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Trusting your intuition
A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light that flashes across his mind from within.
– RALPH WALDO EMERSON
Among the medical technicians who provide emergency care, the on-call physician has to sort out absolute emergencies from relative ones. While sirens wail and the wounded cry out around him, he has to triage the patients, evaluate at a glance the gravity of their condition, from the colour of their cheeks, the whites of their eyes, the movement of their chest. He has to be confident in his judgment to make decisions in a crisis, to listen to himself in the midst of the tumult. The emergency doctor has to stay calm and immediately make good decisions. How does he do it? Does he analyse the situation coldly? It wouldn’t be enough, because he doesn’t have the time to analyse everything. Does he act on instinct, trusting his previous experience? That wouldn’t be enough either, because he needs data, clinical information. In fact, he is invested in the decision as a whole person, his emotions and his reasoning mind, his body and his spirit.
A businessman is in the thick of a heated negotiation. The back and forth has been going on for some time, but suddenly he ‘feels’ it. He changes his tone and proposes a final price. Take it or leave it. After a few seconds, his counterpart accepts. The businessman’s intuition was right. He knew how to listen to himself. And to listen to his whole self. At the moment when he proposes his final price, he too is entirely present to himself and to the situation. It would be wrong to think that he does nothing more than analyse the situation coldly and make rapid calculations. It would be just as wrong to think that he works purely on his emotions, interpreting the other’s body language. He does all of that at the same time, and that’s why he ‘feels’ it. In past negotiations, he has known failures as well as successes. He doesn’t make an effort to forget his failures and remember his successes. Otherwise he couldn’t be truly present to the situation. He knows how to be the sum of all that he has lived through, to welcome in the moment the entirety of his experience, so that he is able to quote the right price. The ability to listen to yourself is at once simple and complicated. Simple, because it doesn’t require any gift. Complicated, because it’s hard to achieve this extreme degree of presence in the heat of the moment, during an emergency or at a time of great pressure.
If this capacity to listen to ourselves depended on the extraordinary development of one or another aspect of our make-up, we might worry about never being able to achieve it. But it doesn’t require anything of the sort. Rather, it’s a question of letting all the parts of ourselves speak in concert: reason and sensibility, the conscious mind and the unconscious. To truly listen to ourselves, the important thing is for none of our faculties to predominate over the others. If our reason dominates, then we’ll obey our reason. If our emotions take over, we’ll follow them. When none of our faculties overshadows the others, then what we listen to and have confidence in is ourselves. We are all capable of doing this.
All too often when we were in school, we were told to pay attention to the rules, the regulations, the classroom lessons. We were asked to listen to our teachers. We were never told that the whole point was to be able to listen to ourselves.
Studies conducted by the Programme for International Student Assessment, an organisation that compares the educational systems of different countries, have shown that French students register a glaring disparity between their level of knowledge and their performance on multiple-choice exams. They know a lot, but when it comes to deciding between several answers they hesitate and choose the wrong one at a higher-than-average rate. Why do French youths get more rattled than the youths of other European countries when faced with boxes to check? Because they haven’t learned to listen to themselves. All too rarely do our school reports include the words ‘trust yourself’. The comment that the student ‘can do better’ or that he ‘must persevere in his efforts’ is common enough, but how often do we see ‘have more confidence in your own judgment’?
I was lucky enough to have two teachers who changed the course of my life. In my literature class, in tenth grade, I discovered Verlaine, Proust, Camus, and others. My teacher was very old school, very demanding, making us learn poems by heart. But she never failed to ask us about our own feelings, to invite us to listen to ourselves: ‘Yes, you’re right, you could certainly say that, but what about you, what do you think about it? Do you think it’s well written? How does it affect you?’
My philosophy professor introduced me to Aristotle, Spinoza, Hegel, and other giants of Western thought. He taught me a great deal, introducing me to new ideas and methods. But more than anything he taught me to listen to myself. He too would often respond, in biting tones, even after giving a long lecture on Descartes: ‘For God’s sake, stop with the Descartes! What do you think about it?’ Twenty-five years later, what I remember about the hours I spent in philosophy class is that they were hours ‘for me’, set aside from the hurly-burly of life, the demands of daily living, and family responsibilities: hours spent learning to listen to myself. In philosophy class, we read Plato, Kant, and Sartre in order to come back to ourselves. We entered Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind only to learn how better to listen to our own minds.
