Have you ever used your intuition to solve problems? Can you
trust your intuition? Can you improve it?

What Is Intuition?

Intuition is simply a feeling , sense, or hunch based on
information not available to your conscious mind. Some say
this comes from the ether or wherever, but I'm content to
believe that our minds have a lot more going on in there
than we know.

How can Gary Kasparov win a chess game against a computer
that can calculate positions many moves further ahead than
he can? By using his intuitive grasp of the game. His
experience allows him to combine analysis with a "sense" of
which move is best.

Intuition can also warn us. My wife and I felt we shoudn't
get on that bus in South America. We knew crowded busses
were prime hunting grounds for pickpockets, and we saw the
drunk man bumping into people. We didn't think about these
things consciously, but they registered in our minds, and
warned us. We ignored our intuition, and I was robbed.

Of course, you can have a hunch for irrelevant reasons too.
If you were hit by a taxi as a child, you might have
"intuitive" hunches not to get into taxis for the rest of
your life. So how do you know when to trust your intuition?

Three Simple Steps To Better Intuition

1. Watch for it. You'll have hunches and ideas more often.
I bought a conversion van, and now I see them all over. Have
you had a similar experience? The same process will happen
if you watch for your intuition - you'll start to see more
of it.

2. Question it. If I had asked myself why I felt bad about
that bus, I might have thought, "Oh yeah, crowded busses are
a bad idea. I know that." Try to see in which areas your
intuition works best, or not at all. If, for example, your
hunches about people are always wrong, don't follow them.

3. Give it good information. Your skill, knowledge and
experience determine the potential effectiveness of your
intuition. A weak chess player will never intuitively beat
that computer. So learn enough about a subject, before you
expect any good hunches. Remember the programmer's maxim:
garbage in - garbage out.

Do these three things and you'll have more useful intuition
more often.



About the Author
Steve Gillman writes on many self help topics including
boosting brainpower, losing weight, meditation, habits of
mind, creative problem solving, learning gratitude,
generating luck and anything related to self improvement.
You'll find more at http://www.SelfImprovementNow.com