234: 11 Practices to Strengthen Business Intuition (Part Two)

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Seeing someone's picture allows me to visualize their intentionality and unleashes more creative ideas about what we can discuss and how I may be able to help them. It also lets me access whether I have a full body, yes to actually seeing them and opening this new door. And if I don't, then I take my hand off the door handle.

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Hi friends. Welcome back to today's episode a continuation from episode 232 on ways to practice building the skill of intuition and applying it to your business. We covered half of the strategies that I use in part one and now without further ado, let's get into the remaining ways that I have practiced and strengthened my own intuition muscle over the years.

Number six Notice and give credit to how you feel when interacting with someone. Seek information if you need additional info. Note yellow flags even when they aren't bright red. So this example of going out for a walk with Michael at night with Ryder and we ran into a guy with a dog and he seemed really friendly. We stopped to chat, but every single time I asked him a question, oh, are you new to the neighborhood? He would give this long rambling answer that made no sense. His tone seemed friendly, his face looked friendly, but his answers were so evasive. Oh, where are you living? Oh well, you know it's a funny thing because when you move and he would just give this like rambling answer and I got the willies from this. I just thought this guy, something's not right. Every single answer to the most basic questions that I would have asked any other neighbor were completely rambling. When I read Tribe of Mentors by Tim Ferriss, I read this example from a guy he's a founder of East Rock Capital. That also stopped me in my tracks in a different way. He was on Tim Ferriss podcast in March 2019 talking about the idea of time billionaires, which of course I love. But I read about an even more interesting practice that I haven't forgotten since his name is Graham Duncan. You know, Tim had this questionnaire he gave to every person. Question was, in the last five years, what have you become better at saying no to? And Graham said, I have my assistant Google pictures of people I'm considering meeting or calling in the next two weeks and put them in Trello cards. I see meeting new people as the opportunity to open a new door to a new world that could change me or their life in some way. Seeing someone's picture allows me to visualize their intentionality and unleashes more creative ideas about what we can discuss and how I may be able to help them. It also lets me access whether I have a full body. Yes. To actually seeing them and opening this new door. And if I don't, then I take my hand off the door handle. Imagine if people are reaching out to you for coffee talks or to pick your brain or to be on your podcast. What if you had an assistant or a team member show you their picture? Sometimes I need to do that. If I'm considering an incoming pitch, I go look at their website. I do a vibe check on the whole site and their photo helps. It helps. It gives an impression. It gives my intuition a chance to weigh in.

That brings us to number seven. Look for a whole body. Yes, and this could also bring in some of parts psychology too, in terms of which part of you is speaking. So notice as you move through the day, even as you add things to your calendar or not, and you think to yourself or you're trying to make decisions, what does your head say? What does your heart say? What does your gut say? This is something I learned long ago when I was going through coach training school and they said that if you ask people to tune in, what does your heart want? Or as Elise Loonan wrote a great post called what do you really, really want? Or even if a client is stammering and not sure and hemming and hawing, you say, pause. Let's just take a nice deep breath.

What does your gut say? If you weren't worried what anybody else would think, if you weren't worried about when or how you had to communicate any of this, what does your gut say? And there would inevitably be a couple minutes of silence. But that silence was powerful. It was thick. That's when they were getting some real downloads, some AHAs, and they always had an answer. Richard Schwartz wrote a book called no Bad Parts, and I've done a couple episodes that I'll link to in the show notes with my first coach, Adrienne Clapack, who has studied more of parts psychology. But you can also try to identify what part of you is speaking. Is it a part that's trying to protect you that you developed when you were a kid? Is it your genuine, your wisest inner self, your core part? I call it the boardroom in your brain. You know, sometimes you can personify different character elements or different people who are part of the noise in your mind. My friend Sarah did this great facilitation exercise for our business bestie brunch where she asked, what part of you do you want to call forth? And what part of you do you want to set free, Send them on vacation like their job here is done. Maybe the part you want to call forth. Well, what came to mind for me when we did that exercise was the writer. It's an identity that I've shunned for a long time. I'm not a writer. I never write. I don't like writing well. I'm trying to call forth the writer in me. What happens when I accept that identity? Because previously I wouldn't write at all. I always felt kind of blocked, and I just would only write every five or six years for each of my big books. And the part that I was willing to set free was the expert needing to know things, needing to have any answers at all. It's been so freeing writing on rolling in dough without any answers. I dropped that expectation of myself. I changed the original subtitle from Divine Disaster Diaries for Breadwinning Business Owners to Divine Disaster Diaries from a Breadwinning Business Owner, precisely because I didn't want to write for anyone. I didn't want to sound smart. I don't want to have my shit together. I wanted to write honestly from the heart about what the trickier parts of running a business feel like. So I'm letting my expert go on vacation, and I'm leaning into the writer. And I'm even working with a writing coach on personal essays and creative nonfiction, genres that I've read and enjoyed and appreciated but didn't know about before in a formal sense.

