#013 - Developing your intuition for business success

In episode 13 of The OvercomeHer Podcast, host Samantha Noelle breaks down intuition in a grounded, practical way and why it matters for business success. 

Using examples like Steve Jobs betting on the touchscreen iPhone, she explains intuition as an unseen, nervous-system and gut-based “knowing” that often arrives before facts, and she distinguishes true intuition (calm, steady, peaceful, consistent) from fear, ego, wishful thinking, and unhealed wound-based bias. 

Samantha shares how distractions, constant noise, emotional attachment, and fear can block intuition, and how to strengthen it through daily meditation, an intuition journal, simple card exercises, and outcome detachment. She also shares real-world stories—like Stanislav Petrov’s gut call that helped avert nuclear war—and prompts to start each day without your phone and ask what you need to know in your business.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

In 2007, Steve Jobs decided to build a phone with no physical keyboard, just a giant touch screen, and almost everyone thought the idea was insane. Most carriers wanted buttons, and focus groups were skeptical, and even some of the engineers at Apple had doubted it. However, Steve just knew people would love holding the internet in their hands. He ignored the data and went with his instinct. And the iPhone became the most successful consumer product in history. Hey everyone, I'm Samantha Noel, and I am your host of the Overcome Her podcast, and you're listening to episode number 13, which is all about learning to build your intuition in order to strengthen your trust and your success in your business. In today's episode, I want to talk about the concept and the idea of intuition. Now, intuition can get super woo-woo and airy fairy, but you know I'm going to keep this as grounded and pragmatic as possible for you all because we need that. We are in business. A lot of people, when they think about intuition, I think they think it's very woo-woo. It's just a feeling or a vibe, like Yemen, like just a vibe. It's a hunch. Something that you either have or you don't have. But intuition has actually been studied extensively, and the military leaders use it, the CIA uses it, emergency room doctors use it, firefighters use it, athletes use it, and even experienced entrepreneurs like Steve Jobs and many others use their intuition. It's not whether intuition itself is real or it exists. The question is, why do some people seem to be able to trust it? Well, other people just ignore it or write it off. In today's episode, I'm going to break down what is intuition, and then I'm going to get into why some people's intuition is better than others, how it shows up in the body, what destroys intuition, how to strengthen it, and then I'm going to give you real-world life examples where intuition has actually saved people. So without wasting any more time, let's get straight into it. What is intuition? Intuition is something that's unseen and intrinsic within your body that is also tied to your nervous system and your gut, which is why people say I had a gut feeling. And as your senses obtain information from the external environment, your brain is processing that before you even become consciously aware of it. So intuition is the knowing that happens, the feeling that happens before you can even consciously discern what is going on, which is why intuition is never backed by facts until well after the actual outcome. Because oftentimes we're sensing and we're feeling things that are way far down in the future. And part of that connection and that reality exists in the now, but we won't experience the actual confirmation of the intuition until later down the road. And maybe it's minutes down the road, maybe it's years. Either way, intuition comes before the actual physical evidence ever does. Your brain is constantly scanning for information. It's paying attention to facial expressions, tone changes, market shifts, customer behavior, people's blink rates, their sweat rates, the way that they wipe their eyebrow, the way that they exhale or breathe, the energy that they're carrying about them, even when they put a smile on their face and they say everything is good and fine. You guys have noticed that, right? When you have a friend who walks into the room and you can feel the heaviness, but they might be portraying a completely different thing and you know that something isn't right, which is how you know to ask them and get the clarification, even when they try to tell you that everything is fine. You know it's not because your intuition is telling you that's not magic, it's just physics. Think of a time that you've met somebody and everything in you says, This person isn't good. I don't know what it is about them, but I just know that they're not good. We've all been there where we've dated somebody that our own intuition told us they were no good. And in the beginning you felt like they were no good, but then you started to override that intuition and think that maybe you were just not giving them a fair enough chance. Well, fast forward to six months down the road, and you find out that they're no good. They're lying, they're cheating, they're not really who they say that they are. We've all kind of had that experience. Well, that's the intuition piece. That's something coming in to try to save us from the pain. And with that, I have to caveat this a little bit because a lot of people will have experiences in life and they'll almost use that as a bias towards other people. And now it's not intuition, it's actually just a pain memory. And now they're going to associate people that have any kind of similar semblance to somebody else. And that unfortunately is different than intuition. That's unhealed wounds, is what that is. And I think that's something that I'll get into a little bit later is in when you're developing your intuition. Part of developing your