As entrepreneurs, we can very easily get caught up in our logical minds. It’s a good thing to have our brains whirring away, always coming up with new ideas, always thinking things through with logic and reason. It can help us make the right decisions we need to take to be successful. But entrepreneurship, like all things in life, requires a balance. That’s what this week’s guest, Laura Linden, is all about. She has written extensively on the use of intuition in business decision- making. The idea of listening to our gut instinct when it comes to something as important as our business might seem like madness, but Laura makes a convincing case for putting our logical mind to bed sometimes and going with our feelings instead.
In the podcast, Laura and I discuss:
- The vital practice of pausing and listening to our intuition, rather than charging forward with our first thoughts.
- The signs to look for when trying to interpret whether your gut feeling is good or bad.
- And the daily habits we can develop to make it easier to hear what our inner self is saying to us.
I asked Laura why we find it so difficult to switch off our conscious mind? “Well, we’ve always been told that thinking is the key to success,” she replied. “In school we get rewarded for our best thinking and action, not for listening to our feelings. And so we have the belief that thinking is what you have to do whenever something important, like money or our business, is involved. Because of that, we don’t learn the balance necessary to listen to our intuition as well. They key is that we have to convince our brain that listening to the intuition is itself a logical step for us to take, and will bring us benefits. If we can do that, the brain will give us permission to relax and do just that.”
Like Laura, I’ve always been a big proponent of relaxation and balance in business, and I encourage you all to follow her advice and start meditating and taking the time to explore your inner self. For more information about Laura’s work and some tools and coaching opportunities, you can visit her website or check out her current book on Amazon – the new book we discuss in the podcast will be out soon.
