Are you friends with your intuition?
Welcome to the ArtsBound Newsletter. Every Tuesday, I share three thoughts or insights meant to help you flourish in your life and career. This week, in considering intuition as a driver of our personal fulfillment, we’ll look at: 1) the paradigms we use to define intuition, 2) intuition’s role in how we choose to stitch together a life and career, and 3) what the COVID-19 pandemic might be teaching us about intuition.
1. Are you ignoring your intuition?
Sir Kenneth Robinson is a renowned author and speaker in the world of education reform (if you are unfamiliar with his work and want to get a snapshot of it, I recommend THIS VIDEO). In his book, The Element, Robinson unpacks the life-changing process of uncovering and living into your passion, as well as how our contemporary social institutions can often make it harder to do so rather than guide us in this process.
In the book, he discusses the human senses as an illustration of something we take for granted and therefore fail to understand. The full example is quite powerful, but I’ll do my best to summarize it.
If asked how many senses we have, most of us probably recall elementary school lessons in which we learned there are five: sight, hearing, taste, touch, and smell.
Robinson makes the case that there are at least twelve distinct senses including temperature and pain - recognized by scientists as different from that of touch - balance, and the sense of intuition (which is somewhat “spooky”, because there’s no physical organ associated with it).
How did we miss these in school?
Anyway...
Here’s the take-away: Naming things helps us to think about them. As a result, things we fail to name often go ignored. Robinson makes the case that, in a society that places so much importance on things that can be seen and measured, “spooky” phenomena are undervalued at best. I.e. school teaches about touch, taste, smell, hearing, and sight, and intuition is swept under the rug.
Being in-tune with your intuition is key to self-fulfillment.
And yet, many of us spend years developing a dependency on outside authorities instead of developing the trust in and discernment of our own inner guidance.
The good news is that intuition can be reclaimed and exercised like a muscle. It just takes small wins - trusting a hunch, speaking a difficult truth, taking a healthy risk - and you are on your way to a more fulfilling life.
2. How many patches are in your quilt?
My most recent podcast guest, Walt Straiton, is a music merchandiser and educational consultant for Conn-Selmer. In our conversation, Walt compares the professional life of most performing artists as that of a patchwork quilt.
Because no one job can encompass everything that makes us who we are as a person and artist, we stitch together different experiences to create something that is uniquely ours. As time goes on, we may use more or less of one type of fabric. Knowing what patches to include often comes down to trusting your intuition… what Walt calls “the tug”.
You can listen to my conversation with Walt HERE.
3. What the pandemic may have to teach us about intuition
I recently wrote a blog article titled “Why People are so Divided on COVID-19, and What It Has to do With Your Personal Fulfillment”. Struck by the wide spectrum of responses we are seeing to the pandemic, I’ve been curious about how we come to decide what degree of social distancing feels right to us and how we negotiate that with others, especially those in our close circles.
In it, I unpack the idea that following your calling (a function of intuition) can be difficult in the face of skeptics - those who cannot see your calling - not unlike being the only one wearing a mask at a social gathering.
I flesh out the connections quite a bit more, but these are the four lessons about personal fulfillment I see hidden within our experience of quarantine:
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Following your calling in the face of skeptics is difficult, but it is essential to leading the life you were meant to live;
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Following your calling is a lifelong endeavor, and therefore requires persistence, commitment, and vigilance;
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Following your calling will bring times of separation from loved ones and familiar things; and
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Following your calling can get easier with practice.
Cheers,
Lee