Gut Feeling is What Matters the Most in Life

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Our ancestors passed down our gut feeling down generations and generations of life. It is our survival instinct that got us to where we are today. Ignore these feelings at your own peril. There’s a reason why your instincts are telling you one thing while your brain tells you another.

Your intuition should be your guiding star to life. It’s something that you feel is good or bad. There’s a reason why you feel that way in ways that you just don’t quite logically understand. It’s from years and years of life experiences and essential pattern recognition.

It’s your unconscious mind telling you that it thinks something is good or bad. There are very few new things in the world that is created every day. The 90%+ of things that we see are on a routine and we’ve most likely seen it before or at the very least a variation of it.

There’s a reason why history often repeats itself and when it doesn’t exactly repeat itself, it rhymes quite often. Are your gut feelings always right? No. However, even though your gut feeling isn’t always right, the majority of the time it is.

Logic, reason, and rationale isn’t as important as your survival instinct passed down over generations and generations.

If something just feels wrong, it probably IS wrong and if something feels right, it probably IS right. There are times when I ignored my senses and paid a dear price for it by the end of it all. For example, I never should have accepted my current job because I did not feel at ease with the boss who was interviewing me.

What is Gut Feeling?

Gut feeling is an immediate feeling of intuition that you have in which you can’t explain a solid rationale for. You don’t know how something is wrong nor do you know how to explain the rationale for it. However, you just sense that something is off. You don’t feel 100%.

I never understood intuition. It wasn’t logical or rational. What are the indicators that tell me that what I’m feeling is intuition? What data can I derive that allows me to conclude that it’s my instincts that are telling me something? It was a completely difficult concept to fully understand.

I’m a completely numbers and data driven person. Without numbers, it’s difficult for something to be convincing to me. However, when I paid the price for ignoring my intuition did I finally understand what it actually feels like to have doubtful feelings. It was when I interviewed for my current job.

It was a standard interview. The direct boss that I would be working with was walking me through the position, the culture of the office, and more. However, something was wrong. When I talked to him, our rhythm was completely out of sync.

I felt that he was answering questions to keep up the job’s image rather than giving me truthful answers. I asked him “how did this position become open?” He took a long pause at that. Then he replied with “the prior employee went for a great opportunity”.

That hesitation and pause coupled with every single one of our interactions told me this wasn’t the best office culture. I was right. While I’m learning a lot of things, I did not think that I belonged here and I still don’t, even after a couple of years under my belt. I regret that I ignored my gut feeling.

Signs You are Experiencing a Gut Feeling

One way to know whether you have a gut feeling instinct is to SMASH that social share button and post to your favorite social media! Your friends can benefit by learning more about their decision making process so that the quality of their decisions can improve.

Don’t let them ignore this crucial missing link when they are about to make crucial life decisions.

Moving on. There are physiological signs that your gut instincts are trying to tell you something. The number one indicator is that you feel different than when you are sitting down in your couch watching TV. You can’t quite pinpoint which area of your body feels different but it does.

Maybe it’s your heart sinking or your stomach turning. Even if it’s not as severe as these feelings, it’s an annoying nagging thought tugging at you. It’s nothing big but the feelings are still apparently there. When you leave the interaction and go home, you just don’t feel right.

Something doesn’t feel wrong necessarily, but something just feels off. That’s one of the most surefire indicators that your gut feeling is trying to tell you something. It’s your senses telling you that they saw this show before and you need to walk away from it.

Why You Should Listen to Your Gut Feeling

1) It’s a Survival Instinct

Gut feeling helps you survive.
It allowed you to survive.

Your ancestors passed down their DNA to you due to intuition. When they sensed that something scary was waiting for them around the corner, they avoided it. When they sensed that an obscure stepping stone seemed off, they avoided it. It’s a sensational feeling that something isn’t what it seems.

That there’s more than what meets the eye.

When you get a job offer, what’s your immediate thought? Is it that you want to accept the offer right away or reject the offer right away? Don’t think about it, think about your immediate reaction. Analysis paralysis is a real problem many people face. It’s what you immediately thought of the offer that matters.

There’s a reason why your gut feelings were so successful to get you to where you are today.

2) Gut Feeling Comes from Experience

Your brain works in two separate buckets, conscious and unconscious. Your unconscious mind stores a lot of information that the unconscious mind doesn’t have the brainpower to. Ever have one of those deja vu moments? You can’t concretely remember when that happened to you before but you’re sure it did.

