Is it Time to Put Your Intellect in a Time Out?
Spoiler: there's no spreadsheet for this
I’ve been alive for 49 years. And I’ve spent a lot of this time over-intellectualizing everything. From the time I was little, I was not satisfied with the status quo and therefore had to gather and process information to make connections, decisions, and opinions. As I got older and discovered the marvel that is spreadsheets, and the SUMPRODUCT formula, I could calculate my thoughts with weighted criteria and validate my decisions with data. 🤯 Mystery of life solved.
But the mystery of life was not solved. No matter how honest I was with myself about the options in front of me, and their importance to me, and no matter how many times I followed what the calculations told me to do, I still somehow ended up in burnout - in a job that I loved, but a career that was not serving me. How is it possible that my precious spreadsheet could stray me so very afar?
Perhaps this obsession with decision making through spreadsheets is what took me over ten years to finally make the change in my life that I needed to and I quit my job. There was no spreadsheet that was ever going to tell me that I will be better off, financially, in the long run if I stepped away from my career without a plan for income. And the more I tried to make the spreadsheet tell me this story, the more my heart and my gut revolted. Until it was pointed out to me, repeatedly, by therapists, friends, and coaches:
I need to trust my intuition more than my spreadsheet for making big life decisions.
That all sounded very woo woo to me. How does one go about listening to their intuition? Is there a spreadsheet for that?
After finally taking the leap to put a career that was not serving me in the rearview mirror, and take my foot off the gas, a lot of clouds are clearing. And behind those clouds - I think I see it - is my intuition.
I’m not an expert on this. I’m just someone in the process of learning how to listen to my intuition. And here’s what I am learning.
Intuition is a feeling more than it is thought. It usually is a simple feeling - like “I like this” or “this feels bad.”
Separating Intuition from The Gut and The Heart
My Leadership professor in my MBA program told us that great leaders know how to balance logic, passion, and experience — in other words, the head, the heart, and the gut.
Intuition is different than the feeling in my gut, which feels all rumbly when I need to make an urgent decision with great gravity. I also find that it fires to warn me against something, rather than to push me in a particular direction.
Intuition is different from “listening to my heart” which is more of an ache, a desperate longing for something. If intuition gives me a generalized feeling about something, the signals from my heart look a lot like the second and third tiers on a feelings wheel. They help identify, in detail, where I’m at in a particular situation.
Balancing Bali in a Spreadsheet
Recently, when I traveled to Bali, I arrived on rocky ground, emotionally. I felt overwhelmed with the SO MUCH of it. Both overjoyed and totally uncomfortable. I found myself hunched over my laptop on my first night, deep in a spreadsheet I titled “Ubud Personal Retreat.” I was building a 10-day retreat for myself, from the long list of suggestions I received for yoga classes, restaurants, meditation classes, art classes, cultural immersion, and excursions. There wasn’t time to do everything and I had to find a way to do it all in 10 days. Structure would make me feel better, I told myself. I spent a couple blissful hours in my room hiding from my overwhelmed self, fully immersed in a color-coded schedule with time-blocked activities and back-ups for every single day.
I stared at it and felt my chest tighten. Not in excitement, but just stress. In Bali.
That tension - that low-grade, spreadsheet-induced dread - was my intuition talking. Not dramatically. Not in the voice of a guru. Just me. Just my voice. A quiet, slightly annoyed whisper: this is not why you came here.
I closed my eyes and this voice spoke a mantra I come back to every now and then: Be here now.
And then I closed the laptop and I went to sleep.
Bali was rocky for the first couple days. Intuition spoke, but I wasn’t quick to fall in line. I ached for more structure, but my intuition wanted me to just be, whatever that means. But somewhere in the middle of that rocky Ubud river, someone mentioned an open mic night. Then someone else did. I couldn’t find a group to go with, so I went alone. That was the moment when Bali opened her arms to me and allowed me to fall into her motherly embrace.
There was a vibrant bohemian crowd at the open mic. Tons of local musicians, as well as tourists stopping by trying to get on the set list for the night. I sat at a table with strangers, who slowly became friends. I listened to a traditional Javanese drum circle, followed by a 12-year-old guitarist playing “Sweet Child O’Mine,” accompanied by a local band.
It would be easy to check the box on the open mic night on my spreadsheet - if I was following it, that is - but I could not in a million years have scheduled that feeling of joy and freedom from that night into a calendar. No weighted criteria would have surfaced it.
I found the right thing, at the right time, because I was finally open enough to hear it.
Bali ended up being one of the richest sensory memories of my entire trip. (My full Bali experience is a story I’ve already told - you can read more about it here.)
The spreadsheet didn’t get me there. Getting quiet did.
Actively Quieting My Intellect
I’m starting to track the moments that give me a special feeling, and note how I got there. Was it intellect or intuition that brought me there? I’m also actively practicing putting my intellect in a time-out so that my intuition and I can get better acquainted. It’s like making a new friend. Conversation isn’t always natural, but the more familiar I get with her, the more I am growing to trust her.
This one is making me think.