuition and bias is critical

When it comes to management responsibilities like hiring, promotions, compensation decisions, and assigning opportunities to employees, it’s important to create an extremely clear distinction between intuition and bias. Here are a few important starting points for creating those distinctions.

1. Learn deeply about unconscious bias, discrimination, and antiracism.
2. Rigorously investigate your gut feelings about employees.
3. Create hiring, promotion, and compensation processes that are fair and transparent.
4. Create a company culture where respectfully checking one another’s biases (we all have them!) is encouraged.

Intuition is often inconvenient

Learning to access and trust your intuition can be wonderful for improving your wellbeing over the long run. Intuition can point you in the direction of greater fulfillment in work and life.

But as you develop a closer relationship with your intuition, you may discover all sorts of inconvenient things. Intuition rarely takes us down paths that please everyone we know. Intuition rarely points us in the direction of someone else’s approval. Intuitive life choices sometimes don’t make sense to others.

And sometimes intuition reveals that we are more dynamic than we originally thought. It may ask us to reevaluate our commitments, or to question timeframes that once seemed inevitable.

When it comes to big life decisions—where to live, which relationships to cultivate, what career paths to choose (or forge!)—intuitive decision-making is not for the faint of heart. More often than not, intuition asks us to muster our courage and take risks.

What’s next?

Once you start accessing your intuition, you’ll likely encounter a whole new frontier of questions, like:

• What if my intuition goes quiet or doesn’t have anything to say to me sometimes?
• How can I really distinguish my intuition from other things, like my inner critic?
• I’ve heard what my intuition has to say. Now how do I trust it and take action?
• How do I talk about my intuition with other people? What if they react negatively to my intuitive decisions?
• How do I cultivate more courage and more comfort with the unknown?

There’s so much more to learn about intuition, and there are many different ways to strengthen your connection to it.

For when you’d like to dig deeper, Amber and I have created Winging It, a self-guided audio course that walks you through simple exercises and helpful perspectives that address many of these questions and themes above.

How about you? What intrigues, scares, or excites you about accessing and following your intuition?