come last on several occasions. Some of the participants spend hours studying form tables and injury lists. What they don’t know is that my wife makes her predictions at the last minute and without any thought, and she still wins by a mile.
Lyn often ends her pronouncements with the phrase “I just know.” Being male, it drives me to distraction. A typical conversation goes like this:
Me: I’m going to invest in Bob’s startup.
Lyn: Don’t, he’s bad news.
Me: How can you say that? You’ve never met him.
Lyn: I just know.
Me: How can you just know if you’ve never met him and have no idea what his business is?
Lyn: I just do. It’s up to you, but if you want my advice, I wouldn’t do it.
Today, I take her advice, but it wasn’t always that way. I had to learn the hard way. The first few times I ignored her intuition, it cost me, financially and mentally. Now I know better. I also know that my wife is not unusual. Many women have powerful intuitions, while many men ignore their own. Some people dismiss intuition because they think it isn’t “logical,” but that doesn’t mean it isn’t valid and real.
Who else trusts their intuition? Bill Gates. Steve Jobs believed intuition is “more powerful than intellect.” Warren Buffett only makes decisions based on it. Richard Branson prefers it to “stats and data.” Albert Einstein called it the “only real valuable thing.” In a 2016 study, only one-third of the CEOs surveyed said they trusted their data and resulting analytics, while in another study, 59 percent of decision makers said that “the analysis they require relies primarily on human judgment rather than machine algorithms.”
At Cornell University, Dr. Daryl Bem oversaw a decade-long series of experiments involving a thousand participants that showed humans do indeed have the ability to “sense” future outcomes. Because of the intuition study’s paradigm-shifting implications, Dr. Bem waited until he had reached a “74 billion to 1” statistical certainty before releasing the results. By anyone’s standards that is statistically significant. Dr. Bem said, “It violates our notion of how the physical world works. The phenomena of modern quantum physics are just as mind-boggling, but they are so technical that most nonphysicists don’t know about them.”
Yet the implications for business of embracing the power of the feminine goes beyond just intuition and coming up with winning ideas. This approach should inform how every business is run. For instance, one 2013 study concluded that women’s abilities to make fair decisions when competing interests are at stake make them better corporate leaders. The study found that the more cooperative approach to decision-making translated into better performance for their companies. “We’ve known for some time that companies that have more women on their boards have better results,” explained Professor Chris Bart. “Our findings show that having women on the board is no longer just the right thing but also the smart thing to do. Companies with few female directors may actually be shortchanging their investors.”
The researchers found that male directors preferred to make decisions using rules, regulations, and traditional ways of doing business. Female directors, in contrast, were less constrained by these parameters and more prepared to rock the boat.
Several other studies have shown that gender equity in senior management and at the board level brings many tangible benefits. In 2016, Forbes said, “Today’s corporate world may be male-dominated but companies should take note: Hiring women is actually good for business. It’s not just about equality, it’s a business case with measurable success. Companies with more women onboard tend to outperform companies with more men onboard.”
My own experience matches this data. While startups don’t usually have to worry about hiring lots of employees or contractors and the composition of an executive board, it’s a good lesson to remember. Strive for gender balance in hiring in the same way you strive to balance the feminine/masculine attributes in yourself.
Meditation: Training the Mind
Meditation is called mindfulness training because, like practicing a sport, it improves us in measurable ways and increases our mental and emotional skills through focus and repetition. If you want to improve your intuition, meditation is one of the best ways.
According to University of Iowa researchers, the brain’s so-called “axis of intuition” is the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, which sits in the middle of the forehead. This is what gets depicted in cartoons of superheroes or spiritual gurus — a power emanating from the forehead. Further, a 2014 Wake Forest University study looked at the brains of fifteen volunteers before and after four days of mindfulness training. What did they find? In addition to a host of other wonderful brain enhancements, the freshly minted meditators seriously increased the “activity” and “interconnectivity” of their ventromedial prefrontal cortex. The ventromedial prefrontal cortex has been shown to play a key role in the extinction of conditioned fear responses and, importantly, in the maintenance of fear extinction over time. Fear is known to kill intuition.
Meditation can change your brain by eliminating fear for short periods, like thirty minutes, to create winning ideas and make better decisions. Every good idea I have ever had in business or life has come shortly after a session of meditation. I might feel fear before I sit in meditation — fear of problems, finances, growth, and so on — but by doing the meditation, I free my mind from fear and allow it to access solutions. It is the only method I know that helps.
There are many kinds of meditation techniques, and just like different forms of physical training in sports, they are used for different purposes and outcomes. Here, I offer one simple meditation technique that is intended to increase the frequency of great ideas.
Taking Quiet Time
I call this meditation technique “taking quiet time” (or TQT), and the whole thing takes about twenty minutes. It requires no skill or experience, and there are no advanced levels. It is a variation of a meditation technique that can be found in most spiritual practices.
The goal is to sit quietly, clear the mind, and for a few minutes think of nothing, which sounds simple but is actually very hard. It is contrary to the media-filled distractions of modern life and to how most of us have learned to behave. Yet to me, taking quiet time is the number-one business-growth tool in your arsenal.
Just like any sport, or any particular meditation technique, taking quiet time can be explained in simple or intricate terms, in four or four hundred steps. But if I want someone who has never played soccer to get excited about the sport, I will simply take them to a park and kick a ball around. If I first subjected the person to a step-by-step soccer lesson and explained every rule and technique, they would be bored to death. I want you to be excited about taking quiet time, so here is the four-step version. Kick it around for a while. If you want to know the intricacies of meditation, you can go as deep down that rabbit hole as you like (and a good place to start is my website, www.trevorgblake.com). But if you have never experienced the amazing benefits of meditation before, just try this simple process.
1.Get up thirty minutes earlier than your normal wakeup time.
2.Go to a quiet part of your home.
3.Sit upright in a chair, feet on the floor, hands overlapped.
4.Do nothing for twenty minutes. Try to think of nothing. Focus on your gentle breathing through each inhalation and exhalation. When the mind chatter kicks in — as it always does, even for expert meditators — smile and imagine the words floating out a window. Then start again and focus on breathing.
That is all there is to it. I never time myself because somehow I always know when twenty minutes are up, but you might want to set a timer at first, in case you fall asleep — and there is nothing wrong with falling asleep.
Your Intuition Needs a Distracted Brain
Meditating and taking quiet time work in ways we