232: 11 Practices to Strengthen Business Intuition (Part One)

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So there are lots of ways to refine your intuition. Again, it's not a gift that's bestowed only on a special few. That's even the first step is to say this is available to me and I want to start paying more attention to it. Sometimes there is a gap you might be in big or small ways, suppressing that little voice inside of you even without realizing it, simply because you're not giving it the airtime. You've turned the volume all the way down on that source of your intelligence.

This is your time. How can we earn twice as much in half the time with joy and ease while serving the highest good? That is our guiding question here at the Freetime Cafe, your home for heart based business. I'm your host Jenny Blake. Join me for conversations with authors, friends and fellow business owners as we explore ways to free your mind, time and team to do your best work now onto today's show.

Today's episode is a two parter based on a listener question about intuition. And no, it's not just for a special few. You can definitely build your intuition muscle too.

One of my favorite games to play growing up was people watching at sidewalk cafes, telling different passerby stories with a friend. Sometimes with my dad. Those two are on a first date. Those two have been married for 10 years. That guy's on his way to a job interview for a position he doesn't want. Sometimes we'd even get super specific just for the fun of it. This couple over here just bought a country house and the repairs are killing them slowly. They're on their way to a designer furniture store to relieve stress by dreaming about what's possible. Probably going to impulse Buy a soft leather couch that they're not going to let the dog sit on. Of course, our own biases and projections and even judgments crept in. But this is a time to play a little bit, to stretch our imagination and tune in to our intuition. If only we could have asked each stranger what they were actually up to so we could verify or debunk our various guesses. What does this game have to do with building skills to run your business more than you might think. That's the thing about intuition. It's always speaking to you in subtle ways. The question is, are you listening? As I've been sharing on Substack and rolling in dough, different stories have different downloads or intuitive hits or decisions to go all in on myself. In response to Mutually Assured Rejection Part two, where I talk about why I went into hybrid publishing for free time, Claudia asked a great question in the comments. She said, I read your words all in on myself and how you consciously choose to believe that the universe was is redirecting you. I talk about rejection as redirection and I can't help but think Jenny's so in tune with her intuition, no matter what comes, she has this trust muscle that allows her to keep going, to keep betting on herself and her ideas. And I wish I was better at it. Is this something you've learned gotten better with at practice? And is there any advice you would share with us here about how to cultivate this way of being? Thank you. As always, right back at you. Thank you Claudia for this great question. Short answer, yes, intuition is a skill. It's a muscle like anything else. And I became very deliberate about practicing it and refining it. Starting about 10 years ago, some of my most influential teachers on this subject are the one and only Penny Pierce. I will put all of her books in the show notes, starting with the Intuitive Way, which I think is the number one first book you should read on this topic and then later inspired as well by Tosha Silver and a few other books that I'm going to put in the show notes. Funny story, at the end of that book she has you make a list of dream people that one day you just hope you could meet. And I wrote down her name thinking how cliche. Everyone who reads this book probably writes down Penny's name. Later I hired her for a numerology reading. Then a little while after that I invited her to the podcast. We had so much fun on that first taping that we decided to do another one and another one and now we have a 12 album playlist on Spotify. I'll link to it in the show notes. And we're dear friends. I consider her like family. So that was one very surprising, unexpected outcome from reading this beautiful, magical book. But it's very practical. It's a practical guide to refining your intuition. Penny says superconscious guidance is always marked by love and is always empowering. As we seek to apply intuition for practical purposes, I can think of few other applications as important as obtaining accurate guidance for ourselves and sharing our well intentioned insights about others with them. As you begin practicing intuitive skills, it will behoove you to make a quick check. How open are you to hearing the truth either from within or without? Can you comfortably share your personal truth with others? Penny writes, as many do, that intuition and even psychic abilities are not limited to a special few. But there are some people whose channel is more open than others. And I used to feel that, oh, I just don't have that skill. I don't have the skill of intuition that's for other people, let alone more esoteric abilities. We'll talk about the Claire's in a moment. But what the intuitive way taught me and Penny over the many years is that we all have a home frequency. She writes about that in her book Frequency. And we can learn to tune into it. For Penny, one of the highest forms of being in our home frequency is self entertainment. How delightful is that. So instead of operating our businesses out of fear and worry and anxiety, what if we were always aiming at self entertainment? What if we were following the fun? As my friend Kay said, what if we were doing what's easy and joyful, even if the work itself isn't always easy? And we certainly know life is not always easy, in fact, oftentimes gets very hard and complicated. But that if we were continually listening to the whispers in our body, in our soul, in our spirit, I truly believe that we can lean into that information and that source of our intelligence as we run our businesses, even alongside other more hard data like numbers and metrics and charts and reports? In that same passage, Penny writes, superconscious guidance is easy to obtain. It's available in every moment. No matter where you are or what you're doing, you must only ask, look and listen. If you can't for some reason recognize a superconscious message inside your own brain, rest assured that the higher powers will use a friend, a rival, a stranger, a license plate on a passing car, a billboard, a song lyric or an actor in a movie to speak your own higher mind to you. Similarly, you may be unwittingly used to speak important messages to others. Guidance is pouring out of all of us in everything we say and do. So we must be willing to share and be ever on the alert to notice and respect the ideas of others. You are making decisions in your business every day. What types of clients to work with, what each of those clients needs, perhaps even needs and wants they are not seeing even for themselves. Yet you're making decisions about how much to charge for your products and services, what to create next, what to write. On a given day, I'm always having to kind of tune in and tune into what feels new and fresh and alive for me and also tuning into that super conscious guidance what would be in service of the many. So if you're creating a podcast episode or even going up on stage, I talked about this in my signature story episode on Jay Akunzo's unthinkable podcast