Seizing on intuition… (Part Three)

Keeping track of intuition through a log is perhaps the best tool there is to train our perceptual system. This is not about journaling our life. It’s about training, developing and using that perceptual faculty. So, each time we feel a strong intuition, write one sentence, like “I have a feeling X will happen.” Then add the bodily sensation, the emotional tone, the context and forget about it. 

Later, when the outcome becomes clear, return to the log and mark either correct or incorrect, partially correct or undetermined. This will build a feedback loop, just like the athletes among us refine our muscle memory! If we are persistent, we’ll begin to see patterns, like which sensations correlate with accuracy, which emotions distort intuition, which contexts sharpen or blur our perception. This is how intuition becomes a trainable skill rather than a lucky guess. Finally, before we close this discussion, let’s see how to tell "Intuition" from "Anxiety". This is perhaps the most critical skill. Real intuition and fear feel very similar, but they have different "flavors". The table below shows these differences:

Finally, while it’s fun to celebrate our successes, it will be even more helpful to study our misses When an intuition proves right, it’s tempting to just enjoy the confirmation, but the real growth comes from asking, first when it worked perfectly: What did it feel like? What was the first moment I sensed it? What was the “signal” beneath the noise? 

And when an intuition is wrong, let’s ask what emotion was masquerading as intuition? What bodily cue misled us? What did I want to be true? This is best way to train our intuition into a more precise indicator. This is both a complicated and elusive matter, so don’t be surprised if I find more effective or useful tools in the near future. 

In the meantime, we’ve got enough to get to work, so for those of you interested, let’s try to compare our respective progress, say in a year from now. Good luck !

Seizing on intuition… (Part Two)

Having some intuition is one thing, using it effectively is quite another. So, how can we make it useful to us? Specialists say that everything starts with a rich "Database", something that could also be called a form of input. In fact, intuition is only as good as the data it’s built on. Chess masters have "perfect" intuition about a board because they have seen thousands of patterns. Conversely, a novice has "little or bad" intuition because their database is empty. 

We must go beyond experiencing the moment and instead draw the teachings of every breathing moment in our lives. Let's not just work; let's analyze. If we are a manager, let's not be content with running a meeting, instead, always ask: "What were the three subtle cues I missed?" This feeds the subconscious better data. In addition, we must read case studies or "After Action Reviews." Our brain can always "claim" the experiences of others and add them to our intuitive library. In addition, before making a decision, picture the project failing 6 months from now. 

Let’s ask our gut: "What went wrong?" This forces our intuition to scan for subtle red flags we’ve been ignoring. The next stage is to work on the "Receiver" and make it more sensitive. Scientists call the ability, should I say this talent, to feel your own internal signals “Intreroception.” People with high interoceptive awareness (the ability to accurately feel their own heartbeat or "butterflies") consistently make better intuitive decisions. 

We can get better at this by practicing body scans, in which we practice a 2-minute "check-in" during low-stress moments. What does our chest feel like? Our stomach? our jaw? Then there’s the "Flash Decision" exercise in which when faced with a trivial choice (like picking a restaurant), we give ourselves exactly 3 seconds to choose. We observe the physical sensation of that "instant" choice. Does it feel "heavy" or "light"? Over time, we should learn to recognize the physical "signature" of a correct hunch. 

This leaves us with calibrating the "Feedback Loop", and within it, the biggest enemy of intuition is hindsight bias (the "I knew it all along" feeling that is often a lie). To improve, we must prove ourselves wrong by keeping an "Intuition Journal" in which we write down a hunch when we have it, including how it felt physically. For instance, "Met the new contractor today. 

My stomach felt tight, even though his resume is perfect. I’m going to hire him but watch the budget closely." From there, we need to review the outcomes by going back to that journal every 3 months. Was our stomach right, or was it just anxiety? This "tunes" our brain to distinguish between real intuition and emotional noise. Tomorrow, we’ll see how we can keep track of our various intuitions and measure them…

Seizing on intuition… (Part One)

Recently, I got a flagrant proof that a strong intuition I recently felt intensely, proved to be right. It was about a recommendation for a periodontist by my treating dentist. My negative feelings about that specialist were confirmed and made me realize that listening to our instincts is important, but can we really rely on them and how do we know for sure that they are valid premonitions or not?

Today, intuition is taken more seriously and is no longer considered "mystical." In cognitive science, it’s recognized as Rapid Pattern Recognition (RAP). Our brain is essentially a high-speed prediction machine that constantly compares our current situation to a massive internal library of past experiences, delivering a "verdict" before our conscious mind even finishes processing the data. 

