A Life Led By Intuition
So what does a life led by intuition look like? What are the benefits? According to Choquette, a person can’t fulfill their life purpose without it. “Intuition is a personal guidance system and if it is used well life quite simply gets easier,” says Choquette. Decisions become easier. Ideas and inspiration flow more naturally so people have more fun plotting the direction of their days and their life. As a person becomes more skillful at trusting their intuition they will see that it works and that actually they do know the answers and they are capable of making the choices which support them perfectly in this world. Choquette says that intuition can actually keep a person safe and happy just as well as decisions based on the logic of the brain. Ideally people will learn to use both intuition and logic and to draw on all the information available to them from the environment and outside sources, to make the best decisions. As intuition sharpens so too do ones other senses and a person will become much more affective at making the “right” decisions for them.
And from the experience of one of the intuition study participants for this paper, Kim Todd, who decided to practice techniques for improving intuition over 6 months from June to December 2011, as her confidence with intuition grew life started to take on a magical quality – like anything is possible – because her intuition really does seem to know all the right answers. (From personal conversation December 15, 2011.) Todd reported that it feels as if she really is in control of her destiny, and her happiness. She reported that when listening to her intuition she feels happy and calm and her energy is positive. Good things seem to keep happening. And because she is practicing techniques to encourage calm and peace so as to get a good intuitive reading, her overall life has become seemingly more relaxed and harmonious. So there are health benefits here as well. Indeed the benefits do seem endless. So much so that it seems intuition is something that everyone would benefit from practicing.
Intuition In Coaching
So how can intuition be used in coaching and what would the effects be? Reitz concludes in her coaching paper titled “Developing Intuitive Awareness”, that “intuition plays a crucial role in the coaching relationship”. She says that all coaches use it to varying degrees and some belong to the “expertise camp” which believe intuition is based on experience and expertise which is stored in memory and accessed when needed; while others belong to the “connection camp” which believes people can communicate with and read their environment and other people in ways they do not even fully understand. “We are capable of holding only a relatively small amount in our conscious mind,” says Reitz. “Intuition enables us to tap into our unconscious expertise as well as perhaps giving us access to a wider, collective or universal unconscious.”
There are many ways in which intuition is used by coaches in coaching, for example, sensing the energy of the client and using this information to formulate questions in the coaching session. Reitz describes one situation in a coaching session when the coach had an intuition about why the client had come to the session. The coach asked the client if there was anything else she wanted to discuss that day. She replied “no”. Later the coach reframed the question and asked again, this time the client spoke of a major problem that was actually affecting her and which opened up an important area for the client to explore. In another example, the coach had a visual intuition of a snake shedding it’s skin during the coaching session. The coach was able to communicate this vision to the client with positive results, as this turned out to be how the client was feeling about the decision she had just made. If coaches are able to use their intuition well and with confidence while coaching, it seems that this can create a stronger connection between coach and client as well as create insights to drive the coaching process. However, the coach does need to develop experience using intuition to ensure it is used well and to ensure he or she is not being influenced by assumptions or bias or other emotions.
The Co-Active Coaching Model actively promotes the use of intuition when working with clients. This involves the coach using intuition as well as encouraging clients to tap into their own intuition. The co-active coaching manual describes intuition as enormously valuable because “it synthesizes more impressions and information than we could ever analyse consciously.” This model encourages coaches to “blurt out” their intuitions so as not to lose the moment where an insight can occur. It says that “blurting out your intuition can often create a dramatic shortcut in the coaching conversation, boring through more layers.” Coaches who develop expertise using intuitive skills could then naturally pass on their skills to clients to assist them in developing their own intuition. As outlined above, there are many benefits to developing intuitive skills, including health benefits as well as the benefits which come from making decisions which help people to fulfill life purpose. Since coaching is based on “effectively empowering people to find their own answers” intuition is an effective skill to learn for doing just that.