Putting your intuition to work

by Brian Tracy

Men and women become great when they begin listening to their inner voices. Intuition is so powerful, the greatest men and women of history studied and wrote about it for thousands of years. When you use it regularly and systematically, there is virtually nothing that you cannot accomplish.

Your intuition is a still, small voice within. You may experience your intuition as a gut-feeling, as an inner sense of what is right or wrong for you. Sometimes your intuition manifests itself as a hunch or an inspiration. Often it comes as a flash of insight. Your intuition leads you to new ideas, concepts and breakthroughs. Sometimes, an intuitive flash helps you see a situation differently and solve it on a different level.

Einstein was referring to intuition when he said: “No problem can be solved on the same level at which you meet it.”

You can unlock your intuition by using your imagination to think about your problem in a different way. There are two major types of imagination you use continually, both of which require the highest use of your intuitive powers. They are synthetic imagination and creative imagination.

Synthetic imagination
Synthetic imagination is your ability to assemble existing pieces of knowledge and information into new forms. It is very much like taking all the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, having a clear idea of the picture or goal that you want to accomplish and assembling them into a single piece.

This form of imagination is often called integrative intelligence. Integrative intelligence is your ability to integrate a large number of different pieces of information into a single precept for decision and action. This form of intelligence is extremely valuable in sales, where you must consider a large number of different pieces of information at once.

People who rise to the top are invariably those who know more than others. Divisions in our society do not exist between those who have more and have less; they exist between those who know more and know less.

As a salesperson, you must continually gather additional bits of practical and useful information to have different ideas and concepts to draw upon. Your intuition then goes to work for you by helping you quickly sort out the relevant facts and giving you the answers you need when you need them.

Creative imagination
Creative imagination refers to your ability to come up with completely new and different ideas and concepts to solve problems and achieve goals. 

The most successful men and women of all time are those who deliberately train themselves to tap into creative imagination on a regular basis. You can do it too, if you learn how.

Your creative imagination is the source of all hunches, inspirations, imagination, flashes of insight and new understandings of complex concepts. The cultivation and development of your creative imagination helps you make more progress in one or two years than the average person might make in 10 or 20.

Your creativity is like a muscle. It grows with use. The more you practice with it and rely on it, the stronger it becomes and the faster it acts for you.

Your intuition is your direct pipeline to a form of intelligence completely beyond your conscious brain. It is accessed by your subconscious mind, which is controlled by the thoughts you think and the beliefs you hold in your conscious mind.

The more you affirm and visualize your desired goals in your conscious mind, the more readily your subconscious mind picks them up and the more rapidly your intuition or creative imagination is triggered.

In your lifetime, you made a lot of decisions, some of them right and some of them wrong. But when your intuition tells you to do or to not do something, it is always correct.

If you have ever gone against your intuition, your inner voice, haven’t you regretted it? Where you push aside that nagging inner feeling, it comes back to haunt you.

Perhaps the best method for stimulating your intuition is learning to practice solitude on a regular basis. The greatest thinkers of all time practiced solitude as a regular part of work and life. They took time to be alone with themselves. They sat quietly prior to any situation of importance. 

Most people never practice solitude because they believe they have no time for it. However, one good idea that comes to you in the silence of solitude can save you a year of hard work. You cannot afford not to practice solitude on a regular basis. Here’s how you do it.

First, find a place to sit where you can be completely alone, in silence, without interruptions. You want to avoid any activities that will disturb your reverie, such as eating, drinking, listening to music, and getting telephone calls. You can sit in your basement, your backyard, or on a park bench. The main objective is to be completely alone with yourself.

And second, force yourself to sit without moving for 60 minutes. The first 25 or 30 minutes will be excruciatingly difficult. You will have an irresistible urge to get up and walk around. But you must persist. You must force yourself to stay still.

After 25 or 30 minutes, a wonderful thing will happen. You will start to feel very good about yourself and your life. You will relax completely. Your mind will become calm and clear. You will feel energy flowing through your body. The situations and difficulties of your life will seem to fade away, and you will begin to get tremendous clarity on how to reach your goals.

At the end of your 60 minutes, get up and do exactly what your intuition told you to do. Don’t worry about whether or not people will like it or approve of it. Just take the action, make the commitment, do the deed. You will find later this was exactly the right thing to do.

Solitude requires no energy, no effort, no trying at all. It simply requires a state of relaxed awareness where you open your mind to infinite intelligence. And at the right moment, exactly the right answer you need will come to you, in exactly the right form.

You can overcome any obstacle, solve any problem or achieve any goal by tapping into the incredible powers of your mind and by trusting your intuition in everything you do. Once you begin to develop and use your intuition, you will become more alert, more aware, smarter and more effective in everything that you do. And your potential will begin to unfold at a speed you cannot now imagine.

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