that one of the things that helps me craft the stories I'm going to tell on any given day is that the day of a keynote speech, I will close my eyes and tune in. Or sometimes, if I'm in the room, look out at the audience and ask, show me what this group needs today. How can I be of service? And I listen quietly for any downloads about what is going to be most important about what they need. I look out at their faces. Do they look tired? Do they look stressed? Do they look busy? I try to feel in my body, what do I feel when I connect with this crowd again, if I have the luxury to do that in person, because sometimes I'm only seeing myself on my computer screen, even if that talk is getting streamed to a thousand people. But even then, Penny and so many others have taught me that even then you can tune into your intuition about what those thousand people need in this moment, on this day, and answers will come. So there are lots of ways to refine your intuition. Again, it's not a gift that's bestowed only on a special few. That's even the first step is to say this is available to me and as Claudia is doing, to say, and I want to start paying more attention to it, sometimes there is a gap. You might be in big or small ways, suppressing that little voice inside of you even without realizing it, simply because you're not giving it the airtime. You've turned the volume all the way down on that source of your intelligence. Today I'm going to share a bunch of practices that have worked well for me to actually build and focus on this muscle of Growing my intuition. And not just growing my intuition, but trusting myself to follow it. I think that's another key piece of this here. I'll give you some examples too. But I also encourage you to look back at your life and business to see what strategies might be best for you, because these are all based on my experience. But we all have different superpowers. We all take in information differently and we certainly access intuition in different ways. The dictionary defines intuition as the ability to understand something immediately without the need for conscious reasoning. Now sometimes intuition gets written off as some sort of Frou Frou Spidey sense. Oh, it's this woo woo thing. It has nothing to do with business. My counter argument to that is what is intuition if not a thousand or a million or a trillion subconscious data points that you've been collecting your whole life? So I personally think intuition is very data driven. But no, might not need immediate conscious reasoning. Sometimes your intuition is going to tell you to do something or not do something or break up with someone or get out the door and go to that coffee shop and you don't know why. So that's the part where there's not always a reason, some sort of thing that you can explain to another person. You just have a feeling. Some of us get guidance from something that feels bigger than ourselves. Now maybe it is your soul, like Penny says we are soul. The soul is not separate from us. Maybe it is part of a higher power, if you believe in that, part of a higher wisdom within you, part of the collective consciousness that you're tapping into. You'll often hear people refer to extra sensibilities as the clairs. There's four of clairaudience, clairvoyance, clairsentience and claircognizance. Let's talk very briefly about each one and then I'll give you the ways to practice building your intuition and even your Claire's the first one. Clairaudience. Hearing voices so it sounds like someone is talking in your mind. It's not a stressful voice, it's not a fear based voice. These messages are calm, they're clear. And the example I'll put the link to where I found these definitions in the show notes say you're driving down an unfamiliar road and you're not sure where to go. As you approach an intersection, you hear turn right. That's clairaudience. Clairvoyance is seeing images. So this is kind of seeing a picture, a flash, a mental image or a scene or even a symbol. So maybe you meet up with a friend and as you say hello, you see a mental image of them standing in the rain crying. You then ask, is everything okay? Just had the feeling to ask or to check in. Sometimes clairvoyance comes to me. Not in any big or profound way, believe me, but like when I'm really getting burnt out and I know I need a staycation even within my same city. As I wrote about recently in do, I did a two night staycation just over the east river in Dumbo. But I didn't know. I didn't know if I should do the staycation. I didn't know if I should spend the money. It really didn't seem like a great time to do something what my inner CFO would call very frivolous. But I kept seeing images of Dumbo. They were persistent. They were coming all day. I would go into my hotel Tonight app and I would look at the one hotel because it's so fancy and it is kind of the fancy luxury hotel in most of Brooklyn. If you have another one that you love, let me know. But I kept seeing the image of this hotel and I kept seeing myself there over and over. But every time I would open the HotelTonight app, I would see the price and my heart would just break a little bit and my stomach would drop and I would think, oh, I don't know, I really shouldn't. But. So the on paper thing was I shouldn't. But then I kept seeing the images of me being there, relaxed, happy, how badly I needed it. Ultimately I decided to go and I figure, you know what, you never know with these things. Because the images were that persistent, I decided to go for it. And I'm so glad I did. I really, really needed that break. And I try not to be frivolous with my spending, but also decouple the idea that that's only a sunk cost. What if I need those two days to recharge? I ended up migrating all my lists over to substack. It was a big business move that I did. So I didn't get an immediate ROI on the two days. But you just never know how things are going to play out over time. The third Claire is clairsentience recognizing feelings. So this person notes that this is the most common and it might be physical feelings, emotional, energetic. If you're empathic, you might often feel like a sponge, like you're talking to somebody and all of a sudden you feel really anxious. Maybe this person is an energy vampire or they're negative or they're a sociopath. I'll Tell you a story later about a guy Michael and I met while we were walking our dogs. We have one dog, but the other guy was walking his. So there were multiple. Anyway, clairsentience is maybe tuning into the physical sensations in your body and picking up on other people's energy and emotions and just sort of feeling into a situation. The last one, claircognizance, knowing this is the one that is most common for me. Thoughts that seem to just drop into your head, unlike clairaudience, you don't actually hear them suddenly. You just know. Many people call these bursts of intuition downloads because of the way they seem to just appear in the mind as if from somewhere else. Claircognizance happens when you feel some instantaneous insight or knowledge about yourself, another person, a particular situation, and so on. The idea for Free Time came to me as a download. Just all of a sudden, I had the words freetime. They just landed in my mind, and they were sort of highlighted as if on a billboard of my thoughts. They were bigger than my other thoughts. They were isolated. They were clear. That's what I would refer to as a download. So a lot of what I do in my business, a lot of the decisions, a lot of the titles, a lot of the writing for me, starts as just an imprint. It's not audible. I can't hear a voice, but there's just a sensation that a word or phrase idea is getting handed to me.