intuition is also healing your own stuff so that you're not coming in with a filter because intuition is void of any filter. Here's an interesting fact for you studies on firefighters found that experienced firefighters often knew a building was about to collapse before they could even explain why they knew. Their brains had unconsciously recognized patterns from previous fires, and this is called recognition primed decision making. I think a lot of people don't fully understand what intuition is yet. The best way that I can describe what intuition is is simply this. We are all connected through energy. Everything that exists in our entire world and in our entire universe is made up of energy. And all of that energy is connected. There's nothing that separates that energy. And if you think that there's anything that separates the energy, I would ask and challenge you, what do you think it is that separates that energy? And if anybody were to say something that's physical separates it. But we know through science that even what appears to be physical is not actually purely physical, that it's made up of a bunch of molecules and atoms that actually have a lot of space in them and aren't solid themselves. Therefore, even the thing that's the most solid appearing isn't actually fully solid, but it's made up of a bunch of energy and particles that is connected to everything else, just like it's connected to us. That energy is all connected. And so intuition is simply our own God-given ability to perceive what we cannot sense with our five tactical senses. And it comes to us before a conscious mind actually has the time to interpret the patterns and the stimuli that we see around us. It's how people have known to take certain risks, it's how Steve Jobs knew to move towards the concept of an iPhone, which everyone thought was crazy at the time. There's no evidence of that. There's no ability to have a pattern that you recognize. It's a feeling based on being connected to all of the energy that exists in the world. And it's the same as when you meet someone and you can feel in your gut that something is off about that person, even though you don't know anything about them. Now, oftentimes people will misconstrue what intuition actually is because they might meet somebody and they have personal biases and they allow the personal biases to get in the way, and then they call that intuition. And I've often heard people say over the years, I can read people and I can pick out the bad ones right away. Usually, if you're coming from that mental framework, you have unhealed wounds and you're filtering the world through those unhealed wounds. And that actually makes understanding and reading your own intuition harder for you because you're seeing it through a filtered lens, and intuition requires you to get out of the way. And when I say you to get out of the way, I mean your own perceived ideas and notions and concepts and belief systems because intuition will go against all logic. A lot of successful entrepreneurs often trust their intuition. And I just talked about in a previous episode about having trust and confidence in yourself. Successful entrepreneurs will trust their intuition. That's part of having confidence, is having that relationship with your own inner divine, the piece of you that's completely connected to everything unseen that has access to unlimited ideas, unlimited potential. Like in the Michael movie, where Michael is floating in the pool and he tells his brothers that he's trying to connect with the creator to get his next great idea so that the creator doesn't give it to prince. All highly successful people understand the power to some degree of their intuition and listening to that intuition. I think children are a great example of intuition because children come into the world fully connected to their intuition. And yet, as we and society get a hold of that child, we tell them to override it. When they don't trust a certain stranger, we tell them to just be nice and say hello and shake their hand. Meanwhile, that stranger might have bad intentions, or maybe that stranger is carrying a lot of heavy and negative energy, and the child doesn't want to interact with that. And then we, as women, we've been told to override our intuition. We second guess ourselves. We give certain people chances when our own intuition tells us that we shouldn't, and then we find out six months later that our intuition was right from the very beginning and we just overwrote it. Intuition feels like a calm, steady feeling within us. It's a knowing, it's something that doesn't change. And some people have asked me, why does my intuition change? Your intuition doesn't change. It wasn't your intuition. If it changes, it's not your intuition, it's your wishful thinking, it's your projections, it's your fear, it's your ego, it's what you want to happen or what you don't want to happen, what you're afraid will happen. And that's why I say a lot of people think that their intuition is super strong and that they can easily identify bad people. Well, if you're always focused on thinking that your intuition is identifying bad people, that's not what intuition is there for. Intuition is there to help you, to expand you, to grow you, to move you into your purpose as a human being and as a soul in a human body. Your intuition is meant to help keep you safe when your time isn't up. Your intuition is there to serve as a friend to you, to keep you safe, to help you navigate, and to help you grow, and not keep you safe in the same way that your nervous system or your brain does, but in a way that you decide to go a different route, and then you find out that there was a car accident at the exact same time that you would have been at an intersection had you not gone a different way. Intuition moves you forward as well as it keeps you safe, but it's not in the same fearful way that our mind likes to do. Why is it that some people seem to have better intuition