Church of the Customer Blog
« Learning again to listen | Main | A perfect job title »
September 08, 2005
Learning again to listen
When my instinct intuition was telling me a few years ago that a consulting
client didn't really believe in customer evangelism and would be impossible
to work with, I didn't listen. We took the job for the money. The
client was impossible. The money wasn't worth the time.
When my instinct intuition was telling me last year that an event planner
wanting to hire me for a speaking engagement was disorganized and callow, I didn't
listen. I accepted the work. He was a terrible event planner and
did his own presentation right before me that borrowed liberally from my work. It made much of my presentation redundant.
When my instinct intuition was telling me last month that my PC was behaving
oddly and that I'd better back up critical data (or spring for a
substantial backup system), I kept putting it off in the name of other
important deadlines. My hard drive failed last week and took with it
gigabytes of critical data, research, PowerPoint files, accounting
records -- you name it.
Our instinct intuition is always there, talking to us. Quietly. The effects of age, adulthood and data overload make it harder to hear.
UPDATE: In the comments to this post, Chris Bailey rightly points out that intution is our inner voice, not instinct, which fuels our inherent disposition toward certain actions. In psychological terms, intuition is instinct seeking voice.
Other blogs that reference Learning again to listen:
so true... ssssshhh!
...listening to my instinct now - it's saying stop checking RSS feeds and send that e-mail you've been putting off!
OK...
That does it... you're the second person this week in my universe to have this happen. I'm now listening to my instinct and ordering a backup hard drive!
Good luck with getting your files back... oy.
Ben - you are SO right on. Almost every time I ignore my "gut" I regret it later - especially in terms of hiring, utilizing certian people in leadership roles (i work for a non-profit), etc...
Thanks for the great reminder!
Amen. Women especially have been taught not to listen to our instincts.
Ben, I hope you don't think I'm splitting hairs here, but I would argue that what you are talking about is really intuition rather than instinct. I make this distinction because in the business world, it is less acceptible to talk about intuition which is unfortunate and short-sighted. It's that inner voice that keeps us from blindly accepting facts and observations as truth.
I view the difference like this: our instincts are primal (other animals have these); our intuition is not only the higher voice of these instincts, but a purely human trait where we collect data from multiple levels - both conscious and unconscious - to inform our worldview.
You knew that event planner was a dud, your computer was going to crash, etc. Whether you chose to act on those or not, you had a feeling something wasn't quite right. I think that's really intuition.
So, it's okay for us men to acknowledge that we have intuition.
Chris, you're right on both counts. It was intuition that was fueling my doubts, not instinct.
For clarification purposes, instinct is innate knowledge that compels us to act. Intuition is knowing the unknowable.
Mike Arons of the University of West Georgia has written a fascinating treatise on the role of instinct and intution. He says: "Intuition is instinct seeking voice. Not only is intuition the voice of the instincts, it is the perpetual reminder of all human creation and activity of their sources, often forgotten by their authors in the reflective process, leading each author 'back' to the necessities of nature."
His paper is at http://www.westga.edu/~psydept/arons-intuition.html
"Our intuition is always there, talking to us. Quietly. The effects of age, adulthood and data overload make it harder to hear."
Basically, this is the theme of Malcolm Gladwell's "Blink" - that our preconcious adds up all those life experiences and makes a quick calculation based on that data. He argues that that instant result often more accurate than all the gunked-up thinking that comes later.
