Unleash the Power of Your Intuition

Let’s imagine that intuition is a person that you have decided to entice into your life. She is worth courting and is highly sought after because of the many benefits she brings.

She is an expert at discovery, creative problem solving and decision-making. She is a masterful generator of ideas, a forecaster and a revealer of truths. She is a skilled and subtle guide to successful living. She brings another way to use our minds and to approach knowledge. She gives us access to understanding who we are, what we need and she allows us to move toward the realization of our highest potential.

She sits ready and willing to contribute her gifts to the person who is willing to create an environment in which she can thrive.

If you believe in her talents and abilities intellectually yet at the same time harbor mistrust on an emotional level, your intuition will be a hesitant and inconsistent contributor to your life. In order to get intuition’s full cooperation, here are a few attitudes and behaviors that intuition finds particularly unappealing so they need to be addressed before your intuition will give you a second glance.

We will call these anti-intuitive behaviors.

The first is low self-esteem. Intuition isn’t attracted because low self-esteem often translates into a serious mistrust of anything that comes from within ourselves. Next in line is a fear of success. Intuition likes to help make things work through creative, imaginative and innovative solutions. When we expect to fail, we are closed to hearing the intuitive messages that would assist in having our decision-making work.

A lack of confidence and a lack of permission to think independently will keep us from opening to our intuition because of the discomfort with the often surprising, unpredictable and unconventional knowledge that is available to us from our own unique wisdom base.

Living in the fast lane keeps us too distracted, numb to our deeper needs and desires and keeps us out of touch with the ability to hear the subtleties and nuances that is the language that intuition speaks.

Excessive security needs, fear of change and intolerance of uncertainty all conspire to stifle and suffocate intuition’s gifts. When we seek control and predictability over our lives by the following of rigid rules and standardized procedures, our intuition gets limited to safety issues rather than valued for her strongest talent, which is innovation.

When we take our work, our problems, our lives and ourselves too seriously we create a climate that kills spontaneity. Intuition and humor are cousins. They both have in common the ability to take wild, unexpected illogical leaps in thinking that can be both practical and entertaining but neither can survive in a climate devoid of light, expectant energy.

Now that you know her major turnoffs, let’s talk about what kind of climate allows intuition to thrive. She flourishes in an environment of self-trust and conceptual and behavioral flexibility. Here are a few specific attitudes and behaviors to cultivate if you want to get intuition’s attention.

The first behavior is openness. Openness is the willingness to examine our preconceived ideas about who we are, what we think and how we feel. It is the skill of intellectual and emotional curiosity about ourselves. The opposite behavior is a ‘don’t confuse me with the facts’ attitude.

The next attitude is acceptance. Acceptance is the willingness to accept all aspects of ourselves, both the positive and the negative, without judging ourselves harshly, even if we don’t like what we find. Acceptance is the ability to treat ourselves with respect and a healthy positive regard.

The third necessary ingredient to entice intuition into your life is congruence. This means being willing to uncover and discover our needs, establish our core values and have our thoughts and feelings working together on the same team so that our behavior is aligned with who we are and what we stand for. It is the ability to walk our talk, to say yes when we mean yes and no when we mean no because we have taken the time to discern what is important to us. When we are incongruent, we say yes when we mean no, no when we mean yes and therefore have very little personal power at our command.

The fourth behavior is reliability. We do what we say we will do. We make agreements with ourselves and we honor them. We take ownership of the responsibility for our lives.

Most of us have at least one of these four components that we find troublesome. Here is the good news. If we take the time to identify which of these four attitudes and behaviors are our weakest one and take the time to increase our effectiveness in that one area, our self-trust will immediately increase and intuition will instantly be more attracted to the party.

Therefore, my intent today is to highlight ways of adding to your self-trust that will allow you to attract intuition into your life as a valued and trusted source of inner guidance and direction, tailor-made exclusively for your life situations.

Your intuitive knowledge, when in partnership with your intellect, will allow you to easily and effectively create a life that is solidly grounded and fed by your own unique storehouse of wisdom.

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Susan McNeal Velasquez is a Master facilitator. Her new book: BEYOND INTELLECT: Journey Into The Wisdom of Your Intuitive Mind is available on-line at: Amazon.com. www.beyondintellect.com for additional information.
E-mail: SusanVelas@aol.com.