Many clients and students come to me with an all-or-nothing attitude toward intuition. They want to know if they should trust their intuition and use it instead of logic, or give up on it entirely and rely only on logic if they cannot always trust their intuition. Interestingly, this mindset puts way too much pressure on ourselves—and on our intuition—and can even quiet it down. It is like telling a wise friend to never speak up unless they are one hundred percent accurate. What we tend to forget is that whenever we need to make an important decision, it is best to gather all the inputs we can access, consider all the factors involved, and then put them together and sift through them to reach a conclusion.
Intuition is the ability to access your accumulated knowledge and experiences—including those stored in your subconscious and unconscious—and to generate new ideas or answers to your questions. Joel Pearson, a neuroscientist and professor at the University of South Wales, defines intuition in his book The Intuition Toolkit as "the learned, productive use of unconscious information to improve decisions or actions." He emphasizes that intuition involves drawing on unconscious information in a way that enhances decision-making and behavior, distinguishing it from impulses, habits, or random guesses. Pearson’s approach is grounded in neuroscience and offers practical guidance for developing and trusting intuition under the right conditions.
Pearson uses the acronym SMILE, to describe five conditions that need to be satisfied in order for intuition to work: The letters correspond to: Self-Awareness (caution about using intuition when under the influence of high emotions); Mastery (relying on intuition in areas where the person has a lot of experience or expertise); Impulses (knowing the difference between impulses and addictions and intuition); Low probability (not using intuition for low probability events or situations such as rare occurrences); and Environment (using intuition only in familiar and predictable contexts). These conditions all make sense when you consider that intuition is based on all of our accumulated knowledge and experiences.
I always tell my clients and students to learn how to tap into their intuition and capture its response, but also to compare it with what their intellect or logic suggests, as well as with what experts on the topic say when relevant. As you test your intuition, you combine it with conscious thinking and analysis. You can review and analyze the conditions under which your intuition was activated. You can also ensure that you were not anxious or frustrated when you tried to access your intuition, as strong emotions may have influenced your response rather than true intuition. By comparing the input from your intuition with expert opinions on the topic, you expand your base of accumulated knowledge and experience beyond your own. It is healthy to question your intuition in this way.
Some of my clients and students ask why we should even get into intuition if we cannot trust it completely. In response, I ask them if they can trust all their conscious thoughts all the time. They immediately say, “No!” Then I ask why they don’t just stop thinking or never take their conscious thoughts into account when making decisions. They reply that they think because they are able to, and many times it is useful to them. As you can imagine, this is when I point out that they can use their intuition as well, since we all have that ability and it can be useful in many cases. The key is to learn to tap into intuition in such a way that the conditions for reliability are mostly met, capture the response, and still question and compare it to what your intellect and research suggest.
You can read more about how to activate your intuition and make decisions using it alongside your logic in my book Down to Earth: Demystify Intuition to Upgrade Your Life that is scheduled to be published on September 15th, 2025.
Sources:
Pearson, J. (2024). The Intuition Toolkit: The New Science of Knowing What without Knowing Why. Simon & Schuster Australia.
https://www.amazon.com/Intuition-Toolkit-Science-Knowing-Without/dp/B0CGJR475B
