Nothin’ But Gut
Gen Y has no gut instinct. Or so I declared late last night (N.B. When in the throes of insomnia, I sometimes throw out bold declarations and unfiltered non sequiturs on Twitter). On the whole, we’ve never made developing our intuition and using it as a guide in decision-making much of a priority. And why would we? Sources of information to check and double check our options against the “norm,” against the paths chosen by our peers, against the advice offered up by four out of five dentists is everywhere. When do we actually fly blind?
But even if we’re never faced with the prospect of being trapped in an avalanche and having to weigh the pros and cons of self-amputating a crushed arm as a means of facilitating an escape (pro: More mobility! con: Dying of sepsis!), it pays to have have the ability to take ownership of our decisions and to be able to put our faith in what our accumulated experience, intuition and overarching values tell us vs. allowing the majority to rule our lives.
The good news is that gut instinct can be developed, even for those of you born figuratively gutless. It’s a repetitive process of performing a post-mortem on decisions, noting how difficult or easy it was to come to the decision, the outcomes of the decision and how they did or didn’t match up with your expectations. Lather, rinse, repeat. File this information away. Dig it out the next time you have to make a decision and look for similarities between those circumstances and the present ones. Do you feel the same sense of dread about buying this condo that you felt about taking that I.T. job in New Haven? If the latter decision didn’t pan out and you can identify commonalities between it and your current conundrum, those red flags represent your gut trying to send you a message. Heed its warnings and proceed with caution.
Honing your gut instinct is a trial and error process. It involves exposing yourself to the possibility of failure and dealing with the consequences in a deliberate, measured way. Not going to pieces, not blaming yourself, not vowing to never take another risk so help you God as long as you shall live, but mining each disappointment, heartbreak or personal implosion for the information mentioned above and being willing to examine failure not as a reflection on your self-worth, but a rich capsule of useful experiential data – choices made and not made, input sought and feedback discounted and on and on.
Developing a gut instinct is one thing. With enough time and effort and willingness to make and implement decisions which may not work, we can all cultivate or tap into natural intuition, but relying on it is a whole ‘nother ballgame. We live crowdsourced lives. Google (or Facebook/Twitter/LinkedIn stalk) your blind date, check Yelp for the 411 on that new restaurant or Rotten Tomatoes to see what the critics have to say about this week’s new releases, poll friends and family and when all else fails, there’s probably an app for that. We’re surrounded by so much information and opinion that we’ve deprioritized our own experience and feelings (sometimes entirely unconsciously), especially in the face of overwhelming evidence that we’re not on the same page as everyone else. Be a lonely outlier, or adjust your perspective to conform to the baseline and use the ready pipeline of public opinion data, product reviews, polemics, sales figures, celebrity endorsements, etc. as a proxy for a hard and fast ruling from the pit of your own stomach? Not much of a choice if you’ve never bothered to cultivate your own intuition to the point of trusting it over the wisdom of the crowd. But if you do develop it, eventually, that gut instinct is gonna come in very, very handy. There will come a time when the crowd gets it wrong, when something looks good on paper, but just feels off to you, when you’ll be faced with a decision for which there is no precedent and which is so deeply personal that only you can be the one to decide it. Back against the wall and it’s nothin’ but gut. And you’re going to be glad your instincts are there for you when that time comes. I guarantee it.
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