Great teachers launch you into the adventure of life: they give you weapons that allow you to be yourself. Often, we feel that they have travelled a road analogous to our own – they too became themselves by coming into contact with the authors and ideas they are now teaching. They are the opposite of the ‘Conscientious One’ whom Nietzsche mocked, the kind of person who becomes a teacher because he is afraid of life, because he lacks confidence in himself. This teacher and others like him were once dedicated students and have now gone round to the far side of the desk. But did they listen to themselves? What did they learn about themselves? Do they know what their attitude as obedient students said about their relationship to the world? These are the teachers who humiliate their students at the least infraction of the rules, at the slightest sign of levity, undermining their students’ confidence with slashes of their red ballpoints.
When I think back to these two teachers of mine, I also remember that they had the courage to say simple things, which sometimes struck even me as simplistic. I would understand it later: where others camouflaged the little they had to say in pretentious jargon, they knew how to express very complex things in a simple way. Having the courage to speak simply requires the courage to listen to yourself. There is no better way to make a student want to listen to himself, whether he is in grade school, high school, or college, than to show him this virtue in action. I can’t think of anything better that a person can be taught in school. Listen to your teachers: they will teach you to listen to yourself.
But listening to yourself is never that easy. You first need to stop accepting conventional truths. If these truths derive from religion or social tradition, they can be openly debated and questioned. Someone who unquestioningly repeats what his religious education has taught him about God won’t be able to listen to himself: he will never know whether he truly believes or not. The person who says, ‘We’ve always done things that way here,’ in order to avoid an open discussion has also given up any chance of listening to himself. He is submitting to the ‘truth’ of tradition just as others submit to the ‘truth’ of religion. He venerates the past too much to really trust himself. He can’t conceive that what is unfolding within himself, here and now, has the weight of authority.
If the conventional truths are being propounded by science, we should still want to understand how they were arrived at. Knowing how to listen to yourself is a matter of integrating knowledge and remembering to question it.
Knowing how to listen to yourself also means not giving in to a sense of urgency. We all know how that happens: we’re short of time, or afraid of being late, or in a stressful situation, and we act in an abrupt, rushed way. We obey the person who is hurrying us the most, who is shouting loudest, and we become, as it were, absent to ourselves. We are no longer able to hear our inner voice.
One of the ways to free ourselves from the tyranny of urgency is to make the distinction between urgency and importance. Many things are urgent, but not all are important. Simply remembering this distinction can sometimes be liberating, and it doesn’t stop us from continuing to do what we need to do in a limited amount of time. Many executives, who are constantly under time pressure, lose confidence in their own judgement. But we can always counter the incessant flood of demands, each more urgent than the last, by asking this simple question: granting the urgency, is it important? What is truly important in our professional lives is that we do the things we have to do, as defined by the terms of our job, and that we do them well. With this in mind, we can try to satisfy the urgent request of a colleague or boss, but armed with a new inner freedom. It may be that this colleague or boss is himself overcome by stress, that he is putting undue pressure on us or asking us for things that are not really in our purview. It then behooves us not to lose sight of what is important: doing what we need to do well. We can also frame this distinction between the urgent and the important in a larger perspective, not limiting it to our professional lives. What is important is that our children should prosper and be in good spirits, and that we be spared life’s tragedies and know how to make the best of life. Then, even when we are in a rush at the office, we know that the essential lies elsewhere. We are in a hurry, but we are not being dictated to by the urgency of the situation. By remembering the difference between urgency and importance, we can maintain the ability to listen to ourselves.
The emergency services doctor also has to act in a hurry. The flood that assails him is not a flood of emails but a flood of trauma cases. He acts with urgency, but he has an inner compass. He doesn’t let himself be affected by the commotion all around him. He knows that some emergencies are more important than others. He isn’t caught up in the high-speed tempo of the environment in which he works. He draws his serenity from a longer time span, the time during which he accumulated the experiences that now allow him to listen to himself in an emergency so that he can perform the most important actions, those that will save the maximum number of lives.