Speaking of writing, that brings us to number eight, write Freely by hand. In her famous book, the Artist's Way, Julia Cameron advises us all to do three morning pages every day. Freehand. I used to do a practice called Soul Letters to Self. I got that idea from a book on developing psychic abilities from Sonia Choquette. I'll put that in the show notes. And Elizabeth Gilbert just launched her substack Letters from Love, where she talks about her practice of 20 years, saying, Dear Love, what would you have me know today? And then free writing out the answer. The point of all this is to get your unconscious moving, to clear the decks. With morning pages. It's usually not on page one that your big insights arise. It's when you feel stuck. That's when you've gotten the most obvious things that you already know about yourself and how you're feeling out onto the page. So it's by page two and page three, where you're really just trying to hit the quantity goal, that you're pushing yourself a little bit, and new things can emerge with the letters. What was so helpful for me was I felt like I was really tapping into something bigger than me. For me, it was my soul, my wisest self, that's connected to higher consciousness. When I wrote soul Letters from Self, they were so comforting, and I was writing them to myself. I used a different language that I didn't expect, Little pet names. I know Liz Gilbert talks about this theme as well, and I would give such wise, sage advice. I stopped doing them after about eight months, but it got me through a really tough time. And I don't do morning pages every day, but I'm happy when I do them. So I, too, could get better at a lot of these practices, but I really appreciate them for just jogging things loose. And I highly recommend it for you, too, if you're trying to practice and tune into more nuanced, subtle aspects of your information and what's in your awareness.

Number nine. Pay attention to persistent thoughts or feelings. So maybe you just get this weird thought like, oh, I should make a change, or your stomach's churning and you go, my stomach feels nauseous today. What is this about? And sometimes for me, my body feels. I feel like I have a weighted blanket on my chest. It's a physical sensation before I know why. Pay attention to those. So one time I recorded a podcast episode. It was a bonus for bff. And after I recorded the first draft, I kept having this persistent thought about one line. Again, think of Da Vinci Code, where the lines glow and they come off the page and they make it so clear in the movie of what you should be paying attention to or what the main character is seeing. And this one line of the episode kept persisting in my mind that I was worried someone was going to feel bad when they heard it. And I just thought, you know what? My friend Julie and I used to have a mantra for writing when in doubt, go without. I ended up deleting that line. It kind of created extra work for me because I needed to re edit, go back in, re export the file, re upload it to two different places. But that persistent thought was flagging something for me. So I try to listen to those. Was it the right move? I don't know. But why would I have had that persistent thought otherwise? I recently did an episode for my 40th on the Pivot podcast 3:43 we'll put it in the show notes. And again, I just kept having this recurring feeling that the podcast was rambling and it wasn't good enough yet and should I release it at all? I wrote to the production team and I said, is this cringe? I really need to know. Don't spare me, spare the listeners. And I think by asking for that feedback because my intuition was telling me something's off, I don't even know if this episode is worth running. They were able to weigh in and suggest a few small changes so we didn't scrap the whole thing entirely. I think I would have really gotten us off track if we did that. Is it my best work? Absolutely not. But I was grateful for their honest feedback. So sometimes you might not know what to do or how to fix something, but your intuitive hit is saying, ask for help.

We'll be right back just after this.

