GUT FEELING: How To Let It Guide and Guard You.

Your Gut Feeling can make a big difference in your life and can help you reach new heights if you learn how to tune in to it.

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Today, we lived in a fast paced world, events, situations and the need for survival has made people blind and deafened to the importance of serenity and calm as well as recognizing that we are God’s Masterpiece created in His Likeness. This is supposed to be our lot and key to complete happiness in life.

Our borders and the space available per square meter to each individual are continually being receded.

Resulting in polluted and crowded environment, the resultant effect being a loss of the essence of the creator in us therefore causing us to loss the ability of our gut feeling.

As the noise levels from the blaring of sirens, hooting of car horns, music from loud speakers as well as noise from public address systems from worship places reached unprecedented height, our inner peace and calm are continuously being eroded. And inner peace and calm is a prerequisite to recognizing our gut feeling (instinct). We are continuously being bombarded by these external sounds, but fail to acknowledge the impact on our being. However, there are other forms of noise which affects the average person. These are the thoughts we hold inside our head. Scientists say humans have over 60,000 (sixty thousand) thoughts a day.

These thought forms, if they are incoherent can cause imbalance and restiveness in us.

More so, these thought forms are more dangerous, they are subtle and determine whether you can achieve your dreams and goals in life.

A man they say is what he thinks of all day. Hence, these inner thought forms as well as the external noises turn our body into a battle field of sought.

Our focus here is how we can decipher the messages from our gut feeling and inner voice in a noisy world and use it to make our lives and the world a better place.

DIFFERENT SCHOOLS OF THOUGHT ON THE GUT FEELING

When you are a victim of inner conflicts and restiveness, which comes from your inability to retreat once in a while into the sacred sanctuary of your being, you are unable to perceive messages and impressions from your gut feeling, thereby making important life decisions from the use of your rational reasoning which is subject to errors and mistakes, since you try to reach decisions base on past experiences and judgments. This is why you hear people say my decisions did not work out, or I made the wrong choice on this matter. Obeying your gut feeling could save you a lot of wear and tear.

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Top achievers and many great men learn to bypass or drop their rational reasoning when making important life changing decisions. They have mastered the use of their gut feeling. How and where this impression does reach the person who has learned to use their gut in making decisions is still a subject of confusion between the scientists, psychologists and the religionists. The best explanation Psychologists now offer is that intuition is a mental matching game. The brain takes in a situation, does a very quick search of its files and finds its best analogue among the stored sprawl of memories and knowledge. Based on that analogy, you ascribe meaning to the situation in front of you. The gut feeling does not use words or images. Gut feeling uses the emotions and sometimes reaches us through the Central Nervous System. You know things you don’t even know how you know them. Yet you have a sense of certainty when driving down a strange street that you really must make a left turn.

Gut feeling or intuition is a sudden strong judgments’ whose origin we can’t immediately explain. This school of thoughts however, believed these impressions emanates from the gut which is close to the abdomen. The gut is made up of nerve cells that have a mind of its own; it picks the signals transmitted from the brains and passes it through the emotion and the Central Nervous System.

Another school of thoughts suggest that you can feel approaching events specifically because of your dopamine neurons. The jitters of dopamine help keep track of reality, alerting us of the subtle patterns that we can’t consciously detect.

Most religious people, including Christians and the Middle Eastern religionists believe that there is an unseen force that lives within each of us, and that connects us all. This force can guide us if we can tune in to it. Impressions from this force reach us as gut feeling or intuition. Most Christians believed that if you accept the lord Jesus Christ he can guide you and you can hear is voice as the still small voice in your heart.

In Star Wars movie, Master Yoda, the great Jedi told Luke the Skywalker that ‘’my ally is the force, and a powerful ally it is. Life creates it, and makes it grow. Its energy surrounds us and binds us. You must feel the force around. Here, between you, me, the tree, the rock, everywhere. Even between the land and the sea, if Luke learns to master the force as other Jedi’s have done, the Force can provide access to even higher levels of awareness and intuition’’.