It’s your unconscious brain that kept track of all the information you experienced throughout the years. That’s where the instinct and intuition comes from. You’ve experienced these things before but you just can’t remember the exact details of when you did.

Experience built your unconscious decision making process to be even better than any rational conscious decision can be. Your gut feeling is telling you that this is a replay of a movie you’ve already been through. Why are you ignoring it?

3) You Trust Yourself More

You’ll never know whether a decision was right or wrong until you go through the results of it. There’s no way to know beforehand the results of two separate decisions. The benefit of actually listening to your gut is that you trust your decisions more so than before.

Whether it’s right or wrong, that doesn’t matter. You start to depend and rely on yourself. I am usually a heavy opponent of dependency. However, when you are depending on yourself, I am heavily in favor of it. Your instinct is yourself telling you something that you haven’t even considered.

Why would you trust others to tell you that instead of yourself? The biggest cheerleader of yourself is not your parents or friends, it’s you. You are the foundation and building block to the life that you are building. Give yourself more credit.

4) You Avoid Analysis Paralysis

Gut feeling means no overanalyzing.
This isn’t the best course of action.

When you rely heavily on the immediate gut reaction to an event, then there is no chances of analysis paralysis. One great advice that I heard was “whatever decision you make, make it the right decision”. Don’t think about what could have been, move on and think about what decision you actually made.

You have the sole power to make a decision right. Decisive decisions are better than indecisive analysis that drags on for days, if not weeks at a time. There is no way to see the results of both decisions so that you can choose with having perfect information.

Your gut feeling took all of the painstaking process of thinking of the right decision out of it. Remember that the worst spot to be in isn’t being in a worse position. It’s to stay in the exact same place for a long time. It’s frustrating. Losing or winning is both good. Staying still is bad.

5) You Save Money

There’s so many people out there who are after your money. They just want to get dollars out of your pocket to their pocket. When one of my friends had a legal issue with his home insurance, he approached his lawyer for next steps. Without hesitation, his lawyer advised him to go to court.

The incentives are misaligned. My friend’s motive was to get the claim resolved in the cheapest and fastest way possible. The lawyer’s motive was to make as much money as he can. My friend’s gut feeling was to immediately decline and pursue the claim on his own.

It took a long bit of time, persuasion, and effort but the claim finally went through and processed after going through it alone. He saved money on lawyer fees just because he listened to his intuition and immediate thought before considering any other factors.

6) Not Driven by Fear or Anxiety

Your gut feelings are not driven by fear. It’s driven by experiential things that happened to you in the past. It’s a clear hint that history may repeat itself. When you listen to your gut, you get the benefit of skipping those emotions altogether. You don’t add those emotions as a factor in your decision.

Most of the analysis we do has to do with pros and cons. When we move on to the cons part of the equation, that’s when our fear kicks in. We think about the worst case scenarios and what if it doesn’t work out. All of that is removed through your gut instincts.

What Happens When You Ignore Your Gut Feeling

Ignore your gut at your own peril. There’s so many times that I got burned as a result of ignoring my gut.

1) You End Up Making a Subpar Decision

Before I accepted my current job, I actually told my boss’ boss that I wasn’t interested anymore. The reason is because I had a bad feeling about my boss. Therefore, I communicated that my preference was to remove myself from candidacy. I was right.

However, I saw the dollar signs that they offered so I took it. That was a subpar decision. I was so tired and fed up with my prior job that I didn’t think about what I had actually done. Which was to ignore my gut reaction that I wouldn’t get along with my current boss.

Don’t make a subpar decision like I did. Survival instincts are so powerful and teaches you more things than any textbook will. The right side that controls reasoning and problem solving isn’t always right. Sometimes, you have to listen to the left side of your brain more often.

2) Your Decision Isn’t Yours

When you ignore your gut feeling, your decision isn’t really yours. When someone pushes and wants you buy something very quickly, what’s your immediate first reaction? I bet it’s to walk away. I mean, it’s a textbook sign that they are using high pressure sales tactic to drive sales.

However, if you ignore that sense and go ahead with what they are selling because it’s so shiny and tempting, your decision isn’t yours. It’s theirs. You made that decision because others wanted you to, not because you wanted to. It makes a difference.