Okay, so let's get into some ways that you can practice. I mentioned this, but number one, review your intuition history. If you haven't done this yet, reverse engineer previous intuitive hits and the actions you took. Times you listened, times you didn't, times it worked, times it didn't. And worked is in quotes, by the way, because even if you don't think something worked, it failed. Maybe it was redirecting you for something different, something that was more meant to be. So this will help you understand how your intuition speaks to you. Is it a whisper? Is it a feeling? Is it an image? The example I give in the Mutually Assured Rejection piece was that while I was on the zoom call with my publisher, the energy of the call was making my stomach turn. It was down, it was low. There was a vibe, a low vibe trying to read the room. People seemed tired. And I know it was early 2021, so we all had zoom fatigue, but still, the energy was not enlivening. It was heavy, it was tired, it was slow, it was sluggish. Like, this was the energy of our collective energy. I might have been a part of that, but I just remember hanging up from that call and I just had a gut feeling. Free Time is about agility, ease, joy, fun, delightfully tiny teams. Most likely, this message is not meant to be paired with a huge publishing conglomerate with a lot of bureaucracy and a slower process. That's not in line with the message of free time. The freetime diagnostic itself. Friction versus Flow is something that you can tap into as you review your intuition histories. So when were you in friction and what little signals? What was the whisper before you made big decisions? Before you reached out to network with somebody else in the company? Before you pivoted internally or before you chose to leave your job to start your own business? What were the little whispers? Even the ones you didn't want to pay attention to at first because they were too hard, they would have shaken things up too much. And yet if you don't listen, they just get louder and louder and louder. There's a concept I first heard from Martha Beck called Clean Pain versus Dirty Pain. I'll put her article in the show notes that my friend Sarah and I adapt to talk about in terms of clean energy versus Dirty energy. Clean energy is when you're interacting with someone or doing a certain type of work and it feels light and bright and free. Dirty energy is you just can't explain why sometimes. But your interaction with a person, again, it's draining. Something isn't sitting right, and part of practicing intuition is giving credence to those feelings. It's not that we want to judge other people or that we're trying to leap to conclusions, but your body is very intelligent. If you want to be terrified and also empowered to listen to your intuition, read the Gift of Fear by Gavin de Becker. Another example, in terms of my intuition history, where I only learned the hard way were with podcast guest pitches. I get a lot of these between both shows, sometimes five a day. And there was this pattern where I was saying yes to a couple pitches that sounded pretty good, but they were not people where I had intuitively sought out their work, their book, or their podcast, and where I intuitively or energetically excitedly leapt to go invite them to one of my shows. These were examples where I was reacting, I was responding. And so the email pitch would come in and I would go, yeah, okay, this seems interesting. But sure enough, time after time I would show up. I wasn't excited on those interview days, and I don't want to be rude to the people who I was interviewing, but unless I had an instant super zing that was coming from a podcast pitch. The times that I was 50, 50 and I said yes, I learned only the hard way that I didn't look forward to those as much on the day of. And oftentimes the conversation fell completely flat because there wasn't this intangible thing within me that was seeking that person out proactively. I was reacting to someone else, putting them forward. And again, that had nothing to do with who these people were. It's just that we weren't cosmically linked. Now, I have had some be really successful and really fun, but I had to slow my roll in terms of saying yes, because this kept happening. And so I had to look in hindsight and say, in hindsight, was I booking out of just jumping with joy or not? And sometimes I'll get a pitch from an author that changed my life or that was one of the first books I read, like Mark Lesser or Judith Orloff. And I get beside myself what their team is reaching out to me, you know? But that's also an energetic sign. Okay, that's an obvious Y. So that goes back to Penny and noticing your home frequency and even levels of listening. So we'll talk about the whole body. Yes coming up.

