Leading with Intuition
Facts and intuition are false opposites.
Leaders should listen to their intuition and instincts
and allow others to do the same because they are subconscious,
fast ways of processing, aggregating and then accessing
evidence to reach a swift conclusion. Trust your gut.
—phil dourado, the 60 second leader
Let’s face it—not everyone is cut out to be a leader. Not everyone wants to be a leader. However, there are so many who are born to lead and are natural leaders. Whether you are leading a team at work, are a coach, or run things at home, you can become a better leader by using your intuition.
You don’t really need to rely on your intuition to know that you’ll get more from someone when they are comfortable with you or when they feel good about the situation they are in. Whether it’s a team you are leading or clients you are wooing, it’s common knowledge that you catch more flies with honey. Obviously, we are not flies, but we do react better when we are relaxed, so we can use our intuition to determine what will make our customers or clients happy.
Become a Better Leader
Back in the caveman days, intuition was a critical part of life. Humans needed to constantly be connected to their intuition to stay safe. They were only trusted to lead a group if they were strong. Being strong wasn’t just a physical thing. It also meant they were able to find food and provide shelter without getting everyone killed in the process. Cavemen couldn’t mess around.
Luckily, being a leader now isn’t usually a life-or-death situation, but you still have people depending on you. How can you be that person that people want to follow? You not only need to be good at what you do; you also have to give your team or your company someone to believe in. You have to be the kind of leader you’d want. Who would that be?
Great leaders inspire everyone to follow and take action. More than that, they create a culture in which people feel free to act. Herminia Ibarra knows leadership. She is the Cora Chaired Professor of Leadership and Learning at INSEAD, the founding director of the leadership transition executive education program at INSEAD, and an author who writes about business and leadership. She writes, “When we act like a leader by proposing new ideas, making contributions outside our area of expertise, or connecting people and resources to a worthwhile goal (to cite just a few examples), people see us behaving as leaders and confirm as much.” 9
These good leaders encourage their subordinates to think for themselves and welcome the offering of ideas and thoughts. Self-absorption is not a characteristic that should ever be used to describe a skilled leader. The best leaders motivate their team to want to succeed. Being a great leader doesn’t just happen; it comes from within and is developed further by your actions. The best leaders can bring value to the table through ideas, concepts, and contributing as much as, if not more than, those they are leading.
The first rule of leadership is knowing that investing in your people, team, group, and so on will cause your business to grow exponentially. This, simply put, means putting time and energy into your group. You need to gain the respect of your team in order to get what you need out of them. No one will respect you unless you respect them. They may be afraid of you, or fear for their job, but they will not hold you in high esteem if they can’t trust that you have their backs.
In order to become a better leader, you should look to a combination of intuition and reason, sometimes known as your inner and outer worlds. You need to figure out what will stimulate your team to build a successful business. In order to do that, you can utilize all your talents—both physical, worldly skills (outer) and metaphysical (inner) skills. Before you decide how, you need to determine what the end goal is. It doesn’t have to be the final outcome, but you must have goals along the way that others can aspire to reach. Leaders who are able to access both sides of their brain in a cooperative way will invariably be better naturally at managing groups because they use everything they’ve got.
Way back when I was the controller of a company, I helped set up a day of aptitude and personality training for all the department heads. We went off campus to an establishment that specialized in making companies better by matching their employees to the jobs they were best suited for. This applied to the leaders as well.
They got us all set up and administered the Myers-Briggs test. When we finished, we plotted our answers on a chart and connected the dots. Most people were mostly on the right or the left sides and mostly on top or below the center line. My chart was a perfect diamond. The test facilitator explains that I was perfectly right and left brain balanced, logical as well as intuitive, extroverted and introverted all at the same time. This, they said, was a compassionate leader in the making. It made perfect sense to me, and the balance seemed to match with my value system.
Developing core values that your team can relate to is important anytime you are in a managerial position. Bringing your team in to create the value system with you will create bonding within the team. Tapping into your intuition will help to create that list of values. The following is a compilation of possible values. Go through them and check which ones fit with your style and your leadership.