I am sure a lot of people have felt this feeling of knowingness, which guided them or steered them away from danger or led them to seemingly good fortune. Obeying your gut feeling means you must give your gut the attention it deserves. Your gut has a quicker link to your inner self than your brain does. Examples abound of people who have been saved from disasters; others have made fortune just by following their gut feeling. At this juncture, I am going to stop to share stories of people who have benefitted from following their gut feeling.

YOUR LIFE CAN BE INTERESTING IF YOU LEARN THE CULTURE OF OBEYING YOUR GUT FEELING.

Starting with my story. Some years ago I had a very important engagement to fulfill in Lagos, Nigeria, but didn’t have the money to make it to Lagos. As I looked for money to be able to embark on the journey, I became distraught and disappointed as it became clearer every passing day that I won’t be able to get the money for the cost of transportation to Lagos and back to Warri, a distance of about 397km. But, from the beginning, I could recognize this quiet voice associated with a strong feeling telling me that all would be well, that I should proceed to Lagos when it was time for me to go. But, each time my rational reasoning will set in, saying, don’t be silly, how can you go to Lagos without a dime in your pocket, who have you seen embarked on such a suicidal mission? However, I braced the odd and decided to follow my gut feeling. On the day of the trip, I carried my bag and decided to embark on the suicidal mission. On getting to Effurun roundabout, without money except with the assurance from my instinct, I started walking toward Sapele, another transit town on the way to Lagos. After walking for some time, doubts began to creep in, but each time I would push it aside, checking to see if the assurance from the gut feeling was still there. I was resolute and believed strongly that a miracle would happen. As I kept walking, as if by a stroke of luck the miracle happened. A car behind me started hooting its horn ruthlessly. I was embarrassed, at the same time angered by the horn, even after I had shifted clearly away from the road. The lone driver apparently, trying to get my attention drove to where I was and beckoned on me to come and he asked if I was going to Lagos. I couldn’t believe my ears, though I answered in the affirmative albeit with some hesitation. When he noticed my hesitation, he went ahead to explain that, he came to town for a meeting and was going back to Lagos where he resides and had been praying to God to send a companion to accompany him in the long journey. That was when he saw me and decided to ask. Needless to say, that was one of the best days of my life. As I highlighted in Lagos, this dude gave me some good amount of money in appreciation for being a good companion.

I have experienced many similar miracles since I learned to obey and follow my gut feeling.

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Another story of following your gut feeling was the story of Photographer Mindy Véissid, who woke up one winter morning in 2010 with a simple idea: dogs running in the snow. “That’s all I had,” she recalled. The Manhattan resident followed her gut feeling and went across town to Central Park. There, Véissid found three dogs jumping around in a couple of inches of new snow covering the famed park’s Great Lawn. She plopped down in the field and waited. That’s when the dogs headed right for her. She snapped off a shot just before they barreled over her. The picture she took that morning, of happy-looking pups charging through a cloud of snow with the New York City skyline behind them, has become one of Véissid’s calling cards, maybe her most recognizable shot. It’s a photo she would have missed if she had not trusted her instinct.

This last story about trusting your gut feeling was from a lady we would call Jane who learned in a hard way about the danger that comes when we disobey our gut feeling and try to use cognitive reasoning to guide ourselves or assess our situation. One day Jane went shopping and met a stranger who offered to help her with her groceries. Although the stranger looked kind and like a perfect gentleman, her instinct told her to dispatch this stranger feeling that behind the beautiful smile could be a wicked intention. She argued with herself front and back and decides to follow her reasoning. This stranger walked her home, and as soon as he was in her apartment, brought out a gun and threatened to shoot her if she did not let him have his way. The stranger raped her repeatedly and left her unconscious. She would have been spared this agony if she had listened and trust her gut feeling.