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Number 10. If you get strange in the moment thoughts to blurt something out to a client or a friend, offer them with a complete willingness to be wrong. For those of you who are coaches, this will come in very handy. And they taught me this at coach school in 2008 through CTI, that you can even tell your clients at the start of your engagement. By the way, I might blurt things from time to time if I get an intuitive hit, but you can always disagree or tell me I'm wrong. It's okay. I'm not attached to anything I say, but I'd love for there to be a context of permission where I can just say it and then we can bounce off of it from there and keep going. So I do like to preface things because sometimes I'll be listening to a client speak, or even when I was doing the voxer coaching over the summer. That's asynchronous. So we're not even on the phone. They're leaving a voice memo. And then. Not my job. My privilege was that I got to record what was almost a solo podcast episode for each person. I had 11 clients over the summer for 12 weeks. That was a lot of solo episodes, but it was so fun. And inevitably, one or two people in any given week would just write in saying, I don't have a question this week. I'm feeling a little stuck. Or I'm just not sure what to ask. And so sometimes that's all I would receive. And then I would just say, okay, well, I'm thinking to myself, I could let it slide and just take a pass and say, oh, okay, no problem, see you next week. But that's not how I want to show up. So then I would just record a 10 or 15 minute reply and say, okay, no problem, that you don't have a question. Here's what's coming up for me. And I would say reject any of this. I may be completely off base because in this example, I'm not even going off any question. I'm just going off of the phrase I don't have a question. And so I would tune in to what I knew about this person, what my intuition was telling me about the situation, what wisdom or examples from my own life could I offer, even unprompted? And sure enough, every single time I did that, the person wrote back and said, thank you so much. I didn't even know that I needed that. That was so helpful. And I'm not trying to float my own boat here. I'm just trying to say that you would be surprised and amazed at what can happen when you're willing to take a risk to put out some random seeming ideas that are coming to you in the moment of talking to or working with someone. So Martha Beck would say, tell me where I'm wrong, but. And I just love this, because maybe someone will be talking and I'll say, I'm just going to pause you for a second. I might be completely off base here, but it sounds to me like you don't want to do this at all. Am I crazy? You know, and I might say the hard thing, and I say, I have no attachment to this, but I can't help but think when I'm listening to you, do you even want to do this? You know, whatever the thing is, but something where it really interrupts a certain train of thought and even the premise of the entire conversation because I'll get a hit and I feel compelled to blurt it out. And could this offend people? I mean, sometimes. But the thing is, you're not giving advice. It's in service of them. And if you're willing to be wrong, then they can say, absolutely not. No, that has nothing to do with it. Let me tell you what's really going on. And it still can lead to a new and interesting direction.

