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In our everyday lives, we’re often told to “trust your gut” or “follow our intuition.” While both phrases might seem interchangeable, understanding the nuanced differences between gut feelings and intuition is pivotal for making well-informed decisions. Recognizing these subtle distinctions can significantly impact how we navigate challenges, solve problems, and seize opportunities.
Imagine you’re in a high-stakes meeting, and an idea suddenly pops into your mind. Without any forewarning or logical reasoning, you just know it’s the right move to make. Or perhaps, out of nowhere, you feel a knot in your stomach when considering a seemingly attractive business proposition.
Are these moments of revelation merely random, or do they signify something deeper at play?
What is Gut Feeling?
An Emotional Rollercoaster
Gut feelings are often characterized by a sudden rush of emotion. Imagine finding yourself in a situation where every fiber of your being screams, “Something is wrong!” This overwhelming sensation typically arrives with a rapid increase in blood pressure, heart palpitations, and that undeniable feeling of anxiety.
The Science Behind Gut Feelings
As Yvonne Heimann explains in her video, gut feelings are highly tied to our body’s autonomic nervous system. This system controls involuntary functions, like breathing and heart rate, and is also responsible for triggering our fight or flight responses. Originating from our evolutionary need to dodge predators, these reactions, though less useful in our digital era, still persist.
In modern-day settings, these gut reactions can misfire, leading to anxiety or panic attacks over relatively benign situations, like seeing a competitor’s social media post. In essence, while gut feelings serve as immediate and powerful emotional responses, they can be misleading due to their highly reactionary nature.
Diving Into Intuition
A Calm and Collected Knowing
Unlike gut feelings, intuition manifests as a calm, almost serene realization. It’s those moments when everything just clicks—no rush of adrenaline, no immediate butterflies. As Heimann explains, it’s your brain seamlessly connecting a complex web of patterns and previous experiences without any conscious effort.
The Cognitive Basis of Intuition
Heimann highlights a study from Carnegie Mellon University that sheds light on intuition’s underpinnings. Titled “Making Management Decisions: The Role of Intuition and Emotion,” this study elucidates that intuition draws on unconscious patterns formed through past knowledge and experiences. When making complex decisions, those who rely on their intuition often tap into a vast reservoir of subconscious wisdom, enabling them to act effectively under pressure.
Moreover, Heimann differentiates how she uses intuition during client consultations, where verbalizing thoughts helps bring subconscious patterns to consciousness. This practice not only clarifies her own insights but also aids clients in understanding her thought process, empowering them to make informed choices.
When Gut Feelings Go Wrong
The Downside of Gut Reactions
Because gut feelings are rooted in our fight or flight instincts, they can sometimes malfunction, leading to undue stress and anxiety in non-threatening situations. Heimann uses the example of social media-induced panic to illustrate how such reactions are often disproportionate to the actual threat, revealing the potential pitfalls of overly relying on gut instincts.
Managing Misleading Gut Feelings
The key to mitigating the downside of gut feelings lies in retraining your nervous system. Techniques like mindfulness, cognitive-behavioral therapy, and stress management can help recalibrate your body’s response to perceived threats, enabling a more measured and rational approach.
Trusting Your Intuition for Sustainable Decisions
Intuition as a Strategic Asset
Intuition is essentially a distillation of life’s lessons, coded into a subconscious algorithm that aids in decision-making. This makes it particularly valuable in scenarios where you don’t have the luxury to ponder over extensive data but still need to make informed choices.
A Personal Anecdote: Intuition Live in Action
Heimann recounts an enlightening personal experience during a podcast. When asked about her long-term goals, she spontaneously articulated a detailed vision for her company, Ask Yvi, which includes transforming it into an educational and philanthropic organization. This spontaneous yet strategic insight, entirely derived from her intuition, underscored the deep-seated knowledge she had accumulated over years.
Only after recognizing this intuitive insight did her gut reactions—complete with doubts and limiting beliefs—surface. This demonstrates the clear demarcation between the calm, knowledge-based intuition and the emotionally charged, immediate gut feelings.
Making the Distinction
Characteristics of Intuition vs. Gut Feelings
Understanding the key differences can significantly enhance decision-making:
Intuition
is calm, unemotional, and rooted in long-term experience. It is objective and knowledge-based, helping you navigate complex situations smoothly.
Gut Feelings
are immediate, emotional, and reactionary. While powerful, they are survival-oriented and can lead to hasty decisions lacking rational grounding.
