The Commercialization of Intuition

And how we make our way back to that innate sense of knowing without knowing how we know.

I know I am not alone among this audience in formerly (or presently) being obsessed with the concept of intuition. Intuition is extremely popular in the self-help world because it promises a better, more aligned, authentic life. Assisting people in connecting to their intuitions has thus become a service to market. (See: “Intuitive Life Coaches Near Me” Google search; yes, that is actually a job title.) Scroll through social media with the right algorithm, and you’ll come across dozens of creators describing how they access their intuition, or advertising in sparkling font their “Intuitive” business model. Intuition, in short, has been commercialized.

The message to “listen to your intuition” or “listen to your heart” appears to be rather innocuous advice. Yet, an undercurrent of morality has been incorporated into the concept of intuition: to be intuitive is to be correct. Correct for you, that is, and because self-knowledge is oft-considered the epitome of knowledge, it is concurrently impervious to being refuted by anyone else.

To act intuitively suggests that you are not listening to, say, those dreaded societal influences or your intense parent who wants you to go to medical school, but to yourself. To listen to yourself—inward—is the golden standard in America, land of the individual. To claim that your intuition is leading you somewhere or causing you to make a certain choice is to effectively say that it is the correct decision, because it came from you.

Intuition may be called by a different name, depending on who you are: God, for example, or spirit, or heart. Intuition is, in essence, the way you know what to do without knowing how you know. It is your sense of what is true or “most right” for you; it is your internal instinct for the choices you make. Whether you conceptualize intuition as a divine presence, a function of your animal instincts, or simply a cool way your body has adapted to keep you alive and thriving, it does exist within you, seemingly for your benefit.

The challenge with intuition is that it competes with a lot of other things going on in your body: your hormones, your mood, whether you had breakfast or not, or if you’ve just run 10 miles. Making intuitive decisions, that is to say, is highly dependent on the context in which you and your intuition are working at that given moment. It can be very easy, then, to confuse your intuition with some other element at play, or to mentally convince yourself that what feels really good is the right decision because your intuition said it is. As we all know, what feels really good is not always the right thing; it may even be a sign that you should actually do the opposite.

As I mentioned in a recent post, Self-Surveillance Is Not Empowerment, I previously went through a phase of believing that all of my strong thoughts and emotions were my intuition trying to speak to me: As many of my thoughts are neurotic, I became incredibly paranoid. I struggled to distinguish between what was true and what I was afraid of being true, thus rendering my sense of intuition void in a lot of circumstances.

The problem with attaching morality to intuition is that it suggests that there is a distinctly right (intuitive) and wrong (not intuitive) decision in every situation. I’ve since learned that making an “intuitive” choice is not always possible, nor is it something that can be clearly defined as “right” or “wrong”.

With time, especially time away from the self-help world, I have developed a stronger ability to tell which is anxiety and which is my intuition. The former fuels thoughts that are fear-based, frantic, or ridden with doubt; the latter comes from a different place in me, one that is calm, trusting, loving, forgiving. I know now that even if I go “against” my intuition, or if I make a decision that doesn’t end up feeling right, it’s ok. Intuition involves us in all aspects of our humanity, rather than exclude us from the hard parts: it does not exist to exempt us from discomfort, pain, or mistakes.

When it comes to making big life decisions, I do believe each of us has an internal sense of what the ‘right’ decision for us will be. And, some of our decisions will lead to undesirable outcomes no matter what we decide, because much of life is out of our control. Intuition, though helpful, is not foolproof: it cannot predict the future plus all of its confounding factors.

Decreasing the amount of external influences on the choices we make is a good thing, especially if we are accustomed to making decisions based on what other people think. However, try as we might, we will never eliminate all of what may hinder our intuition-following ability—and that’s ok. It’s ok to mess up, or make poor choices, or listen to someone else instead of ourselves. That’s how we learn.

After many years of thinking about intuition and trying to connect to my own, I’ve come to the conclusion that intuition really just means listening to my body and being patient rather than impulsive when making decisions. Being intuitive means trusting myself to figure things out, whether I made the “right” decision or not. It means being honest enough with myself to have regrets, to view past poor decisions not as a “betrayal of myself” but in a more neutral, forgiving light, as part of my growth.

While intuition looks different for everyone, the point remains that we all have a unique sense of what feels right, is right, for us. Sometimes, what’s right feels bad for a while. Some decisions exist outside of the bounds of right or wrong, good or bad: they just are, they just happen.

Cultivating trust in yourself, in your intuitive sense of what to do, is an ongoing, lifelong process. In terms of how to connect to your intuition, well, I guess you’ve got to hire an intuitive life coach to help.

Just kidding. Try taking a walk or calling a friend. Maybe sleep on it for another night.

Happy decision making,

Maggie