For those of you who know me well, you’ve probably heard some of my stories about my ridiculously strong sixth sense. Sometimes I know things that I simply can’t explain. But I’ve learned over the years not to say much about it in public because, frankly, people either think it’s strange or they think I’m bragging over lucky guesses. The funny thing is, years later, those “guesses” have an annoying habit of turning out to be right.
The challenge is that I didn’t exactly grow up in a world that celebrated intuition (“inta-what?”).
I have an undergraduate and master’s degree in engineering. My training taught me to love data. To question assumptions. To look for proof. And I still believe deeply in that way of thinking. Some of the biggest mistakes I’ve seen leaders make come from ignoring the facts.
But I also think we’ve swung too far in the other direction.
Somewhere along the way, I internalized a message that if I couldn’t prove something with data, then my intuition wasn’t valid. It wasn’t just secondary to logic—it was something to suppress until the evidence showed up.
The problem is that great leadership can’t always wait for evidence.
Sometimes you’re interviewing someone who looks perfect on paper, but something just doesn’t sit right.
Sometimes you’re looking at a business that’s losing money and every spreadsheet says, “Shut it down,” while another part of you knows it’s creating something strategically valuable that the numbers can’t yet capture.
Sometimes you know a partnership is over long before you can articulate why.
Those moments fascinated me because I’ve lived them over and over again. More than once I’ve ignored my gut because I couldn’t defend it intellectually, only to look back two years later and think, I knew. I absolutely knew.
But by then, saying it out loud just sounds like an “I told you so.”
This summer something shifted.
During a retreat earlier this year, I had one of those moments that quietly rearranges how you see yourself. I realized that I had become incredibly comfortable accessing my intuition for other people. Put me in front of a client, and I could often sense dynamics, tensions or possibilities that weren’t obvious on the surface. But when it came to my own life? I had almost completely disconnected from that part of myself.
That realization hit harder than I expected.
As I reflected back on my life, it was like walking through a graveyard full of decisions in which I silenced my gut because I couldn’t prove the business case. Ouch.
As client work naturally slowed over the summer, instead of trying to fill every open space in my calendar, I decided to protect it. I wanted to think again. Read again. Paddle. Walk. Get bored.
That decision has led me down a path I honestly didn’t expect.
I’ve been reading Laura Day’s Practical Intuition, and what’s striking isn’t that she’s convincing me intuition exists. I’ve never doubted that. What’s changing is that I’m finally learning how to work with it intentionally instead of treating it like this mysterious thing that occasionally drops into my life uninvited.
I’m learning that intuition isn’t the opposite of logic. It’s another source of information.
Data tells us what has happened.
Logic helps us understand why.
Intuition sometimes points toward what neither of those can see yet.
The older I get, the less interested I am in the debate over whether intuition is “real.” I’ve had too many experiences to question that anymore. What interests me now is whether we’ve unintentionally trained smart people to distrust one of their greatest decision-making assets simply because it can’t always be explained in a spreadsheet.
I’m beginning to think the best leaders aren’t the ones who choose between data and intuition.
They’re the ones who know how to harness both.