More On Living Intuitively

Intuitive (tacit) knowledge and insights are important ways to guide ourselves through life, but it’s best to also check them against verifiable data and knowledge to determine the best path to take.

What I read: “Tacit (intuitive) knowledge has issues” by Theo Dawson. Published February 17, 2018.

I don’t often dole out advice with such certainty, but after decades of struggling with what seems to be every known goal and productivity strategy known to humankind, I’m here to tell you there’s a better way. At least a better way for many of us.

A while back I wrote about this topic in “Living Intuitively”.

I’ve written before about my tussles with the lifelong habit of believing I can somehow guide my future optimally through the use of detailed goals and associated task planning. Over time, I’ve had too many dashed hopes that resulted from a robust bout of detailed life planning. At least I’ve abandoned believing that such planning works for me, but replacing it with something that does actually work for me hasn’t been easy.

Enter intuitive living. At least that’s where my thinking is headed nowadays.

I struggled for a while with the word intuitive because it elicited an amorphous and intangible sense of mysticism, or something like that. But over time I’ve become comfortable with the word intuitive in part because it aligns with the concept of tacit knowledge we accumulate over time.

Often, people know more about a particular subject than they can communicate verbally. This is because much of what we learn through experience does not automatically become part of our conscious (or explicit) knowledge. It’s in a form that’s difficult to share. It is tacit or intuitive.

The article by Theo Dawson references tacit knowledge in a specific context but it’s applicable to the day-to-day life we all experience. Tacit knowledge is what spawns intuitive insight. These insights can help guide us when specific goals and tasks might not always do so.

Sylvia Clare puts it this way in “Living Intuitively – Trusting Your Intuition.”

Intuition is a bright light leading you onwards in an adventurous life.

That’s a concise explanation about how intuition can benefit us as we move through life. It’s a bright light that can help guide us, but it doesn’t necessarily account for all of the twists, turns, and deviations from the path we might be on at the time.

The conflict between living entirely by intuition or by rigid goals and processes is best resolved by understanding tacit knowledge. Tacit knowledge is all the information and wisdom we’ve accumulated that can help guide our decisions and directions in life. But unless it’s checked against what hard data we have at our disposal, that tacit (intuitive) knowledge might lead us astray.

Those of us who have worked to embrace and develop our intuitive capabilities do some things differently than those who have not. In “10 Things Highly Intuitive People Do Differently,” Carolyn Gregoire points out things like listening to our inner voice, taking time for solitude, and practicing mindfulness that intuitive people consciously or unconsciously do to optimally navigate through life.

That’s all great, but if we don’t at the same time check our intuitive insights against verifiable data, either objective data or that data we’ve discovered based on our own experiences, such intuition might not be fully trustable.

So, at present, my own process is to live a life mostly driven by intuition. However, I take those intuitive decisions and check them against what solid information I have at my disposal whether I learned that information in a book or simply by metaphorically repeatedly banging my head unsuccessfully against the same brick wall.

This has created a nice balance in my life. Maybe it will for you too. Listen to your intuitive insights. Use them to help you make decisions. Use them to assist you in crafting a life path for yourself. But don’t ignore actual data that might better hone your intuitively derived decisions. Strike this balance and you’ll likely be better poised to succeed in life, whatever success means to you.

You can use this link to access all my writings and social media and ways to support my work.