The Power of Intuition | Sonia Choquette

As we go through life, we hit these decision points, these forks in the road, and you can go left, and you can go right. And these decision points involve the person we end up marrying, the job we take, the city we move to, the book we decide to write, the career that we decide to make for ourself. But imagine how each of these decision points, just going right or going left could have such a profound impact in your life. Most of us take that step left or right, based on looking at the logical landscape of what we know and then making a rational choice. But what if sometimes being irrational, sometimes listening to our heart or our gut is a better way to get there? What I'm talking about is intuition. Intuition is probably one of the most powerful latent skills we have as being human. Some people could argue that intuition is part of being human. It's part of having a soul. It's being able to listen to that gut inner voice that helps us make these decision points. Perhaps this is why Steve Jobs said, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you're meant to become. Everything else is secondary. The question is, are you following your intuition? And if not, why? So I got a deep lesson in the importance of intuition shortly after I graduated. I was living in the Bay Area, in San Francisco. The bubble had burst in Silicon Valley and there were basically no jobs. So the only job I could get as a 25 year old was a job in a company that was selling technology to law firms. And this is what we had to do. We would go to the San Francisco Public Library, check out a yellow page book, photocopy the list of law firms in our territory. Mine was San Antonio. Now what I would do is I would start calling lawyers in San Antonio, starting with A, going all the way to Z, seeing if they were interested in investing in our law firm management software. Now, everyone else was trained to call from A to Z, and they were trained to follow a certain script. I was doing that too. And for the first four months of this job, my results were mediocre. They were just the same as everyone else. Now, as it happened, a friend told me about a particular class happening in Los Angeles one weekend. It was a class on meditation and intuition. So I went to the class, not expecting any dramatic changes, maybe just learning how to control my stress levels. In that class, I started having really deep glimpses of intuition. And the teacher taught me how to listen to that voice. So I went back to my job in San Francisco that Monday, and immediately I tried a different way of picking the law firms to call. I would take the yellow pages, yes, like everyone else. But I would then take my finger, run it down the names and just listen inside. And every now and then I would get a sharp no, or I'd get a sharp yes. I would make sure that the people I called were the ones who that gave me the shot. Yes. The interesting that happened was that that week I had my highest ever sales week. And it continued growing as I learned to trust this voice more. In four months, I ended up getting promoted three times. I'd never done a sales job before, but I ended up getting promoted three times in four months. I was made director of sales of the company by the time I was 26. And I remember my boss coming up to me and telling me, you know, I don't know what you're doing, but it's working. Can you teach the rest of our team? And I said, boss, I think they call it esp. And he said, ha, that's bullshit. That doesn't exist. But whatever you're doing, keep doing it. So I learned that intuition could help me make these incredible decisions. And following that job, I had another intuitive gut response. And that was to quit and start my own company, mindvalley. Today we've grown mindvalley to what it is. And a lot of people think it's just because of the right business decision or attracting the right people. All of that is true. But it's also because every single morning while meditating, I check in with myself and ask my intuition to help me make the right decisions. So the question you might be asking is great, but how accurate is this? Now, intuition is never going to be 100% accurate. But you do not need 100% to make the right decision. See, there have been lots of news lately about how psychics or intuits have failed these grand challenges put out where they had to find a check buried underground, or they had to solve predict a number written in an envelope. And in every single case, the intuit or the psychic failed. That was because all of these competitions were created by strong skeptics of intuition. They were rigged for failure. They were demanding 100% accuracy. You aren't going to get that with intuition because, well, firstly, I don't even know if that's possible. But what intuition will do is increase your accuracy to a certain level where you make decisions better than the norm. I found that, and this has been scientifically studied. So look, if you wanted to make money in, say, the stock market or in property, you don't have to be right 100% of the time. You just have to be right slightly ahead of the norm. Intuition can give you that bump and it makes all the difference. So there was a study done at the University of Edinburgh called the Gansfield test experiments. And these scientists wanted to see just how accurate intuition could be. So they would take two people. One was a receiver, one was a sender. The receiver would sit in. It was a room designed to put them into a deep state of relaxation and meditation. So it was a room with no light, no sound, a relaxed environment. They would basically go into a dreamlike state, almost as if they were asleep. Now, the senders would be in another room, and the senders would be shown a video screen showing a particular vivid imagery. It could be a group of wild horses running across a stream. It could be a tank rolling across a hill. There were numerous different imagery. Now, they would then go back to the people who were receivers, wake them up from their slumber, and show them four different images, and then ask them, what do you think the sender was seeing? So, of course, if you show someone four different images and this is left purely to chance, what would happen is that 25% of the time, someone would get it right. Correct. 25% of the time. That's law of probability. But what they found is that these receivers got it right 33% of the time. 33. That was significantly higher than the law of probability. Significantly, the odds of these receivers getting accurate data almost 33% of the time, get this is almost A billion to 1. 1 billion to 1. This is the science that shows that intuition does exist. It's not going to be 100% accurate, but when you start listening to it, trusting it, it really gives you an edge to create an exponential impact in your life. Think about how your life might be if you listen to your intuition in the past and what your life can be if you start listening to it right now. If you find these ideas interesting, I invite you to sign up for our upcoming class on intuition with Sonia Chocat, who is an American author who's written over 20 books on the subject. Several of them have been bestsellers. She's an amazing trainer, and this class is completely free.