Techcrunch reported a story about Derek Anderson who is the founder of Startup Grind. Derek once asked a successful entrepreneur for advice on what he should do with his latest product idea. His reply was simple ‘trust your gut.’ What does your gut tells you?

Derek confidently replies that his gut feeling tells him that the idea is a $100million business. Although according to Derek he followed his gut started the business, but what happened after is left to be imagined. The question now is was his gut wrong? Derek later met to discuss with George Zachary who is a co-founder of Charles River Ventures Partners and a believer of obeying your gut feeling to arrive at important decisions. In his 17 years running the company, George has had over $1billion returns on $150million in investments. He is an investor in companies like Twitter, Yammer, Playdon, Jambool, and lots more.

This subject is one George has preached about for a long time. ‘’listening to my gut is the right thing to do for me. It doesn’t mean it’s going to work. But it does mean that’s what I should follow’’ said George. He said when he has followed his brain rather than his heart it resulted in disaster and failure every time. He also said he has had no success from making a rational decision based on fear.

George isn’t the only person with this creed. Steve Jobs famously said at his Stanford commencement address in 2005, ’’you can’t connect the dots looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something-your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life’’ he said.

But does it mean you will achieve success any time you go with your gut feeling? George is surprisingly honest and frank about his failures. Despite his friendship with Elon Musk, he didn’t invest in Musk’s early company x.com which he says was a mistake.

He had an opportunity to lead Twitters series A at $25million valuation but he refuse to put his money into it he felt the idea was not good enough to make the cut. He realized his mistake only after Fred Wilson had invested in twitter series A funding ‘’A lot of mistake I have made at acting out of my gut, led to important things that I’ve needed to learn to get better. I’m not sure there is any divine purpose or anything behind it, but what I have come to know is that by learning through my mistakes I’ve tended to get better’’ he says. ‘’There’s no 64000 variable algorithm to investing. If there was, then I would be doing it and so would everyone else. My algorithm to investing is ‘’Do I feel more energized at the end of the meeting than at the beginning of the meeting? That is all there is nothing more. But like Kevin O’ Leary said ‘’ when you are an investor, you can look at the quantitative and qualitative elements of an investment, but there is a third aspect. What do you feel in your gut’’

In 17 years of investing, his gut feeling is a solid bet. George was a founder at shutterfly which eventually went public. He was one of the few Odeo investors that managed to also invest in Twitter.

What’s more, it might not always be obvious when a business decision is based upon your gut feeling— or a deep well of experience. Many of Richard Branson’s successes with Virgin Atlantic have come from snap decisions, for instance. Branson is famous for letting his hunches take over strategic sessions and for avoiding formal business plans. “I research new ideas very thoroughly, asking a lot of people about their experiences and their thoughts. But on many occasions I have followed my intuition; you can’t make decisions based on numbers and reports alone.” He said.

This principle helped guided Steve Jobs to iTunes and the iPod — two projects that were seen as monumental risks when first released in 2001. Jobs made a quick, intuitive decision to green light them even as many doubters said it would sink Apple into a bottomless hole of development costs.

While Jobs made those decisions rapidly, he was also fastidious about the execution of his projects. He famously went through code line by line to make sure his lowest-level employees were executing his plans perfectly.

Click here to Download The free ebook “Think and Grow Rich” by Napoleon Hill

Western cultures began to embrace intuition and people began trusting in their gut feeling only recently, while research suggests Southeast Asian countries have long given credit to the gut being a good guide to decision making.

Eastern managers, for instance, are more likely to rely on hunches and give them credit for successes afterward.

In the west people like Oprah sometimes make decisions based on their gut, she once advised people to follow their intuition. ‘’follow your instincts. That’s where true wisdom manifest itself’’ she said.

Tennis star LeBron James once acknowledges an advice from Warren Buffet, he said ‘’Warren Buffet told me once, and he said always follow and trust your gut. When you have that gut feeling, you have to go with it, don’t go back on it’’.

If these wonderful people all use their gut feeling to arrive at important life decisions as well as business decisions, methinks you should also.