- Authenticity
- Balance
- Compassion
- Creativity
- Dedication
- Fairness
- Family
- Friendship
- Fun
- Growth
- Happiness
- Hard work
- Honesty
- Integrity
- Intuition
- Justice
- Learning
- Recognition
- Respect
- Spirit
- Stability
- Truth
When you share the same values with your group, they will feel more comfortable and will have more respect for your authority and your leadership role. It will help them connect with you and work harder for you and will make the team stronger.
Now that you’ve bonded with your group, figure out what your vision for the team is. Maybe you already have a real one or maybe not. First, you must decide what kind of leader you are. Do you utilize your inner or outer world to get information you need? Do you use both? Below is a checklist. Mark whether you would use your intuition or your external senses in order to handle the situations.
|
Intuition |
Situation |
External |
Try to acquire a new client | ||
Make a decision | ||
Learn about the people I work with | ||
Figure out my next steps | ||
Determine which team members fit with which clients | ||
Design a website | ||
Create/develop a marketing plan for a client | ||
Create/develop a marketing plan for my own business | ||
Design a logo | ||
Solve problems with staff | ||
Determine who needs a promotion | ||
Deal with computer issues | ||
Determine what someone wants | ||
Understand what drives someone | ||
Predict outcomes in situations |
Hopefully, you’ve discovered a little bit about how you process situations as a leader. Using your intuition as well as your external senses gives you a definite advantage. Did you find you favored one over the other? Are you more inner world? Or more outer world? Most people will find they use a blend. If you’re like me, you’ll discover you are more intuitive, and you will trust your instincts more than analytical data.
Take for instance understanding what drives a person. If you are tuning in and trying to feel their energy or you use your clairvoyance to see what they enjoy doing, you are using your intuition. If, alternatively, you do research to find out what that same person is into, you may be leaning more toward your external senses. If you do a little of both, you might use a more balanced approach to discover what drives a person. Figuring out the methods you use can point you toward what you might be able to enhance a bit more to become a great leader.
Using Vision to Lead
Using your intuitive gifts opens a new and improved level of awareness when you are in charge. It gives you options not otherwise utilized. American scholar Warren Bennis wrote, “Leadership is the capacity to translate vision into reality.” 10 The situations in the earlier table are generic in that you can apply them to most leadership roles. You can tune in to your vibes to see how you would handle each. Think of your intuition as a secret weapon and use it to be a better leader.
Choosing to not go it alone and instead bring your entire team into the intuitive process is a sign of a true leader. Listen, they don’t all have to buy into your way of doing things, but they can contribute in their way, to start. Once you get them on board, working together, they may begin to experience their own intuitive hits, those aha moments of clarity. They may have no idea where the ideas came from, but they showed up and they were good!
When you work in a group, your intuition becomes heightened. This is where the really juicy, good stuff comes in. Imagine sitting in a circle, kicking ideas around. You’ve probably done this before in some capacity—in a formal or more relaxed format. You start feeding off each other and the energy just starts to flow through the group, one suggestion building from the one before. This tends to happen when people tune in in any type of creative or intuitive way. It’s the way our minds work.
As leaders, we can create an intuitive group, a think tank if you will, to collectively tune in to the questions leaders need to answer. Pretend you are leading a team that has been tasked to sell a new, healthy energy drink. Not only do you have to decide on flavors, but you have to put together packaging and sell it to the client before you will get the deal.
The good thing about this is you have your entire team to work with, so collect your team and put the first question to them: What is the first flavor we should offer? This can be logically determined by market research. We know, as good leaders, that we should use a mix of traditional data and intuition, so we won’t throw away the opportunity to employ every asset we have to our benefit. But what we absolutely can do to make it better than plain “raspberry” is use our combined intuitive minds to come up with a more exciting name. Ask them to focus on what they hear people calling this new drink in their mind, using their clairaudience. When we make a safe space for people in our team to be creative, you’ll find they will start throwing ideas into the ring. The first may say, “I’m hearing something that starts with an R.” Then, vibing off that, the next team member might come in with “Rascally Raspberry,” and everyone agrees this could definitely be a hit.
Following the loosely communal structure, ideas begin to bounce about the packaging, ending with a white can with a clean, modern, magenta shape that resembles a rabbit but is not quite a rabbit floating around the can. Perfect! All this coming from a team who has used the best of both worlds—traditional research in conjunction with their sixth sense when they came up with the name. And you were the one who led them to this, being the leader that you are.
