Should we always follow our intuition?
If you’re someone who knows and feels things, you know this is a tricky question.
You may have followed a feeling or intuition and rammed straight into a wall. But then, when you tried to just follow your mind and “be logical,” that didn’t work either. You later found that your first feelings and intuitions about people & things were spot on.
Our intuition is really valuable. It helps us sniff out things. At the same time, it can take a lot of time to understand how it actually works. It’s not always as simple as saying “Just follow your gut.” (Although, infuriatingly, sometimes, it is that simple.)
And to really navigate with our intuition, we have to also learn to tune into our own feelings & motivations and see whether they might be clouding our deeper wisdom (Am I projecting something onto this person? Am I indulging in wishful thinking? Am I being biased?) On top of all this, we have to learn to combine our intuition AND our intellect.
Because the strange animal of my intuition feels both so promising and so challenging to me, I am always looking for missing pieces in my understanding.
And I felt like I found another piece when I read Amanda Linehan’s newsletter in which she talked about the process of trusting our intuition. It comes from her Premium Newsletter for INFPs (introverted, intuitive, feeler types) and Amanda has kindly let me share an excerpt here. (Check out Amanda’s great newsletter HERE! )
This is some of what Amanda had to say:
“Intuition Does Not Always Lead to Success, But It Always Leads You Forward.
One of the reasons someone may tell you to be careful with your intuition is that you’re not always successful when you follow it.
I’m here to tell you that is absolutely true. But it’s still leading you where you need to go, which can be confusing.
If you think of your life as a path you are walking, you are always going forward. But sometimes, you reach a place where it’s not clear where your way is going, and you have to make a decision.
Using your intuition is an excellent thing to do here as it allows you to “feel your way along” in order to move yourself forward.
Our eyes are not always that trustworthy as they can latch onto things that seem safe or known but which, in a sense, will lead us backward.
Our intuition always leads us forward, even if forward means making a mistake, facing something painful, or getting ourselves into a mess. Such is life.
But I should also point out that intuition isn’t just going to take you to the uncomfortable places you need to go; it will also lead us to success at times!”
When I read this discussion of how “Intuition does not always lead to success, but it always leads you forward,” I felt a click, as if something I had been grasping at had been crystallized.
This is one of those key things about how intuition works, and why we are often so reluctant to follow it.
There are definitely times when following our intuition leads to direct “success.”
But often, following our intuition is about feeling our way in the dark. It is sensing and moving forward, like an animal on the scent of something.
It may include bumping against the furniture and knocking something over.
It is an exploratory, feeling, moving process that can be messy.
And if we hate messes, or have been schooled to never make mistakes, it can feel like we are doing it ALL WRONG when the truth is we may have made exactly the right “mistake” to come closer to where we’re going.
We have to let ourselves experiment AND let ourselves continue this experiment for a while and not decide the results preemptively.
Becoming more comfortable with uncertainty, ambiguity, the unknown – all of which can sound pretty terrifying at times – is the gateway to new possibilities, undiscovered terrain, original ways of doing things.
But to enter this unknown, we have to learn new skills – we have to learn to take some risks, learn to do this in a sustainable way, and most of all, let ourselves feel the uncertainty and make some shots.
This process is exactly what leads us forward.
I am thankful to Amanda for helping me hone in on another piece for my puzzle.
And I hope Amanda’s words give you encouragement to follow your intuition and let yourself experiment with it and trust that the instinctive part of you is learning, recalibrating and deepening its understanding.
You are an intelligent, intuitive person. And the more you play with your intuitive hunches, the better you will get at understanding how they work.
And also how you work!
You can check out Amanda’s fantastic newsletter for INFPs HERE.
I hope this serves you in your journey.
With love,
Ritu
Ritu Kaushal is the author of the book The Empath’s Journey and a Silver Medal Awardee at the Rex Awards, co-presented by the United Nations in India. Find more about Ritu HERE.
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i dont agree with Amanda. When intuition comes, it gives clues about present or future, in regards to our pursuits. The intuitive messages that may come in different ways, will always be accurate and let you know exactly what the outcome can be if you follow a certain path. What Amanda shares doesnt feel like true intuitive messages. Many times we have hits of ideas and feelings, that are not actually coming from an intuitive place. They come from a false identity. As HSP people and empaths, we tend to mirror others energies without even knowing it. Most of my so called intuitive messages came from this place all of my life, until few years ago when something shifted. So i would say, first deepen your connection to your true self, and only then, ask for intuitive messages to come forth. If you live from a disconnected place, your intuition will mostly deceive you, because that is not true intuition.
Thank you for sharing. I think I understand what you mean. Unless we are really clear inside, it’s easy for us to get mixed up about what’s true intuition & whether we’re “merging” with other people’s energies. I have definitely felt this in my own life. And it’s absolutely true that everything that comes from inside us is not true intuition. And we may be mirroring other people’s energies.
What stood out to me in Amanda’s perspective was the sense that when life is uncertain, there is STILL something inside us that is feeling intuitively into things. Sometimes, it can’t pinpoint exactly what to do, but it still takes us in the right direction. For me, it feels like whenever I am in this situation, the best results come from being experimental and not getting spooked by some early “mistakes.”
At the same time, I have had times where I’ve had this very clear intuition (usually about people) that you mention.
I wonder if these are different aspects of intuition. Amanda and I are also both INFP personality types with extraverted intuition, so I wonder whether we’re talking about this specific aspect of it.
Thank you again for your thoughts. It’s interesting to discuss this. I find intuition such a hard topic to write about – it’s almost like we are using the same word but we all have different understandings of it.