The only philosopher to have seriously addressed the question of self-confidence is Ralph Waldo Emerson, born in Boston, Massachusetts, in the early nineteenth century. In his essay ‘Self-Reliance’, published in 1841, he seems to draw a portrait of our emergency services doctor: ‘It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.’ Even when surrounded by a crowd, the person who has self-confidence knows how to listen to himself as though he were in a quiet place, alone with himself. The experienced front-line doctor, the emergency medic, give proof of the greatness Emerson describes: they make good decisions because they maintain a kind of independence; they have an aptitude for being present to themselves in the midst of chaos. ‘A man,’ Emerson continues, ‘should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light that flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages.’
Managing to listen to ourselves doesn’t happen on its own. It is something that is learned, often with the help of rituals that are a kind of appointment with oneself. Rituals help us preserve a certain distance from the hysteria of the times and the breakneck pace of our lives. They help us get back in touch with our inner selves. To stretch out twice a week on a psychoanalyst’s couch, to go running three times a week, to practise meditation, or yoga, or Shintaido regularly, to keep the sabbath on Friday, to attend Mass on Sunday or mosque on Friday: each of these rituals can provide us with a framework for listening to ourselves. They take us out of the urgent hubbub to re-centre ourselves on what is important. We can recover our breath, become mindful of ourselves again, and it is often in these moments that constricting knots can be untied. We solve the problem in our professional lives that has long been bedevilling us, we understand what we have been looking for in our love life, we see ourselves more clearly. The light often comes on during our moments of down time. We then understand that we can have confidence in ourselves: the answer was inside us all along. We just needed a structure to help us become aware of it.
It has happened to me so many times – I’ll be lying on the analyst’s couch, talking. Just as the Freudian theory of free association describes, I’ll be saying things ‘as they come to me’, when suddenly a piece of the puzzle will pop into place. I’ll see something that I hadn’t noticed before, that I hadn’t wanted to see. I’ll suddenly understand why I react the way I do, why I get nervous, or why I feel relief. I’m not repressing memories to try and convince myself of something. I’m not ignoring my body in order to listen to my conscience. I am entirely present. I’d forgotten that I even knew how to enter this state. We all have a talent for lying to ourselves, and we’re very good at not listening to our inner voice. That is the reason why I suffered a severe depression, years ago, and discovered psychoanalysis. I emerged from my depression fairly quickly, but I continued to visit the analyst’s couch. It’s a ritual that I need. It gives me a chance to stop, a framework where I don’t have to lie, where I finally manage to listen to myself.
In The Little Prince, the children’s book by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, the fox reproaches the prince for having returned to visit him at a different time every day, without developing a ritual:
‘‘ ‘It would be better to come back at the same time,’ said the fox. ‘If, for example, you always came at four o’clock in the afternoon, at three o’clock I would begin to be happy. And I would feel happier and happier as the hour advanced. At four o’clock I would already be restless and worried; I would be discovering the cost of happiness! But if you come at any time, I will never know when to prepare my heart for you … Rituals are necessary.’
‘What is a ritual?” asked the little prince.
‘It is something else that is too often forgotten,’ said the fox. ‘It’s what makes one day different from other days, one hour different from other hours.’ ”
‘Rituals are necessary,’ says the fox. Without them, we would always have to count on our will to supply us with those moments of letting go, of being present to ourselves. If I have an appointment with the psychoanalyst every Tuesday and Thursday at 7 p.m., then I don’t need to make an effort of will to bring it about. It has become a ritual. If I attend Mass every Sunday at 11 a.m., it costs me no special effort to get to church. The ritual supports me: it takes the place of an effort of will. If our will always had to win out over practical concerns and our innate resistance, we would end up on the analyst’s couch once a month and at Mass once a year.
Thanks to rituals, the fox aptly notes, ‘one day is different from other days’. Because rituals are repeated, they allow us to take account of what is not repeated: they help us understand our progress along the path of life. Without these regular stops, how would we know the pace at which we are moving? Let us be wary of unstructured lives, and let us become reacquainted with the sense of ritual that modern life has eroded.