than others? I think it comes down to two things. I think it comes down to trusting yourself and being willing to be less logical, knowing when to use that logical piece of your brain and when to actually just go with that more creative, flowing, intuitive place that isn't filled with pluses and minuses, balance sheets, good, right, wrong, bad. And a lot of people also think that intuition is random, like it just randomly comes up every once in a while, but it's not. Our intuition is always guiding us, and in fact, it gets stronger the more that we use it. It's like a muscle, and when you go to the gym and you work it out, it gets stronger. When you use it more often, it gets stronger. When you stop using it, it atrophies. How does intuition show up in the body? Intuition shows up, intuition shows up in a few different ways. But I would say that when intuition is truly speaking to you in terms of giving you a nudge to move in a certain direction, you'll oftentimes feel a calm steadiness with it. You just kind of know it's the truth, even though you have no idea. And this is not a logical thing, it's not an up-in-the-brain thing. You're not actually logically thinking about it. It's something that you can feel, but you can't fully explain. And you just know it's true, and you can feel within you that moving towards whatever your intuition is guiding you to is peaceful. There's a peace about intuition that when you are moving in the right direction, you can feel that sense of peace, and the peace is strong. And when that intuition is trying to save you from something, it's like move, go now. You need to go this way, you need to do this thing, you need to shift here, you need to not talk to that person, and it still will have a calm steadiness under it. If it's true intuition, you'll feel very confident and you'll feel very calm and you'll feel a sense of peace. That is intuition. What destroys intuition? This is where I think that this is so relevant and pertinent, is that in today's day and age, we have so many distractions. And sometimes I wonder, are all of these just to disconnect us from our own internal knowing? I think back to when life was a little bit simpler, which is crazy because it feels like forever ago, but I don't really think it was that long ago. I think about when I used to be able to sit and read for an hour, an hour and a half every single night before bed, and I didn't have distractions. Whereas now I find it's more challenging and I have to make a conscious effort to do that. But all of the things that we have nowadays definitely reduces our ability to hear our intuition. It's the constant noise, it's all of the input from the media, it's the social media, it's the TikToks, it's the Instagrams, it's the Facebook, it's the advice that we constantly get, it's the podcasts, it's the YouTube videos, it's the TV shows, it's all of the things that are garnering for our attention that are external to us that really start to drown out our intuition, which is why it's so important to actually take conscious time away from these things where we turn off our cell phones, where we put that away, where we go back out into nature. When we don't sit by ourselves in silence long enough to even hear our intuition, it's very hard for us to in daily life when we're actually in business and need to be able to access our intuition, to be able to hear it and to be able to discern what is our intuition and what is just noise or fear or ego. When we're really desperate for something, when we really, really want something to happen, when we have a very strong emotional attachment to the outcome, that also makes intuition a lot harder for us to actually hear and pay attention to because we have such a strong emotional attachment, because then we become vulnerable to having wishful thinking. And wishful thinking can often disguise itself as intuition. And as I've already said, fear is another thing that will block and destroy our intuition because fear is loud. Think about all of the fear-mongering on TV, and then think about somebody who has a YouTube channel or a podcast that's all about calming energy. Fear is a lot louder than intuition. Intuition is quiet, steady, calm, peaceful. Even when it's urging you that something isn't safe, it's still calm, quiet, steady, and peaceful. Okay, now let's get into how do we strengthen intuition. If you've never practiced developing your intuition, the first thing you need to do is you need to start a daily meditation practice. I don't know how to teach somebody to develop their intuition without incorporating meditation. And you don't necessarily have to do meditation forever, every single day of your life, but you're going to need to do it at least in the very beginning, every single day. And even if all you can get is 10 minutes, 10 minutes is better than you shooting for 20 or 30 minutes. 10 minutes consistently every day will go a lot further for you in developing your intuition than just about anything else that you can do. And the reason why meditation is so important is because it forces you for at least 10 minutes a day to just sit in silence, let go of your thoughts, learn to separate out your thoughts from your own center and your own being. Because here's the thing that happens so often in today's world. We believe that our thoughts are us. We become so attached to our own thoughts that we forget our thoughts aren't actually us, they are something that we can observe. So if you can observe it, then that means that there is something greater to you than just your thoughts, if that makes sense. And I think Eckert Tolle even actually talks about how he kind of came to this realization that he was able to observe his thoughts, which then helped him to understand that his thoughts can't actually be him if he's able to observe his own thoughts. So getting into a daily meditation practice, morning is always great, evening is good as well. But 10 minutes where you can sit in