What “Trust Your Gut” actually means (and why it matters)
Intuition Is Data. HIT Is How You Use It.
Hi, I’m Leah Goldman – creator of Intuition Strategy® and Corporate Tarot Cards®.
If you noticed my absence from your inbox, that’s because I hit pause to realign and reset for the next chapter of The Intuition Strategist. Now I’m ready to bring this clarity back to you. Each week, The Gut Check will bring you quick, powerful insights on intuition, strategy, and decisive leadership.
My goal is to help you make faster, more confident decisions and get results that feel good. If that’s no longer what you’re here for, you can unsubscribe anytime. But if it is, I’m so glad to be back in your inbox. Let’s get clear, aligned, and move forward together.
The motto of Intuition Strategy® is “Trust Your Gut. Make Decisions. Get Results.” These three simple statements are the intention of The Intuition Strategist. Before you can fully appreciate how this work can help you, it’s important to understand the foundation it’s built on. Let’s start there: When I say “Trust Your Gut,” here’s exactly what I mean.
Why “Trust Your Gut” needs a Clear Definition
First off, you can’t meaningfully improve, apply, or leverage something you haven’t defined. A clear definition tells us what the thing consists of, where its boundaries are, and how it can be used.
I get asked all the time what it actually means to trust your gut. Most people have some concept of what it means, whether from personal experience (“I always trust my gut!” “I knew I should have trusted my gut… but I didn’t”), by watching others (The business mogul who trusts their gut to land big deals) or based on perceptions (Is it “woo-woo”? “Bro-science”? Mid-body connection? Neuroscience?).
Trusting your gut is having the confidence to act on what your intuition is telling you.
Intuition is an Algorithm
Our intuition is an algorithm that processes all the information we collect in our lived experience.
This can be analytical data, like the spreadsheets, charts and quantifiable information we’re taught to use in decision making. It is also (and most importantly) the invisible data we collect throughout our lived experience – the expertise we gain through practice, interpersonal dynamics we feel in a room, sensory information we detect from our environment. The data we must rely on when there is no historical precedent, when the rules have changed, when leadership has changed, when new technologies, regulations, or social constructs have emerged.
Your intuition algorithm is constantly recognizing patterns and sense-making the information gathered from the world around you. It processes this information and delivers an output to you, often as a feeling.
When you learn how to leverage this system to take action, trusting your gut is like 24/7 on-demand access to your own personal inner trusted advisor for your next move.
Trust as the Foundation of Intuition Strategy®
I created Intuition Strategy® because I recognized the value of fast, aligned decisions. I saw this throughout my career: leaders I’ve advised, mentees I’ve guided, and tarot querents I’ve read for. Most critically, I learned firsthand through the guidance I’ve received from my inner trusted advisor as I navigated my own crossroads.
I knew that teaching others to strengthen this skill of fast, clear decisions and aligned, confident action would result in outsized results.
We’ve all been taught the rules about how to trust the analytical data. We know what KPIs we should see, we know to evaluate how sensitive our outputs are to our assumptions, and we have had years of practice figuring out which of Column A or Column B is bigger/better/faster.
What we haven’t been taught is how to trust the invisible data that we are also collecting and analyzing.
I’ve taken the abstract concept of “Trust your gut” and gave it structure to make it tangible and repeatable. The result is better communication, sharper execution, and stronger leadership.
Intuition Strategy® provides actionable, repeatable frameworks and an operating system to put these concepts in place to work for you and your organization.
The HIT Framework to Trust Your Gut
One of the most common things I hear from friends, colleagues, and clients is, “How do I know if I’m making a good decision when I trust my gut?” And the answer is, not surprisingly, that it takes structure and practice.
In the Intuition Strategy® Operating System, I developed a concrete and repeatable three-step framework to help you “Trust Your Gut”: Hear, Interpret, Trust.
Hear. Recognize the outputs of your intuition algorithm and acknowledge those feelings
Interpret. Understand what your intuition is telling you
Trust. Act on intuition with confidence because the next aligned step is clear
Next week, we structure “Hear”
Over the next few weeks, we’ll dive into the three components of the HIT framework, starting with Hear. How can we learn to hear what our intuition is telling us? When, and in what ways, does our informed intuition show up? How can we hear our intuition when we need it most?
What questions do you have about the framework? Let me know in the comments and I’ll make this series as actionable as possible for you.