An Intuitive Leap: From the “tea Room” to the Boardroom

AN INTUITIVE LEAP: FROM THE “TEA ROOM” TO THE BOARDROOM

By Diane Brandon

Intuition—a faculty most of us value, many of us have developed, and some of us work with professionally. Especially for those of us who work as professional intuitives or use it in our healing work, intuition’s value to us is so great that it’s woven into the daily fabric of our lives so seamlessly that we don’t even consciously notice at times that we’re using it.



We’ve learned that intuition has many benefits over and above the guidance it can give us when we’re looking for insight. It can strengthen our inner voice and thus our confidence. It can help us “read” and understand others, so that our relationships can improve measurably and any conflict be minimized. It can help us to perceive more clearly and objectively. It can give us insight for future directions.

It’s ironic that, with all its far-reaching benefits and as much as we revere our inner voice, intuition continues to be relatively hidden from the view of most people and even ostracized. Indeed many of us are tentative in mentioning it at times and may be comfortable discussing it only with those people we consider to be like-minded. The same could be said, of course, for energy work and other forms of alternative and complementary healing.

Why is this?

For many years, metaphysical and new thought ideas have been marginalized, even regarded as fringe—to the extent that there’s a separation, even a perceptible antipathy, between “new agers” (or those into alternative spirituality and modalities) and the mainstream. One of the major reasons for this estrangement lies in the (so-called) “unproven” nature of many of the modalities we embrace. Another reason lies, quite simply, in the fact that they’re not traditional, and many people primarily embrace that which is traditional.

And yet, just as intuition can have powerful benefits on the personal level, so too can it give us positive effects in other areas of our lives. As a professional intuitive, I know that intuition can have many practical benefits that can be applied to pragmatic areas, such as business. And I’m not talking about intuitives giving business advice (even though I’ve looked at business-related issues for many clients). I’m talking about teaching intuition and intuitive skills to management and business personnel.

What many of us are beginning to realize is that developing and mastering intuition is just the tip of the iceberg insofar as its positive effects are concerned. What developing and using this faculty does is help to develop more of our consciousness potential—and our potential intelligence—especially when combined with good left-brain skills. Since the Age of Reason and ascendance of science, we have embraced—and our academic institutions have emphasized—primarily our left-brain aptitude and skills—logic, analysis, deductive reasoning, etc. The “softer” right-brain skills, such as creativity, intuitive knowing, holistic perspectives, self-expression, vision, among others, gradually came to be regarded as somewhat inferior or, at the least, less important. Interestingly, this shift gradually led to “hemisphere wars,” as some people picked sides and pledged their allegiance to only one hemisphere and its functions, to the detriment of the other.

What we’re now starting to see, thankfully, is a more holistic stance toward our mental faculties and a new emphasis on development of potential. Indeed businesses are starting to embrace creativity (a real necessity for innovation). For this reason, I sense more and more an impending “mainstreaming” of intuition, including in the corporate world.

Intuition is, after all, a mental faculty. As much as many of us incorporate the spiritual into the intuitive and see it as indispensable to intuition (and indeed there are so many resonances between the two), intuition can be developed as a purely mental faculty. And it needn’t be off-putting. Certainly one major type of intuition, in which we pull information from our subconscious into conscious awareness, fits easily into our “normal” human consciousness and isn’t “supernatural.” And this type of intuition, in which we access information we had but didn’t know that we had, can be taught and should certainly not be intimidating.

Even the more extra-sensory nature of intuitive information that may seem to spring from nowhere needn’t be a hindrance. There are theories that can explain how such seemingly supernatural phenomena can exist, and there are methods to teach its employ.

When I’ve taught corporate seminars on intuition and creativity, I have experienced a receptiveness that is encouraging. All that’s required is rational explanations and definitions and an applicability to business needs. Businesses can indeed benefit from its usage, in areas such as morale, teamwork, productivity, planning, marketing, R & D, etc.

I increasingly feel that we’re at a point in our societal development where new thought faculties and modalities may be more widely embraced and used. Certainly yoga and meditation have evolved since the 60s from far-out “weird” practices to accepted modalities that are known to have health benefits. The same will be true of intuition and other modalities.

It’s time for intuition and other modalities to make that intuitive leap and share their potential rewards in more traditional arenas