Conclusion: Finding Balance
Navigating life effectively involves recognizing which internal signals to pay heed to and when. Gut feelings and intuition both play crucial roles, but they serve different purposes. By understanding these differences, you can better trust your intuition for long-term strategic decisions and handle gut feelings with a balanced approach. Whether in personal or professional realms, this balance will equip you to make better, more informed choices.
If you’ve had experiences where your gut feelings or intuition played a pivotal role, we’d love to hear about them. Share your stories in the comments below and join the conversation. And don’t forget to check out our previous video on the YouTube game, where Yvonne discusses the practical implications of trusting gut feelings over intuition.
Keep trusting your instincts and intuition, and stay tuned for more insights and advice!
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Video Transcription:
Yvonne Heimann [00:00:00]:
Trust your gut is one of the worst advices you can ever listen to. Have you ever had one of those moments where you just know something is off, but you can’t quite explain why? Or maybe you have a strong feeling that something is right and you are supposed to do something. You are supposed to go somewhere, yet you, again, can’t put your finger on it for some reason. Sometimes we call this a gut feeling, but is it really just your gut talking, or is there something more going on? And then there is intuition. Intuition. That inner sense that seems to pull everything together without you even trying. Today we’re gonna break down the two concepts of gut feeling and intuition so you can understand what’s really behind those ‘aha’ moments. We’re gonna be talking about intuition versus gut and why you really should not listen to somebody telling you, just trust your gut.
Yvonne Heimann [00:00:55]:
Hi. If you’re new here and don’t know me yet, I’m Yvonne Heimann, aka Yvi, from AskYvi, and I help digital entrepreneurs and service providers turn their passion into profit by automating their business so you can dominate your industry. Let’s talk about gut feeling. You know that rush of emotion that suddenly hits? That’s your gut feeling. Gut feeling is often immediate and comes, like, deep inside, and it’s followed with high blood pressure and your heart racing, and it’s just like, oh, my God, oh, my God, oh, my God. Gut feeling comes as a wave. It is impactful, it is strong. Research also has shown that that gut feeling are deeply connected to our body’s autonomic nervous system.
Yvonne Heimann [00:01:41]:
That system controls all involuntarily body function. You don’t have to think about breathing. You are just breathing. And not just that, it’s also your heart rate, your digestion. It is what triggers our fight or flight mode. It is way back when, before there was even I thinking of you, where nature was like, ooh, bad thing. Go on. That’s your autonomic nervous system.
Yvonne Heimann [00:02:08]:
It’s. It does things to your body to make sure you survive. Now, the problem with that is that nowadays, we don’t have to run from a tiger anymore wanting to eat us. However, patterns are so still ingrained in our nervous system where that can go south. Anxiety, panic attack, life. Why are we freaking out about social media? It’s not gonna kill us. That is where the gut feeling comes in and potentially bites us in the booty because it is a reaction. It is a potential fight or flight reaction.
Yvonne Heimann [00:02:45]:
So, for example, panic attacks, that’s literally where your nervous system goes wrong. And it’s just like, oh, my God, I’m gonna die because somebody does better on social media. You’re going into anxiety, and you are going into a panic attack. That is your body reacting on something perceived that is not there. We are not dying. Our body doesn’t need to go into fight or flight and do something. However it happens.
Yvonne Heimann [00:03:13]:
You can retrain your nervous system. You can learn dealing with it, but this is the downside of trusting your gut. We’ll come back around this here in a second, after we dive deeper into intuition. How does intuition show up? Intuition shows up with, oh, what just happened? It is more of a calm and collected knowing. There is no burst of adrenaline. There is no initial butterflies. There might be once you realize what just came to you, what you just downloaded, what your intuition just told you. What happens is your brain connects all kinds of different patterns and knowledge.
Yvonne Heimann [00:03:54]:
And I literally do this on client calls. The first time my clients see me in that, I have to warn them. I’m like, just give me five minutes. Just let me talk through this. I’ll make sense of it for you later on. Because what happens is my intuition kicks in, but I have to talk through it. Meaning, okay, so you wanted this and that and here my brain, by talking through this, makes all these connections and patterns and what’s happening? Where’s the issue? And suddenly, literally, just by talking through my intuition, my knowledge kicks in, and I’m like, here it is. That’s what intuition is.
Yvonne Heimann [00:04:28]:
Intuition is not your drama tv. It’s not full of emotions. It just is calm. Another study called Making Management Decisions -The role of intuition and emotion, from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, found that intuition relies on patterns. Like I just explained to you, our brain has picked those up from previous experiences, and you might not even be consciously aware of them. Now, as I just explained to you, I make them consciously aware. If I would just be in my brain, it would be subconscious.
