Trust your intuition? Can coaching with imagery help?

When someone tells you to trust your intuition, how do you respond? Whilst your answer might reflect where you tend to sit on the ‘feel’ rather than ‘think’ spectrum, most of us have some memorable evidence of how intuition either saved us from a bad outcome or perhaps, how in hindsight, we should have listened to it. 

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Intuition manifests itself through a visceral ‘gut’ feeling. A feeling that ranges from a definitive, ‘Do not walk down that dark alley’ type instruction, to a barely there tingle that our logic-leaning brains can sometimes miss. As Albert Einstein put it, “The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honours the servant and has forgotten the gift”. 

What we ‘feel’ in our body is the brain's way of saying hang on, there’s more to this. Slow down! Observe, question.

Intuition baffles scientists. It tends to get lumped in with a host of other themes like paranoia, cognitive bias and the paranormal. So perhaps to understand it better, we should call out what it isn’t. And who better to help us than eminent psychologist Joel Pearson, who, in his recent book, ‘The Intuition Toolkit’, shines a light on scenarios that are what he calls ‘misintuition'. This is his five-step guide, with a memorable acronym…


S = Self-awareness

We shouldn’t trust what feels like intuition when we are stressed or emotional because what we’re really doing is relying on emotional thinking, fear or paranoia.

M = Mastery

You can’t rely on intuition if it’s your first time doing something. This is a good one to remember when you try a new skill. Don’t listen to the voice that tries to tell you won’t be any good at it. 

I = Impulses/addictions

These are often mistaken for intuition, but impulses are “innate reflexes” i.e., the thing that drives the salmon upstream to spawn. So next time you get a craving, it’s got nothing to do with intuition.

L = Low probability

Attributing a random event like dreaming of a plane crash the night before a plane actually crashes somewhere in the world, is also not intuition.

E = Environment

Only use intuition in familiar and predictable contexts. It’s probably not the best way to assess a prospective business partner from a different culture or to navigate your way around a new city. 

Source: Joel Pearson, ‘The Intuition Toolkit’: Joel’s observations may help to spot the red herrings, but that still leaves us with a host of scenarios where listening to intuition could be vital.

Take for example when faced with one of life’s big decisions. Whether you still love your partner, whether you are in the right job, whether to walk away from a long friendship… People often describe these kinds of gut feelings as, ‘eating away’ at them such is the strength of calling to connect and trust intuition. 


How coaching can help

Turning to coaching can be a really effective way to explore intuitive feelings and disrupt the limiting thinking patterns that make us feel trapped or unable to decide. But some dilemmas are harder to resolve and the real evidence to make a confident decision is buried deep below the surface in our unconscious thoughts.

And that’s when imagery can be really helpful. Imagery as understood by Carl Jung, is the bridge to the unconscious brain. Our unconscious brain is home to the vast reserve of everything we’ve ever thought felt, seen or imagined and it’s encoded as imagery. So when we see or identify with an image we trigger the emotion attached to that image.

By working with images in the coaching space, we widen the decision-making stimulus and make thoughts and feelings that are hard to express in words, or may have been repressed or forgotten, tangible. These might not always be happy feelings, some images can evoke darker thoughts* but ultimately exploring emotive imagery in a safe place is an instructive way to act on intuition and reveal influential evidence of what really drives you. 

The choice of whether we act on intuition is ours to take. But do take comfort from the fact that to feel viscerally is a positive way to use unconscious information for better decisions or actions. 

NB* Coaching with imagery is not always advisable for someone recently bereaved or suffering from unresolved trauma or mental illness.

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The views expressed in this article are those of the author. All articles published on Life Coach Directory are reviewed by our editorial team.

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Brighton BN1 & London W11
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Written by The Shapeshifter
Creativity and career coach. IAPC&M/ CCT /FRSA.
location_on Brighton BN1 & London W11
Jude Arnup (aka the Shapeshifter) is an accredited coach specialising in working with creatives. She is a trained practitioner in the Collage Coaching Technique™. Jude is ICF/AC Approved.
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