Listening to Your Intuition: Why Men Stop Trusting Their Gut
When we experience intuition, we are listening to the internal signals that come through our body and point to a deeper knowing of what is necessary or important. As men, we are often raised out of our emotions and out of the sensations our bodies use to communicate with us. That puts us at a disadvantage, because we miss critical information that helps us make good decisions.
Intuition is the learnt, productive use of unconscious information to improve decisions or actions.
Joel Pearson
Intuition becomes increasingly valuable in the new information society precisely because there is so much data.
John Naisbitt
What Is Intuition?
Intuition is our ability to know things unconsciously, without cognitive awareness, so that we can make better decisions. It is the acknowledgement that our entire nervous system is picking up vastly more information than our conscious mind can take in. That information helps us know what to do and what not to do.
Every day I walk out of my house with my keys and phone in my pocket. If one day I walk out without my phone, I will suddenly notice a sense that I’m forgetting something. My unconscious can’t send me the thought, “You’re forgetting your phone.” Instead it sends an uneasy sensation in my throat or stomach. When I listen to that sensation and slow down enough to check, I find that it was my unconscious signaling that the usual things in my pocket are not there.
Intuition Is Another Way to Know
Often we look for the right answer in books, spreadsheets, AI and other places. That is a good thing, and we have amazing resources at our fingertips today. We should use all of them.
Intuition is another resource humans have, and it can also provide really important information. Becoming an expert in your professional life comes from many experiences that lead you to an advanced level of proficiency. Your subconscious holds all of the information, patterns and integrated wisdom that make someone an expert. Underneath our conscious knowing is this incredible resource that wants to let us know when some of those patterns are not lining up. That is what intuition provides: a signal from the subconscious that helps us make better decisions and notice things we might otherwise miss.
Using intuition is a way of accessing all the information in our subconscious mind.
The Cost of Not Listening
When we don’t listen to our internal signals, we can make bad decisions. Have you ever thought, after things didn’t turn out how you hoped, that you knew the right decision all along? It may not have been that you knew it in your mind, but there was a felt sense of what the right thing to do was. “I knew it,” may have been your response.
So many of us men have been denying awareness of our world of sensation, because that is also our emotional world. Connecting to emotions requires awareness of the body. From an early age many boys are shamed when they express their feelings, and after a while they stop paying attention.
Not only are we missing a richer, more satisfying emotional experience, we are also walling ourselves off from powerful wisdom in our subconscious.
Another cost of not listening is that we can disconnect from our integrity. When we make a decision that is outside our values, our subconscious will typically throw a fit to make sure we know it is not okay. When we know we need to have the hard conversation or let go of our pride, our intuition is trying to tell us to do the hard thing. If we don’t listen, we may live a life of regret.
What Gets in the Way of Intuition
In the film High Fidelity, John Cusack’s character Rob Gordon famously concludes that his guts “have shit for brains.”
I’ve always loved that line. Rob is a great example of someone who wasn’t listening to his intuition and was instead making impulsive decisions that led him to terrible outcomes. He was in love with the woman at the center of the movie but couldn’t get clear in his mind that he wanted to be with her. Instead he let his thoughts keep talking him out of it. She broke up with him, which drives the drama of the film, and Rob just got resentful instead of listening to what he really wanted and finding a way to make it happen. She was asking him to be more of himself and show up differently in the relationship. Rob focused on the other men she might be interested in and felt deep jealousy and betrayal.
What Rob didn’t do was slow down and get clearer about what was true. If he had, he would have realized those other men weren’t the problem. He needed to grow up so that the woman he loved could fully trust him.
One challenge in accessing intuition is telling the experience of intuition apart from the experience of emotion. How can we know the difference?
Emotions are helpful guides, but they are not intuition. Anger, happiness and annoyance arrive in a moment and don’t necessarily tell us the bigger picture of what is happening. Our emotions matter, but intuition takes in many patterns over time and leads you to a bigger awareness. The sense that you forgot something may not be life-altering, but it is a simple example of how your intuition notices things and then signals you. When it comes to bigger decisions, like a life partner or whether to have children with someone, your intuition can be a major support. Only if we listen.
How This Shows Up in My Life
In my 20s I worked in the tech industry, and part of my job was hiring new managers for a distribution center. These were people I was going to work next to every day, so these were big decisions. After making a few mistakes, I started to listen more closely to what my intuition was telling me. At the time I didn’t know that was what I was doing. I got much better at using my intuition, and as a result I made much better hiring decisions.
Today my intuition offers many helpful signals about what really matters to me. When I get pulled into the grind of work at the expense of time with my family, I can sense that this isn’t what is good for me. My intuition is telling me my values are out of alignment. That allows me to course correct and move toward what is most important.
Reconnect With Your Inner Wisdom
If you want more access to your intuitive wisdom, I’d love to help. Much of my counseling for men in Denver is somatic, helping men reconnect with the signals in their bodies, and my virtual men’s group is a place to practice it with other men. Start with a free 30 minute phone consultation.
Wishing you the day you need to have!
References:
Pearson, Joel (2024). The Intuition Toolkit: The New Science of Knowing What without Knowing Why. Future Minds Publishing, Brighton, MI.