Finally, number 11, because why not end on a cosmically wonderful, numerologically interesting one? One from Penny. Let go of needing things to be nailed down in advance. Penny writes, you can still have a vision and goals, and you can still make plans, but let it all be fluid. Visions and plans evolve constantly. Affirm to yourself, I know what I need to know exactly when I need to know it. In any given moment, there's just one piece of information, one urge, one action that's a perfect fit. Oh, boy, did I get this lesson the hard way. In 2016, I had just started dating Michael, and three months after we met, walking down the street, he went to Burning Man. That was his first time. If you know anyone who's been to Burning man, you know that when they come home, they're not always the same as when they left. No judgment. I'm just saying that some people have very profound experiences. And for Michael, that was the case. By the time he came back, he wasn't making any plans anymore at all. No plans were to be had. And we were still early in our dating. And I would have a very anxious attachment style if I'm in a dating situation where I just have no clue what the F is going on. And I worked on it, and I worked on it a lot with Michael. I did a lot of turnarounds. Byron, Katie's, the work. But one of the big things that I kept having to turn around and had to relax was that I was a planner. Like, when am I gonna see you next? Or when do you wanna hang out? And he would just, like, shrug and say, oh, I don't know. And I just. Every day, every day, every week was trying to practice. Not because I was trying to make myself be somebody I wasn't, but because my strategies of trying to control things and know and have certainty, they just hadn't worked. They hadn't worked with any other dating situation up to this point. So I was finally willing to try something different. Finally, every time I would get anxious and wonder about our plans, I would just do a turnaround worksheet. I swear, I did so many. And I would just let it be whatever it wanted to be. And when Michael called, it must have been the perfect time to talk with him or hang out with him. And when he didn't, I must have meant to be alone and doing my own thing. And I really, truly tried to find joy either way, but it taught me to just go with the flow and have less plans. And one time I ran into him in the subway and then we went and hung out. And I wouldn't have planned it. And if given the choice, would I choose to live entirely this way? No. No. Now we meet in the middle. There was a time I was officiating a friend's wedding in Colorado, and I learned. How do I know? Because I married an enfp. I learned from Southwest that you can cancel a ticket 10 minutes prior to a flight. So I didn't know until the morning of me leaving for Colorado to officiate this wedding if he was coming with me or not. To be fair, he was getting his mfa. I think he had a big senior thesis coming up. But he didn't give me an answer until the day prior whether he's coming with me or not. Now, some people. This would drive you absolutely insane. My own wedding, I didn't know if it was happening until a couple days prior. And this wasn't a referendum on, oh, he's feeling iffy about me. Or I had any concerns because my intuition was very loud and very prominent that he was family from the early days that I met him. But he's not a planner. And I joke like, we got married at City Hall. It was the most low key, minimalist wedding you could imagine. But I still wanted to book a photographer. It's hard to book a photographer or tell my brother and his wife, who were living in Brooklyn at the time, whether it's a go or not. And I just told them if you could just save the date and I can let you know as it gets closer. And so the wedding planning was this highlight of his no plans planning. And my Venn diagram of needing to have some plans in place, they just didn't overlap for the wedding planning process. Even a teeny tiny micro wedding like ours, that's not our shared zone of genius, but it has really taught me to go with the flow and to schedule less. And that's that friction to flow thing. What would it be like for you if you were going to experiment with not having everything so rigidly planned? And the thing I learned from being with Michael all these years, seven now, is I don't really want to plan too many things in advance because I do like to go with my energy on any given day. If you don't plan at all, you might not see the people you care about. So there is obviously a middle path here. But I just encourage you, if you lean toward one end or the other, see what happens when you make plans, but you hold them loosely. And now I have friends that I just invited somebody to something. And she replied and said, I'm going to say no. But shockingly, I don't feel bad saying no to you because I know of everyone in my life, you're the one that would understand. And I laughed. I smiled. This was on Voxer and I left a message back and I said, I love that you told me no. I love when I hear somebody say no, like it's energizing. It gives us all permission. So I was completely celebrating her no. Like, I just have no attachment on what people do or don't do, especially as it relates to plans. With me, it's all good. Even some people have really strict coaching policies. You must Cancel at least 48 hours in advance, otherwise you forfeit the session and I keep your money. I just never enforced that, even if I had that in my policies. Because if somebody canceled even at last minute, a, they usually have a good reason, and B, maybe I'm meant to have free time. I figure whenever we do meet, that will be the perfect day and time. So I'm pretty flexible and understanding with a lot of that. By the time it gets to five or six reschedules, that's where I assume the energy is off. Let's just call it.

I would love to hear from you of what strategies work for you when it comes to intuition. How do you build your intuition muscle? How do you know when it's speaking to you? And I'd love to hear if you have any big examples? I mean, these are my favorite stories, either serendipity stories or, as I talk about in free time, nonlinear breakthroughs. Or a time where you listened to your intuition and you were so glad that you did. Or maybe even a time that you didn't and you regretted it later. I would love to hear. You could always leave me a voice memo@itsfreetime.com Ask and now you can connect with me on substack@substack.com ennyblake you hereby have permission to make decisions based on intuition, even when you don't have a rational explanation on paper yet. It might even be revealed to you after the fact. And then again, it may not. You may never know if you made the right choice. But that's where trust comes in. So open yourself up to the possibility that it's not just something other people have. Intuition getting downloads, connecting to a consciousness bigger than you. Start deliberately paying attention. Listening at quieter levels. Build this as you would any skill through experimenting, observing yourself, seeing what's working, and then refining if you could do one thing this week, try making one decision based on a muscle test. So it could be whether to say yes or no to a meeting request, whether or not to reach out to someone, or even what topic to write about. Or create a podcast or whatever kind of creative work that you do. What topic you want to cover next? Just try it. Do the one where your body leans forward or back. Do the infinity linked thumb and pointer fingers. Do the arms straight out at your side. Super bonus. You can even try the exercises suggested where you create your own council of wise ones. Even if you've never met them, picture yourself surrounded by them and ask for their input. And then, of course, listen for their answers. Thank you so much for listening. Have a beautiful rest of your day.

Of course, you know I always want to hear from you too, so if I missed something, let us know. Leave me a voice note. It's freetime.com ask.

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