silence, and if it helps you better to have some kind of music, to just doing that for 10 minutes every day where you're just going to focus on your breathing. You're going to slowly breathe in and slowly exhale. It's always great when you start to take three really good deep slow breaths, hold that breath for five to six counts, and then exhale it out for five to six counts. Because you want to relax your parasympathetic nervous system. And the reason you want that to relax is because when your nervous system is in fight or flight, when you're stressed from all of the day's activities or from all of the things that you've got on your to-do list or in your brain, it's hard for you to access the intuition. Not impossible, just makes it harder. So we want to make this as easy as possible to access the intuition so you begin to learn to feel what intuition actually feels like versus what your own stuff feels like. The other thing that I would recommend for developing your intuition is getting an intuition journal, and maybe it's just a little notebook that you have, and you write down when you have hits of intuition, and then write down what was the action that you took and the date that you had that. That way you can always come back in the future when you do have evidence of your intuition being right, whether you actually chose to act on it or you chose to do nothing at all. There's a lot of other little things that you can do to develop your intuition. And one thing that you can do is you can take a simple deck of cards, you can turn it so all of the cards are facing down, and you create two piles, black and red. And for every card that's on the top, you're going to feel does it feel black or does it feel red? If you have never done anything to develop your intuition or listen to your intuition before, it might sound weird that I'm telling you to feel if it feels black or feels red. But when you begin to try this, you'll understand what I mean because there is a feeling to everything. There's a feeling to color, there's a feeling to animate and inanimate objects. Everything has a feeling because it is part of all of that unseen energy matrix that we're all a part of. So with the cards facing down, feel. Does this feel black or does it feel red? And don't flip them over right away. Wait and see. How accurate you are. Try maybe 10 or 15 carts and see how accurate you can get that to be. And over time, the more you practice it, the more you'll start to be able to truly feel when something is black and when something is red. Starting to trust and develop your intuition is also when you need to trust it and to act on it. As long as it's not harming anyone, that is a great way to learn to discern your own intuition because you're actually trying out what works and what doesn't work. And you're figuring it out. What does it actually feel like? And then when you find proof of your intuition or proof against what you thought was your intuition, then you can realize, oh, I really wanted something to happen that wasn't my intuition. And I just wanted it to happen so bad that I was creating phantom feelings so that I could justify doing something that I really wanted to have happen. Or I was acting from a place of fear and calling that intuition. Here is an exercise for you to try in the morning on a Monday. Ask yourself, what is one thing that I feel will happen in my business this week? Now you could laugh at this exercise and you could say, There's some things that I could very much expect would happen, but I want you to challenge yourself and I want you to ask, what do I feel is going to happen in my business this week? Do I feel like I'm going to get a new client? Do I feel like I'm going to get a new customer? Do I feel like I'm going to get a new business offer? Do I feel like I'm going to get alone and feel that without expectation? The other thing to developing your intuition is everything about your intuition has to be without expectation. The more that you can release any emotional attachment or expectation that you have to outcome, the more accurate that you will be in discerning what is your intuition. So when you're really emotionally attached to something, don't try to use your intuition. When you're really attached to the outcome of something, don't try to use your intuition. Wait until you're in a neutral place emotionally and mentally about it. Detach from the outcome. Detach from whatever emotional connection that you have that's holding you to it. Back on September 26, 1983, there was a Soviet military officer named Stanislav Petrov, who was on duty when the early warning system had lit up, showing five American nuclear missiles inbound toward the USSR. Every protocol and every procedure, every chain of command had told him to report it as a real attack, which would have triggered a Soviet nuclear response and almost certainly would have caused World War III. However, Petrov had a feeling in his gut that something was wrong. He couldn't articulate it precisely, but the attack pattern didn't feel right. Why only five missiles? He wondered. A real American first strike would be hundreds. He made a unilateral decision in the most pressurized moment imaginable to report it as a system malfunction. And he was right. It was a satellite error. This one man's intuition almost certainly prevented nuclear war and saved hundreds of millions of lives. Okay, then we have the story of Paul Mitchell and John Paul DeGoria. DeGoria had literally at the time been living out of his car when him and Paul Mitchell had started their hair care company in 1980, which is $700. Every logical sign had pointed to failure. They had no investor backing, no industry connections, and they launched during a recession. If anyone was alive in the 80s, they know how bad interest rates were at the time. Salon owners were slamming doors in their faces daily, but DeJoya had this unshakable inner knowing that the product was genuinely superior and that