The second way you can practice intuition is with muscle testing. This is asking yes or no questions and letting your body tell you the answer. When I ask these, I like to ask, is it in the highest good too? So if I'm trying to make a decision. There was one time, this is like 10 years ago, I was walking home from yoga class. I was tired physically. I think I had been in a back to back session or something and a friend texted, do you want to go grab dinner? Something in me was saying I should say yes. But I remember pulling over on the sidewalk and then the passersby, they were disking like, oh, stupid girl walking in a diagonal. You know, people get really annoyed if you veer off your walking path in New York when it's busy on the sidewalks. But I pulled over and then I was gonna do the kind of muscle test that I liked to do in the beginning when I was practicing my intuition where I would close my eyes, I would ground my feet, I would stand up straight, arms down at my sides, and I would say, should I go to dinner? I didn't say, is it in the highest good too? But at that time I would have asked, should I go to dinner or do I wanna go to dinner? And if your body naturally leans forward, it's a yes. And if your body naturally recoils it's a no. And so I pull over, I go under an awning, I straighten everything up, and I go, don't want to go to dinner. I recoil. I'm like, wait a second, let me do it again. That must not be right. Do I want to go to dinner? And my whole body leans backward, and I'm like, wow. Okay. My conscious mind was saying, I should go to dinner. I like this person. I want to say yes, but actually my body was saying no. I've been at a meal at a fancy restaurant with a person who did muscle testing where she would make an O with her pointer finger and thumb and her other pointer finger and thumb and interlock them so almost like an infinity symbol. And as she looked at every item on the menu, she would pull two hands apart. And if it's a yes, you don't break the link. It stays strong. And if it's a no, the link breaks. It's like, oh, do I want the portobello mushroom? And then she pulls her thumbs apart. And if it stays strong, yes, she does. And, oh, do I want the lobster? And she pulls her things, and the thing breaks. And mine broke just now as I was recording, because I hate fish.

