Trust Your “Gut”

Rely on Your Learned Intuitive Skills

Making crucial business decisions in a timely manner without over-analysis or procrastination greatly enhances bottom line results. Using your learned intuitive skills and experiences, otherwise known as your “gut,” has become increasingly important when faced with the challenge of conflicting or inconclusive information. Your “intuition” is not all in your head, but instead, it is rooted in your body… your inner source, or, your gut. Our gut instincts are the sum total of the millions of experiences we have gathered in our lifetime that enable us to make many types of decisions with a high degree of success. Obviously, “gut calls” are better suited to functions such as corporate strategy and planning, marketing, public relations and HR rather than others such as production, operations management, accounting and finance.

Reflect for a moment on the many work and personal instances where your gut has served you well in making difficult decisions, or better still where you should have followed your gut instincts and didn’t. Examples where trusting your gut will pay huge dividends include dealing in a timely fashion with toxic, underperforming and poor attitude employees, low margin and/or high maintenance customers, inflexible and/or high priced vendors, declining and/or highly competitive markets, products/services/process that have lost their competitive advantage, problematic business or partner relationships and many, many more.

Combining available factual information with your gut intuition will enable you to make better decisions in a more timely fashion, thus avoiding procrastination. The great majority of our daily decisions that are non-financial, contractual or legal in nature can be quickly changed or modified, as necessary, if the situation changes or we simply made a wrong decision.

By applying the concept of ‘Trusting Your Gut” you will accelerate the quality and quantity of your decision making process which will help create a proactive can do company culture resulting in enhanced employee morale and improved profitability.

By: Don Schlueter, TAB-Certified Facilitator, TAB Chicago