Intuition at Work

Pulling a rabbit out of a hat

Author Bonita Summers

“The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.” ~Albert Einstein

Often, it is our rational mind that is put to work to come up with ideas. It becomes a strained and serious game, trying to pull a rabbit out of a hat, when we should approach idea generation with a sense of open, gentle play—the way we did when we were children making believe. Yet, when we bring our intuition to the game, magic happens. We find out that we are so much more than a boxed-in brain. There is a natural process that engages our minds when we relax into it and allow ideas to surface naturally.

David Neale, Senior Vice-President of Products and Services at Telus Consumer Solutions Inc., worked for Rogers Wireless as a vice-president for 12 years. He knew Ted Rogers, founder and CEO of Rogers Communications Incorporated, well. In an interview for itbusiness.ca, he described how he saw the late visionary.

“He had astonishing intuition,” Neale said. “He knew consistently where to go. He was “chasing things most people couldn’t see.”

When the work world deals in facts and figures, it misses out on that area of exploration that can only be found with intuition, that ability to take the disparate pieces of information that have been harvested, and put them together in a holistic bounty not possible when we only use the rational mind in our creative process.

In her book, Take the Step: The Bridge Will Be There, Grace Cirocco expounds on the importance of intuition: “Gut feelings have saved lives, discovered cures and made people rich. They might come as a hunch, a flash, a deep knowing. The problem is that so many of us tune out our intuition in favour of something more logical or rational.”

Lopsided Thinking

When we move about in the world, using only our rational capacity, we are operating from the active principle of our being. We act on our ideas in ways that may or may not contribute to achieving our goals. When we operate from our intuition—the receptive principle—we get great ideas, seemingly out of the blue, but we don’t necessarily do anything with them. How often have you heard someone say, “I thought of that”, when someone else speaks up about a concept during the project development process?

With lopsided thinking, where we either use the rational mind or our intuition, we limp along, never fully effective, because we don’t share our great ideas, or we take action that is not informed by our intuition. To operate fully, we need to trust our intuition and let it inform our actions.

The Scientific Basis for Intuition

Dr. Ervin Laszlo, founder of systems philosophy and general evolution theory, and author of 69 books, postulates in Science and the Akashic Field: An Integral Theory of Everything that “we must recognize that a universal in-formation (sic) field conveys the effect we described as ‘nonlocal coherence’ throughout the many domains of nature.” He says, “In the new physics the unified, physically real vacuum is the equivalent of Akasha. It is the original field out of which emerged particles and atoms, stars and planets, human and animal bodies, and all the things that can be seen and touched. It is a dynamic, energy-filled medium in ceaseless fluctuation.” It is this field of abundant, intelligent energy that we can tap into when we brainstorm.

Few of us would deny having had a hunch at some point in our lives. Whenever we arrive at a realization with no rational basis for how we got there, we are operating from our intuition. Lynne McTaggart is author of five award-winning books, including The Field, in which she amassed a considerable body of scientific evidence in regard to what she describes as the ‘Zero Point Field’, “a field of possibility and a free source of unimaginable energy”. She says, “Dozens of scientists in prestigious areas around the world have demonstrated that all matter exists in a vast quantum web of connection and that an information transfer is constantly going on between living beings and their environment…. The brain and DNA, always assumed to be the body’s central conductors, should more properly be considered transducers—which transmit, receive from, and ultimately interpret quantum information picked up from the Field.”

Even before we had any scientific basis to quantify intuition, we knew the stories, like that of Elias Howe, who invented the sewing machine and got the design for the needle from a dream he’d had about savages coming after him with spears that had holes in the tip. How did Howe’s brain provide him with a solution for his needle design beyond the information he had gathered on the subject? If the physicists and philosophers are right, and there is an unbounded field of creativity accessible to all who know how to tap it, how can we benefit?

Tapping the Field

Albert Einstein said, “Problems cannot be solved at the same level of awareness that created them.” Often, when we are trying to find a solution to a problem during our busy workday, it eludes us, until we are submerged in some other activity. Then, the answer comes to light, seemingly of its own accord.

In The Quantum and the Lotus, molecular biologist turned Buddhist monk, Matthieu Ricard says, “It is intuition—or inner experience—that has the leading role in the contemplative approach, which refuses to break up reality, but instead aims to understand it in its entirety.” When we stop exhausting our habitual neural pathways, looking for a response down the same road our thinking usually goes, then the brain is free to put together a solution in a holistic, all-encompassing manner.

To build new neural pathways, we need to change the way we use our brains. Shaking up our thought processes can throw the rational mind offline long enough to allow intuition to reign free. What follows are suggestions for bringing the receptive faculty of the mind to the forefront:

Meditate. Quieting the mind through silent reflection or the use of relaxation and breathing techniques opens one’s thinking to new possibilities. Consider beginning your next brainstorming session with a brief guided meditation. If you’re at your desk, struggling to find an answer, stop what you are doing and take a few deep breaths and relax. Then, take up another task unrelated to the one that frustrated you. Give your brain a vacation from stewing, and the answer will come sooner.

Article originally published in Volume 11-1 of Your Workplace magazine