These kinds of decisions add up until one day, you wake up and you realize you don’t feel like yourself anymore. It’s not your life. It’s what someone else told you your ideal life should be. When you ignore your first intuitive thought, one day you’ll find out that others made all your decisions for you.

3) The Incorrect Lessons Register in Your Gut

When you ignore your own gut feeling, your gut questions itself. You trust yourself less as time passes. Your gut communicated something to you based on past experiences and yet you blatantly chose to ignore it and move forward anyway. Then it messes up your gut’s entire rhythm.

Maybe next time, it starts to think that a decision is bad when it’s good. So forth and so forth. It’s not a far stretch that when you question your own decisions and instincts, you start to lose self belief. it’s similar to when someone downright rejects any idea you thought was high quality.

Are you really willing to go to that same person who rejected your ideas in the future? More than likely not. You will avoid them and look for other people to pitch your ideas to. Your gut feeling also has its own internal rhythm that can’t be disrupted severely. Don’t let that happen and trust your gut instincts.

4) You Waste Time

Gut feeling helps save time.
Don’t waste precious time.

The most classic case of analysis paralysis. When you ignore your gut feeling, you can’t make a quick decision even if the situation needs one. What happens is you end up wasting time putting in more hours to come to an “optimal” decision. I get the need to come to an optimal conclusion.

However, when the cost to get to the optimal conclusion is high, then it becomes a problem. Not only that, we can’t know what the optimal conclusion is because we don’t know the results of both decisions down the road. Don’t invest resources into something that can’t be figured out.

That’s a fool’s game. Instead, make a decision and move on with your life. There are plenty of other things to finish and more things for you to do. Your time, attention, and effort is better spent elsewhere. Use it wisely.

Trust Your Gut Feeling or Be Left Behind

Your gut feeling is more important than you realize. Use it when you have to make the most important decisions such as finding a romantic partner, job offers, picking the right school, etc. It is the single most helpful tool that you have under your belt that you can use.

Trust yourself. While you may be unable to articulate the reasons why you are making such a decision, there is a reason why. In Malcolm Gladwell’s book, Blink, one example he gives is of George Soros. When you ask George Soros a question on why he thinks the economy will collapse, he will publicly say a logical reason.

Something about China not growing as fast as it used to, etc. However, his relative says how wrong his words are. George Soros usually sells stocks when he feels a pain running down his spine and back. That’s his intuition telling him that there’s something wrong that’s about to happen.

Anecdotal evidence? Yes. However, remember that gut feelings stem from experience. You won’t have a strong feeling when you are just starting out on something. That’s not how it works. However, you will have strong feelings about a decision once you are used to the nuances of the environment.

It’s your unconscious mind collecting past data and communicating it to you. It’s usually more useful and correct than your conscious reasoning process. Protect yourself from the past mistakes I made and make better decisions going forward.

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4 Replies to “Gut Feeling is What Matters the Most in Life”

  1. Just found your blog but enjoying it already. I have also made career choices that went against my gut but came with dollar signs ($$$). I think this is also driven by societal “norms”. It is considered normal in society to pursue the career that pays the most despite whether or not you actually like the job. Great post!

    P.S. – I need to find subtle ways to incorporate “SMASH that social share button” in my own blog LOL. Loved it

    1. Yep! We should never let the dollar signs drive our decisions especially when those decisions impact our life over the long term. It just sucks that everyone has to let the dollar signs drive their choices so we end up choosing suboptimal choices.

  2. I couldn’t agree more. It’s hard to learn how to harness gut feelings, but over time I am trying to listen to them more. When I told my wife I wanted to exit my CEO job, a huge sense of relief overwhelmed my body. The decision felt right…especially in my gut.

    Then there are other times, such as my financial advisor that I hired, where my gut was telling me “no” don’t do it, but I ignored it. Did it turn out horrible? no. But it’s certainly set our financials back quite a bit.

    Trust your gut.

    Also quiet your mind. That helps too!

    1. Ah, I remember reading your post about firing your financial advisor. It’s amazing just how much our gut seems to be right and how our intuition always find a way to be right by the end of it all without giving it a lot of thought and consideration.

      It’s like we have an innate ability to quickly find the answer to the problem that turns out even better than if we were dwelling on it for a long time.

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