Okay, so it does work if you have a friend. You can also straighten your arm at a perpendicular angle to your body, and you point it out like a sword, like Terminator 2 style. And you can ask a yes or no question. They'll push down on it. And if your posture breaks and the arm falls back down to your side, it's a no. And if your arm stays strong and stays in place, it's a yes. Those are just a few examples. There's even more ways of muscle testing, but this could be a physical, more tactile way to figure it out. I used to use a pendulum. You can look up what that is if you're not sure. But it's kind of a weighted anything that's on a string, even a necklace, that has a pendulum, like a heavier part at the bottom. And you can calibrate by saying, show me a yes. Show me a no. It's utterly fascinating that this thing will spin in clockwise if it's a yes and counterclockwise if it's a no. But it might be different for you. And so you can also do that. You get really calm, get grounded, take a deep breath, hold your pendulum, or hold something on a string. It's heavy at the bottom. Is it in the highest? Good for me to record a podcast episode on intuition, and then you see which way the string starts rotating. It's pretty fun. I encourage you to try it. Most likely one of these, by the way, will be easier than the others. Go with that.

Strategy. Number three, ask to be shown after a meditation or sitting quietly. Just ask even as you sit there. Again, it's better after yoga or some kind of movement, something where your body calms down. You're not just jacked up on caffeine or social media or email inbox dread or morning anxiety. It's like calming your system. And then with your eyes closed at the end of a meditation, even if it's a five minute meditation or ten, asking show me the one next step or what is in the highest good for all involved. Another exercise I've done is imagining a council of elders or mentors or wise ones, even if they're imaginary, where you get quiet and you picture yourself sitting at a table with them. And you could ask, what would they advise you to do? When I first did this exercise many years ago, I pictured Penny, who I knew. I pictured Martha Beck, maybe Oprah was sitting at my table. Liz Gilbert. This was my counsel of wise ones. And I would go around and I would say, what would you advise? What would you advise? And you listen to what your intuition tells you, thinking as if it's them. I've done this exercise with coaching clients and it is absolutely fascinating how much wisdom comes pouring out on subjects that they think that they are unsure about when they put themselves in someone they admires shoes. My friend Jen, who's an astrologer, she gave me advice when I was writing pivot. If you get overwhelmed, talk to your book, ask it what it needs, and just go with the first answer that comes to mind. That's something I've learned in trusting intuition is you gotta listen for that first thing, not what your mind starts to write over it, that first thing. So I would picture my book and I would picture it with wings. I would picture it flying and I would say, what do you need to be free? And I would talk to my book, not out loud, not with words, but I would imagine that question and then I would listen. What's the first answer? What's the one next thing I should do with my writing or my editing?

Number four, give things time to simmer or crock pot, as my friend Stephanie calls it, especially when you're unclear. So Penny would always tell me, intuition works on a need to know or as needed basis. And not a moment sooner, you might not be shown every bit of information about your life all at the same time. You're going to get one clue at a time. Even with the articles I've been writing for Rolling In Dough, they are improved so much when I write them in advance and I could give them time and I'll be out walking and one sentence will drop into my mind. Oh, I got to add that one story idea, one structure change, and I'm getting these downloads after the initial draft is sitting there. I get a bunch of downloads in the following days and then eventually it's just got to go live because I can't hang onto it forever. But it's incredible to me how just little bits of information, little downloads will come if I give it time to simmer.

Number five. You know I love some good serendipity signage. So if you do have a question pending about your life or your business as you move through the world, look and listen for clues. People you meet, signs you notice, Pennywood site lyrics you hear. And what makes this interesting is that you are noticing it. Whether you believe in coincidence or serendipity or synchronicity. I mean, it's just fun to play the game. I was having a conversation with somebody who's seeing bees a lot. Multiple people actually, now that I mention it, are seeing bees physically, in person, but also in their mind. And today I walked into my coffee shop near the podcast studio Cafe Grumpy, and lo and behold, there's a sign about bees. So I sent it to my friend and it just made me smile. It's reinforcing an idea. It's reinforcing something that's present, the sign said. With seasonal drinks this good, I'd be grumpy when they're gone. Just makes you smile.

That wraps up part one of this episode on intuition and ways to practice building the skill and noticing how intuition speaks to you. Stay tuned next week, where I'll cover the second half of exercises and practices that have been most helpful to me in developing my intuition over the years.

If you've listened this far, you get a gold star.

Thank you.

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