“Don’t trust your intuition, obey it!”

It was a typical, stereotypical British day, blustery, wet and gray.  The area was industrial which added to the bleakness of the scene.  The Chairman’s office had no warmth, no feel of humanity about it, but his company made a great product and I thought (the operative word here) that I could make it work in the U.S.

When the time came to sign the paperwork, I felt a hollowness in the pit of my stomach.  It was cold and deep and, as it turned out, a perfect presentiment of what would come from my doing so.  The intuitive feeling, as compelling as it was, could not rise up enough to influence my thinking.  The deed was done and the consequences soon followed.

This memory is from many years ago.  Subsequently, the drama of fear, despair, tension, denial, loss and acceptance played out.  Mistakes were made, relationships damaged and lessons were learned.  But, one of the primary components of a happy life is resilience.  I licked my wounds, got up and got out, back into a new, strangely liberated world.

Since those days, I’ve gained awareness of my intuition more and more often.  It has taken some training and some time, but I now have much clearer access to it.  Pausing for a moment to check in has become routine.  Now, it takes just a short time to sense whether I’m urged to go, or to stay.  If I’m ambivalent now, I tend to stay.

A wise man told me years ago, talking about the value of reclaiming this ability to pause between stimulus and response, “Don’t trust your intuition, obey it!”  The pause makes all the difference.  This instant frees us up to see the choice we are offered and to consciously choose.  It is in this ability to choose that our freedom lies.

“Between stimulus and response there is a space.  In that space is our power to choose our response.  In our response lies our growth and our freedom.” Viktor Frankl

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_resilience