Your leadership skills can also be applied to how you can go about increasing your client base. Staying true to your core values and tuning in to what, conceivably, your potential customers want, you can ethically and profitably figure out what you have to offer and send it out to the universe. You can, essentially, lead your future clients on a path directly to you.
Gain More Clients and Customers
How do you gain more clients? I am not saying you need to reinvent the wheel. I for sure have my own issues when it comes to getting more clients, but having a good product and marketing it heavily is a good start. Possibly most important, however, is the follow-through. Using your intuition, you can manifest more customers by putting it out to the universe. There is more to it, though. You need to first decide what type of clients and customers you want to attract, and then you need to decide if you will retain them or if they will be a one-off client. Then, go after them.
No one wants to throw good money after bad—meaning you don’t want to keep spending money the same way if it’s not working. We don’t want to waste our money marketing to the wrong crowd or trying to sell the wrong thing to the wrong person. This, essentially, is what can happen when you think you know everything or assume you are on top of the game when it comes to why people would want your services.
Let’s take my business, for example. The majority of what I do is connect with clients who want psychic readings. I already know that I am able to manifest clients when I put my intuitive magnet to work. However, if I am not consistently doing my manifestation work, the flow of clients dies down pretty quickly. I need to focus on putting my services out for the world to find.
How do I do that? Well, I already know the bulk of my clients want readings, so this is no great mystery. What I’ve never stopped to consider is the specific “why.” I know the basics that everyone wants answers to—relationship, finances, career, family, health, mostly in that order. But I’ve never really thought of the “why” beyond the obvious. Maybe I should try to use my intuition to find out.
It’s about time I tuned in to see the reasons they may want to come in. If I can figure that out, I might be able to change my marketing strategy to attract more people.
Try This!
Using my business as an example, imagine wanting to attract more clients. In order to tune in to why they actually would want to come see me over all the other people who offer what I do, we need to see them in their element. This will be easier to do if we can imagine a typical client instead of trying to focus in on 100 different people.
Imagine a woman, midthirties, who wants to come in. We need to ask her questions, and we will write the answers down so we can review them after.
- How soon do you want an appointment?
- What are you hoping to get out of your session?
- What’s the number-one question you want answered?
- Why do you want to go in versus letting answers happen on their own?
- What made you reach out to make an appointment?
- Is there anything that jumped out to you that caused you to make an appointment with (insert the name you are using)?
- What else should we know about why you chose to book your appointment?
When you’ve asked all the questions, go ahead and review your answers. We can do this together. When we asked about time frame, I saw a calendar opened to the next week and no further. That tells me she wants an appointment pretty much right away. When I posed the next question, I heard “answers.” This doesn’t tell me that much—hopefully the next few will be more detailed. “Is there more out there for me? Please tell me this is not all my life will be” is what I heard for her top concern. I can honestly say I was not expecting that. I thought it would be more like “Should I take the job?” or “Is my deceased boyfriend okay?” This is great. I’m already learning more than I expected. When I tuned in to the next item on the list, I felt her being totally impatient—essentially, I feel like she is just tired of trying to figure things out on her own. “I reached out because I felt warmth from you, and it was easy.” Then, “You jumped out at me because I like your cards on Facebook and one of my friends came to see you.” Okay, well, this didn’t really surprise me. When I asked the final question, I just knew the answer. Desperation and curiosity, it seems, are equally important.
Turns out, if I hadn’t utilized my intuition, I probably wouldn’t have discovered what was important to my clients and those who aren’t clients yet. I know now how to market a bit differently. I can put together some social media posts that play to these sentiments.
For your own business goals, you can come up with any other questions to help you understand how to access and receive more clients or customers. Then market it that way to bring in more traffic. Learning how to appeal to your customer base is huge and can really go a long way toward helping you realize your dreams. I am blessed to do the work that I love, but I need to make a living doing it. I am pretty sure you feel the same way! Drawing in those sales can definitely help.
Once you’ve brought in the business, you have to learn what makes your customers tick. And although you can remain the leader, you want to be sure that the people you are working with feel important and even special. They need to know you are working for them, and by leading them into the future you are seeing, the rewards will inevitably increase for you both.