As a psychologist, it’s been drilled into me to ensure that any interventions we introduce to organisations, teams or individuals override our intuition. The rationale is that intuition can be inherently biased. As ethical practitioners, we base our work on facts and data that can be reliable and valid in most circumstances for a general population.

What importance do we then place on intuition as a leader, and how do we get the right balance between intuition and data for decision making?

For many leaders, as well as fellow psychologists, we can become fearful of our intuition due to the many negative connotations associated with it over the years.

Witches’ hunches, overly emotionally driven, baseless, you name it - it’s been called a number of things that assume discrediting to some form of magic or woo woo. But we can often therefore suppress something vitally important, for fear of not being believed or having enough evidence to back up claims in the moment.

So I’m curious whether my experience may be similar to that of other leaders out there who may have also battled with the validity of their own intuition?

I have listened and learned from everyone I’ve worked with since I started work at 15 and valued so many opinions and insights over the years that I’ve often felt happy to change my own opinion if someone makes a more convincing argument for it. I don’t have a need to be right about everything at all, and I’m very happy for a member of my team to challenge something, especially when done with confidence and suggested improvements.

But it took me a dreadful life and death experience to realise that my intuition was much more important than I had recognised.

Without going into detail, I knew one night in late pregnancy that my daughter had turned round in my tummy a week before she was due. I let everyone tell me I was wrong, experienced midwife included, and the subsequent late arrival of her feet-first was a terrifying experience in the snow with all local hospitals shut. Enough detail, I think of that moment over and over.  I knew what had happened, and my intuition deep down was strong, but I didn’t listen to it, and it almost cost me and my daughter our lives.

That moment changed me forever, and years later, on Boxing Day, when my other daughter was unwell with a bad cough and we had been waiting in A&E for 10 hours, she and my husband wanted to go home and see the doctor the next day, I knew we had to stay. The voice inside me said, despite it all being incredibly inconvenient with hosting lots of guests at home, we had to see the doctor. All preliminary tests were fine, and they both looked at me to say “I told you so,” but the doctor said she wanted to do a quick CT scan just to be sure.

She called me in to see the scan results, she said she had never seen a patient with symptoms like it, her entire left lung was covered with pneumonia, and she was admitted immediately. All was well after treatment. A month later, we were in a pandemic lockdown.

My point is that it took a life-and-death situation for me to listen to my intuition, and that changed both my leadership approach and my approach to life. I have consciously engaged with my intuition on every big decision I’ve made since, especially with my business, which, as any business owner will know, is an incredibly challenging career path to take on your own with no investors, bootstrapping from nothing.

The data and facts are still fundamentally important for making decisions for a business. Still, now I don’t let anyone override me if my intuition is telling me something important, even if I don’t have all the facts I need. And from each time I’ve taken action, the ensuing outcomes have proved me right to listen to that strong inner voice.

How do we build that trust in ourselves? Trust that gives us confidence to use our voice and be seen, heard and valued, particularly when stepping into a role leading others.

I think it starts with our instinct, which I feel is often much more ‘in the moment’ reactions from my subconscious mind guiding my immediate response, noting it and exploring what we are really trying to surface.

Moving from being a great contributor in work collaborations to being a leader requires us to use this confidence to be human in our leadership approach. To be authentic and call it out, this is what I know from the facts, and this is what my intuition is telling me.

I’ve found it liberating to be explicit this way, and that others do listen when they trust you.

We cannot step in our own space if we don’t feel our thoughts and feelings based on intuition are as valid as our knowledge and skills. This important combination is a foundational building block to becoming our best selves as a leader and owning our own path forward.