In the highly structured world of pre-Revolutionary France, the lives of men and women were certainly much more ritualised, but a person’s ability to listen to himself or herself wasn’t valued. In fact, it posed a threat to societal norms and risked unnecessary disruption in a hierarchically structured society. Why place confidence in individuals when what was needed for society to function was that individuals simply submit to tradition and established norms? Why invite them to listen to themselves when all knowledge was known to derive from the sages of antiquity and all decisions were in the hands of princes? Self-confidence had no real meaning in the pre-Revolutionary world, except as it applied to a few aristocrats with a chivalric turn of mind. Self-confidence is a modern concept, an upshot of democratic ideals and the writings of the Enlightenment philosophers. ‘Have the courage to rely on your own understanding. That is the Enlightenment motto,’ wrote Kant. This invitation to make use of one’s own mind is nothing other than an invitation to listen to oneself.
Trusting your intuition and learning to listen to yourself are just a part of being free. When we take shelter behind pseudo-truths, when we submit to the ideas of those ‘in the know’, we are failing to assume our freedom. Sartre’s name for this renunciation was ‘bad faith’. Good faith, by contrast, is confidence in our freedom. We often think of freedom in the wrong way: we equate it with a total lack of external constraints. Since our lives are constrained in one way or another, we deduce that we are not free.
In fact, freedom has nothing to do with lack of constraints. We are free, writes the French philosopher Henri Bergson, when we are fully what we are, when we manage to bring together in the present moment the totality of our past, all our experiences. That is exactly what listening to oneself is. Being mindful of one’s past, one’s lived experience, is not the same as simplifying it into a unified fiction or a Procrustean identity but accepting it as is, in its irreducible complexity. We are free when we manage to listen to ourselves in our entirety. The emergency services doctor in the thick of the action is not free of external constraints; in fact he is caught in a web of overlapping constraints. Yet he is free in Bergson’s sense: he is entirely himself at the heart of the action.
And we can’t be free when we rewrite our story in a way that leaves out its darker aspects, forcing ourselves to see the glass as half full. But it is just as impossible to be free when we are constantly berating ourselves for our sins and can only see the glass as half empty. Both of these mindsets show a same lack of confidence in ourselves.
Self-confidence has to be a confidence in the whole of ourselves. The self is not a pure, unified, and perfectly coherent core on which to build and sustain our confidence. Such a core does not exist. Anyone who says we have to find it in order to have confidence in ourselves is lying to us. Worse, they are pointing us to a dead end. We only have to examine ourselves for a moment to realise this. Where would such a core be located? In our brains? Our stomachs? Our heels? Our genomes? The self is multiple, paradoxical, changing: it’s when we are mindful of its complexity that we experience our freedom, and this realisation can come with the feeling that a dam has burst. We are no longer dominated by just one part of ourselves that tyrannises us from the inside. Nor are we in thrall to a truth that descends to us from the heavens, dictating to us from the outside. We are freed twice over: we finally trust ourselves.
It is no surprise that Emerson, the philosopher of self-confidence, greatly influenced Nietzsche, who heaped such scorn on the ‘Conscientious One’. The author of The Twilight of the Idols even wrote that Emerson was his ‘sister soul’. It is also pertinent that Emerson was an American. He wasn’t raised in one of the countries of Old Europe, taking pride in his country’s multimillennial past and sifting it for answers to the questions of his day. He came from a young nation, one that was discovered as the result of a miscalculation, and one that valued the pioneer spirit, which is the very spirit of self-confidence. In the United States, submission to what Max Weber called ‘the authority of the eternal yesterday’ is less prevalent than in Europe. The pioneer has the courage to listen to himself. In fact, he has no choice, being the first on the scene.
In each of us, a war is raging between the spirit of the ‘Conscientious One’ and the spirit of the Pioneer. Each time we listen to ourselves, the spirit of the Pioneer gets the upper hand. The less we blindly obey dogmas and traditions, the greater space we create for self-confidence.
‘Trust thyself,’ said Emerson, ‘every heart vibrates to that iron string.’ Let us learn to hear that vibration, to detect it. Let us pay less attention to the noise around us, to the voices of those who insist that ‘it’s extremely urgent’, that ‘this is something we can’t argue with’, or that ‘it’s always been this way’. These voices will never be silent. Being confident is finding the strength to turn away from them and hear oneself.