salons were the right channel at a time when nobody was selling professional hair care that way. He kept going on pure conviction, and Paul Mitchell became one of the most successful salon brands in history. Most everybody has used those products at some point, or is it the very least, heard of Paul Mitchell products. DeGoria then followed the exact same intuitive pattern with Patron tequila. He simply felt that Americans would pay luxury prices for premium tequila before any market evidence suggested it was possible. He became a billionaire twice over, each time following a gut feeling that defied the available evidence entirely. It pays to develop our intuition, especially in business. There's so many stories of people striking gold, of having a business idea that's so obscure coming to them. And I'll tell you guys honestly, when I was 10 years old, I remember having the vision of what ended up becoming an iPod in my mind at 10 years old. There's been a couple of other things that I had over the years. And if I was an engineer, I probably would go after some of these ideas and these visions that I get. But at 10 years old, which was back in 1994, I remember seeing in my mind and thinking of the concept of something that you could actually load music onto, that you didn't have to have the CDs, that you could just load the music onto it somehow, that you could connect it into something and that you could get the songs because I hated the fact that you had to buy an entire CD when you just really wanted one or two songs from that album. So I had an idea and I had a vision and I saw this little square thing in my mind where you could just pick a song and you would be able to get it on your device, and then you would have all these different songs from all of these different artists. That's how intuition works. You're connecting to what is unseen. Now, that idea that I had it 10 years old, by the time that I was 20, that was more of a reality at that point. So intuition is available to us all, and we have access to a vast array of ideas that's in a field of energy that we are all connected to. And whether we choose to tap into that and to listen to it and follow it is up to us. Part of intuition is knowing where you want to go, because intuition, in a way, almost acts like GPS. You have to kind of know where you want to go. If you know that you want to be super successful doing something, or if you know that you want to hire somebody amazing and you need this person, then your intuition will start to guide you where to find that person, where to connect with them, where to reach out, where to go. And then next thing you know, you're connecting with the person that you want to hire. Or maybe you're actually interviewing people and something about somebody just doesn't seem right or trustworthy, even though their resume looks great and everything that's logically there seems to be good, but your intuition says something's not right, and you choose to pass on that person as opposed to hiring them. That's where your intuition can show up. Your intuition can show up in giving you the ideas for your sales and your marketing that logically might not have made sense to you. Maybe it comes up with new creative ideas for your product or for your service that make you different than anybody else and that gives you an advantage over your competitors. So intuition isn't something that's just for fluff and airy fairy woo-woo. It's actually for everyday practical matters, like growing and building a successful business. And intuition is not about negating our logical or our rational mind. It is there to serve us and guide us so that we can step fully into what we're meant to do and be the best versions of ourselves possible while delivering helpful products and services to the market. Okay, before we close out this episode, I'm just going to give you a couple of quick prompts that you can do with yourself on a daily basis to help you continue to hear what your intuition is saying and receive that guidance. So when you wake up in the morning, don't touch your phone, leave everything that's technology based alone for at least the first 30 minutes of waking up. I understand if you have to turn off an alarm, but don't look at your phone, don't check your messages, don't check your emails, leave all of that alone. And the first thing that you're going to do is to put one hand on your heart, one hand on your stomach, and just slowly breathe in, exhale out, and ask yourself, what is here for me today in my business that I need to know? Just try that. Really simple. What is here for me today in my business that I need to know? And then maybe write that down in your intuition journal and date that. And then at the end of the day, you can reflect back on that and you can see how that help you in your day. And that might seem incredibly simple, but that's the thing about intuition. It is quite simple. It's not big and loud. It's more that steady, that calm, that peace. And it doesn't change. Okay, everyone. That's everything for today on intuition. And hopefully you guys got something from that. Hopefully that helps you as you move forward in your business, gives you new creative ideas, allows you to open up to what is available for you to help you grow your business successfully. You've been listening to episode number 13, and I'm your host, Samantha Noel. You've listened to the Overcome Her podcast. Feel free to email me your questions or suggestions to the Overcome Her Podcast at gmail.com. Again, it's the Overcome HerPodcast at gmail.com. And I'm your host, Samantha Noel. Also, join me over on Facebook at BuiltForProfit. That's my group for women for female entrepreneurs where we just discuss all things business. And stay tuned because I'm working on bringing you guys a course that will help you grow your business successfully without losing your mind. Okay, everyone. I hope you have an amazing day. See you guys soon.

SPEAKER_00 32:22

We made.