Yvonne Heimann [00:05:00]:
And my clients have no idea what the hell I’m talking about and how I came to that decision. By speaking them out, I bring it to their conscious. They now suddenly know what’s happening and know how I came to that decision, which helps them later on make the right decision. You can do the same thing. When intuition speaks to you, ask the question why? You can bring the decision making that has happened in your brain from the subconscious of, oh, I just know this is right to, okay, how do I know this? Why do I know this? If you want to bring it into the conscious. This study also highlighted that people who trust their intuition can make effective decisions in complex situation because their brain is just drawing from a big amount of subconscious knowledge. That’s one of the reasons why I can step on stage and just talk for hours. The knowledge is in you.
Yvonne Heimann [00:05:53]:
You have it. So if you are in a situation where you can’t think about it, you don’t have time to prep, and you are just being put on the spot, you pull all of that information, and that’s exactly what intuition is. One of these, oh, my God, intuition just pops up. Actually happened to me in the middle of a podcast. I was guest, I wasn’t the one hosting, and the host asked me, what is your goal? Where do you see yourself in 5, 10 years? And I wasn’t prepped for the question. The questions we had prepped were already taken care of. And suddenly it was just coming out of me. Initially, I was literally just talking.
Yvonne Heimann [00:06:30]:
I had not planned on this. I not even consciously had any plans for what this is going to look like. This was complete new to me and just came out of me where I suddenly were talking about, cool. Yes. I want to turn AskYvi into an educational company. I want to sister that up with a nonprofit. To be able to give scholarships to women that want to turn their passion into profit, to be able to have physical locations with offices and training facilities on the bottom, living arrangements on the top, to be able to support women that do want to get and have to get out of a situation they don’t want to be in, to be able to turn their passion into profit and building their own business, supporting them with potential other scholarships, to get food, to connect them with other local nonprofits, to get their feet back on the ground, to have childcare for them, to really. Learn how to fish, to really provide an institution that doesn’t leave any needs open for women to get out of situations they don’t want to be in and be able to support themselves. And I’m still to this day, getting goosebumps when I talk about it.
Yvonne Heimann [00:07:54]:
And that was not a brainstorming session. That was not a where do I see the business in five years? This was literally my intuition kicking in, knowing exactly this is where we are going. It was calm, it was collective. Now, after the podcast where I’m like, what did I just say? What did I just claim? What did I just do? Whole nother story. That’s when my gut kicked in. That’s when my limiting belief said, oh, you’re never gonna get there. You’re never gonna make that happen. And that’s why you shouldn’t trust your gut, but rather your intuition.
Yvonne Heimann [00:08:30]:
So how do you make the difference? Intuition is calm and quiet. It’s based on your experience and it is long term focused. It is unemotional and objective. Now again, once you realize what your intuition just told you, you might get into the gut reaction. The gut reaction then is fully emotional. Chances are you’re gonna feel like puking or running or you’re gonna die. If it goes really bad, panic attack. A gut reaction is emotional and immediate.
Yvonne Heimann [00:09:03]:
It is right now. It is survival oriented. Something in your body is like oh my God, I’m gonna die. No matter if that is true or not, a gut reaction is impulsive and as the name already says, reactionary. It is oh my God, I have to do something. Oh my God, I have to get out of here. It is visceral, it is body focused, and that’s how you make the difference. So don’t trust your gut, but rather trust your intuition.
Yvonne Heimann [00:09:33]:
It doesn’t have to be the housewives of oc drama. That’s not what we are going for. Calm and collective means it’s your intuition. So I hope this breakdown of gut feeling versus intuition was helpful and gave you some insights on how you make the right decision. Remember, whether you’re trusting your gut or following your intuition, both play a role in how we navigate our lives. It’s all about finding that balance of knowing and when to listen to each one. If you had any experience where your gut feeling or intuition really came into play, I’d love to hear about them. Drop them in the comments below.
Yvonne Heimann [00:10:15]:
I would really love to hear them. And if you haven’t yet, go check out my last video where I was talking about the YouTube game and trusting my gut over trusting my intuition. Because that’s actually what I did there. I built on emotions and fear rather than following what I knew I should be doing. And thanks so much for watching. As always, I appreciate your support. Keep trusting your instincts and intuition and I’ll catch you in the next video.
