I often talk about just how powerful intuition is, and why I believe it is a skill of the future.
I believe that by 2038, intuition will be part of most school curriculums and a common training protocol in most Fortune 500 companies.
Our children will be learning to access altered states to draw onto sources of knowledge beyond what we now understand as the brain. And CEOs and Executives will be trained to tap into such states to source ideas, creativity, and better ‘gut’ instincts.
And one of my big dreams in life is to make this skill mainstream.
The thing is, I wasn’t always a believer of intuition.
With my background in engineering, I’ve always needed “hard evidence” of how things work.
So naturally, I first greeted this whole intuition thing with a big dose of skepticism.
But over the years, having gone through multiple intuition classes and trainings, I’ve experienced things I just cannot explain nor can I dismiss.
It started in a big way in 2002. And I wrote the story in my international best-seller, The Code of the Extraordinary Mind.
Basically, I was living in Silicon Valley at that time and had lost all my savings in the dot-com bubble burst. About 14,000 people were laid off the same month I lost my small startup company (and my savings) and the economy was so bad, the only job I could get was a lousy dialing-for-dollars job selling technology to law firms.
I sucked at it. And was not closing sales. After 3 months, and feeling like my life was stagnating, I saw an ad for a class on meditation for intuition. It intrigued me. I flew down to LA to take this class.
And below is an extract from my book on just what happened next….
Immediately I began applying some of the techniques I’d learned, one of which was a simple technique to meditate and get myself into the alpha state of mind. Alpha is a brain wave frequency common in meditation where you’re in a relaxed state. People who advocate this type of meditation say that alpha puts you highly in tune with your intuition, your creativity, and your problem-solving abilities. A key part of what I had learned was listening to my inner voice or intuition. I practiced this when making my phone calls. I stopped calling every lawyer from A to Z in the Yellow Pages, as my coworkers were doing. Instead, I’d go into a relaxed, meditative level of mind, run my finger down the listings, and call the ones where I felt an impulse. The impulse often felt like guessing, but I heeded it. I realize this makes no logical sense. But I discovered that listening to my impulse somehow caused me to call lawyers more likely to buy. My closing rate started rising rapidly.
How much of a change can you expect from studying meditation? I certainly didn’t expect much, other than learning to relax and destress better. But by the end of the first week after flying back from L.A., I had my best- ever sales week. I assumed it was an aberration and that it wouldn’t last. But I closed two deals the next week. And the next. And it got better. A month later, I leveled up to closing three deals. Listening to my intuition seemed to triple the odds of my calling a receptive lawyer.
This occurrence in 2002 — and my then meteoric rise in the company I was working in — caused me to later branch out on my own and eventually start Mindvalley.
Intuition had such an incredible impact on my life that I spent the next 5 years learning and teaching and honing my skills in this area.
But it made me wonder: If intuition is so powerful, why aren’t there more people using it today?
I believe it’s because people often see intuition as a “binary” skill.
It either works.
Or it doesn’t.
Nothing in between.
But here’s the thing, just like any skill you learn, harnessing your intuition improves in gradual degrees.
And sometimes, it’s the small improvements that can make a big difference.
Here’s what I mean by that.
The University of Edinburgh, which is one of the most prestigious universities in the world, has a dedicated division called the Koestler Parapsychology Unit that studies things like intuition and ESP.
And in one of their studies, they wanted to find out whether we have the ability to “send” messages to one another through our minds.
They divided participants into TWO separate groups.
One group would be the “senders.”
The other, the “receivers.”
The senders would be shown a particular video and were then asked to “send” the image they saw to the receivers.
The thing is, the receivers were in a completely different room, listening to white noise, bathing in red light, and wearing eye shields.
So, there was ZERO physical, visual or audible contact between the senders and the receivers.
When the receivers were woken up, they were shown FOUR different videos and had to pick the one video they believed was the same video the senders watched.
Can you guess how often the receivers got it right?
If this was merely a game of chance, then you’d expect a 25% “hit” rate.
Except that this time, the researchers observed that the receivers were reaching a 33% “hit” rate.
That’s a 7% improvement on just chance alone.
Now, you may be thinking that 7% isn’t a big deal.
But when you put this into a real-world context, 7% can be incredibly significant. It shows that the odds of intuition being real are billions to 1 in favor of intuition.
In a famous study by researcher Douglas Dean and Professor John Mihalasky of Newark Institute of Technology, they tested 385 CEOs of American corporations on their intuitive abilities.
Out of the CEOs who scored high on their intuitive and precognitive tests, 80% of them had previously DOUBLED their company’s profits in the last five years.
Interestingly enough, after interviewing these CEOs who scored high on their tests, Dean and Mihalasky discovered that the majority of them acknowledged a private belief in ESP and intuition.
And it wasn’t because they had read any of the prior research but through evidence in their own life experience.
The point I’m making here is ultimately this…
When you tap into your intuition to make decisions in life, it does not mean you’re magically going to get it right 100% of the time.
Like I said earlier, intuition is NOT binary.
But what it does do is improve your odds of making the right choice just a little bit higher (which naturally can improve further with the right tools and techniques).
And when you can make just a 7% improvement on the decisions you make on a daily basis, those small increments will compound dramatically over time.
This is why intuition has been a subject I’ve been fascinated about for years.
