Trusting Your Gut
This month’s message isn’t going to be about marketing.
This one is about trusting your gut. Your intuition. Your sixth sense. Your Spidey Sense. Whatever you want to call it, you need to listen to it.
We’ve all had instances where we didn’t listen to that little voice. That applicant for the job who just looked so perfect, seemed so polished and had great people skills. The potential job that was so huge and could do such great things for your business. The bank loan with the great terms that could help you get your business in a better location… whatever the instance was, you have been there, haven’t you?
The applicant turned into a thief. The great job that looked so promising turned into a nightmare. The bank loan was a mistake because the loan officer didn’t explain something in the small print. Whatever it was, you knew it was too good to be true, and you promised yourself you would listen to your gut the next time it gave you a warning.
If you are hardheaded like me, you’ve had to learn that a few times.
I’ve been reading this book named Blink by Malcolm Gladwell. Fairly early into the book, he talks about an experiment run by the University of Iowa some years ago. Imagine that you are asked to play a simple card game. In front of you are four decks of cards – two are red and two are blue. Each card can either win you a sum of money or cost you money. You are to turn over cards from any of the decks, one at a time, in a way that maximizes your winnings. What they don’t tell you is that one of the decks is a mindfield – the rewards are high, but when you lose on them, you lose a lot.
The only way to win is to take cards from the blue decks, which offer a nice steady diet of $50 payouts and modest penalties. The question is, how long before you figure that out?
After about 50 cards, most people started to develop a hunch about what was going on. They were not sure yet, but it seemed better. After 80 cards, most people had it figured out.
But that isn’t where it got interesting. The Iowa researchers had hooked each gambler up to a machine that measured the activity of the sweat glands below the skin in the palms of their hands. What they found was, the gamblers had started generating stress responses to the red decks FORTY cards before they were able to say that they had a hunch about what was wrong with those two decks.
More interestingly, right around the time their palms started sweating, they took fewer and fewer cards from the red deck – they had actually figured out the game, before they were aware of it consciously yet.
Whoah.
About a year ago, I ran into a situation where the job just looked too good. The money was good. The exposure would have been fabulous – I could have gone anywhere in that particular town and said “I did that, isn’t that great?” I was getting introduced to the Mayor of the city and all kinds of great things. It had a tight deadline. I knew I could meet it. The whole project was for something that is near and dear to my heart, I was brimming with ideas and enthusiasm. But I had this little warning bell. I ignored it.
My first real warning was that the negotiation process was taking too long. There was too much back and forth, and things getting added, and “what if we worked with you this way?” I kept trying to find out what their budget was, because something of that size could get out of hand really, really fast and I wanted to be sure that whatever ideas I proposed would not be too over the top on them when we hit the printer.
Once past the negotiation, I set to work on the project. After the feedback from the first round, I started to have an idea that I was working with someone who was not who he seemed to be. But I wanted the job still, and I put off that warning and plowed forward. I put hours, and hours, and hours of my time into it (see? Hardheaded.) … until finally I had to admit, that the job was a bust, the work that was being created looked terrible and I could never tell anyone I had done it. So then I was in for it only for the money, and feeling like a prostitute. It was dragging on and on, going way past the initial deadline.
The final blow came out when he finally told me what his budget was. It was a shock, I can tell you that. I should have stood my ground in the beginning and made sure I knew that budget before we had even drafted the proposal. I finally had to pick up the phone and resign from the project. I felt crushed – I’d had such hopes for the job, I’d had such vision for it, I was caught up in the cause it was for … I could have saved myself a lot of time, and headache, if I had just listened to my gut in the very beginning.
Listening to your gut is not always easy. I’ve found that my intuition might be trying to tell me something when I am in a bad mood, or things just don’t seem right and I cannot tell you why. Like many people these days, I’m a very busy person, active in so many things outside of my business, that it’s easy to just keep going and not really listen.
Take a moment out of each day. Get your cup of hot chai tea, settle yourself in your favorite spot in your yard or quiet spot in your home. Carry your notepad with you – on a blank page. And just write – not a list! – just write down whatever it is that is getting to you, whether you are aware of it or not. Before 10 minutes is up, you may know what’s wrong. Once you know, you can take steps to fix it, and you can keep that nice Zen feeling you started for the rest of the day.
Like NIKE says, just do it.