This is all well and good, but how do we improve this "muscle?" Well, specialists say that we must focus on three areas: The Database (our experience), The Receiver (our body), and The Filter (our logic). Tomorrow we’ll explore each one of these elements in order to better harness the power of intuition, so please, stay tuned!

Icing on the Park City cake!

Last Sunday afternoon, I skied – I should say ice-skated, most of the Park City Mountain ski runs, with my daughter and we were lucky on many counts. Not to hit a tree, fall and slide without ever stopping as we glided, most of the time on sheer ice. 

Think of it as “on a wing and a prayer!” Something so bad I never experienced in 72 ski seasons, the world over from Australia to Zermatt! 

That should say a lot. Blue ice was visible in numerous spots and everywhere, including on bumps, everything was smooth, but super hard, the kind of material never letting the edges bite. 

Only on flat sections had the traffic abraded snow enough to turn it into some kind of semolina, making “skating” more pleasant. 

Since the combination of noise and vibrations was extremely unnerving, we did our very best to be “brief” and not linger on the harder spots, which gave anyone who watched us the very false impression that we were quite “at ease” on this forsaken terrain. 

Anecdotally, I’ve always thought and said that skiing on ice demanded brevity and I stand by that principle! In fact, we were just terrified and rushing to put an end to our descents. This said, we stuck on the mountain till closing time and tried everything that was available to find better spots, but they weren’t available. 

At the day’s conclusion, we felt good like the survivors we had become...

The 2026 Subaru Outback

Subaru has always been in my blood, at least from 1975 to 2022 when I made a fateful switch to an electric car. Subaru was about to come with its own, the Soltera, reluctantly developed by Toyota, but that I didn’t love enough to purchase. 

Yet, Subarus have always held a soft spot in my soul and I was just devastated when I caught a glance of its new 2026 Outback model. An ugly box to my very discerning and visually demanding eyes! There are also too many distracting details on that car that are plastered around to try to make it cool, fail badly at it.

A case of less is more… I felt a sense of betrayal and now found a justification for my fleeting loyalty to the Japanese brand. I may be old, but still can change! 

How should I have been hired? (Part Two)

As we discussed yesterday, I wondered if I should have asked what educational benefits (mentoring being a big one) I would get from my employers some 30, 40 or 50 years ago. Of course, the short answer had to be “Absolutely not!” 

It sure wasn’t unrealistic to want mentoring 30–50 years ago, but it was uncommon and largely infeasible because workplace culture and employer incentives were totally different then, and formal mentoring was “terra incognita”. Employers typically expected new hires to “pay their dues,” learn on the job at the “school of hard knocks”.

Formal mentoring as we know it, only began to be studied and institutionalized in the late 1970s–1980s. It’s only relatively recently that mentoring became a formal organizational practice. As far as I was concerned, the above research and any formal mentoring program began to appear after the time I hit the job market, while academic attention (like Kathy Kram’s work in 1988) helped legitimize mentoring as a workplace development tool. 

Kathy Kram

During my active life, workplace norms were top‑down and transactional. Employers expect employees to learn on the job and through their own mistakes; with structured professional development budgets and talent pipelines being far less common than they are today. Let’s say it was more like “sink or swim!” Job seekers also had far less bargaining power if any! 

Labor markets and hiring practices gave employers more leverage, so negotiating for non‑monetary benefits like mentorship was a rarity and most often than not would have seemed to be incredibly presumptuous. 

Today, things have evolved and are much different, so to console myself, I can only accept that I operated in a system that didn’t prioritize employee development; my choices were rational given the incentives. 

I'll have to reconsider this as an important emotional reframe. Another instance when I was clearly thinking far too ahead of my times!

How should I have been hired? (Part One)

As a kid, I never received much praised from my parents. This wasn’t part of their upbringing and their rather tough Alpine mountain culture. That kind of notice would have to come from my elementary school teacher who spotted my potential as a kid, give me an opportunity to shine and sent me on my way to success.

All this to underscore that when I talked about my favorite boss a few days ago, I should have mentioned one of the few regrets I got from my professional life and the fact that I sold myself, instead of having my prospective employers sold me about working with them and showing me (or not) how they would mentor me and participate to my personal growth while extracting huge benefits in the process. 

That’s right, I’m lamenting about the fact that I gave a lot, was compensated monetarily, but didn’t receive much in terms of professional education and I suspect that I’m far from being the only one in that situation. It’s true too that in most of my job searches I was so eager and desperate to get the position 

I wanted that I would have been afraid to have my employer laugh at me and, in the process, tell me to take a hike in being too demanding and difficult. I was simply not self-confident enough to dare ask for free mentoring. While this makes so much sense today, was this unrealistic to ask 50, 40 or 30 years ago? 

We’ll try to find an answer to that question tomorrow…