This article is not for beginners.…
When I was still in my early teen years my school offered Economics as a subject and I took it. The teacher was dreadful and I wanted to have nothing to do with Depreciation again in my life, ever again… However, I was gently coerced by my family to actually read Economics at university. During the university years, the subject was more interesting and to this day I have kept many analogies and insights from that time. In my opinion, Economics is so abstract that the people who study it have had develop great skill at analogies. So I am going to make use of what I learned back in Uni and in the 8 years teaching the DeRose Method to discuss a very interesting topic.
In this article I am going to use this knowledge of economics to explain intuition.
What do you understand by intuition?
A typical dictionary definition of it is to understand something immediately without need for conscious reasoning. I really like this definition.
Imagine…. What if you could have immediate understanding of the issues facing you at your work? What if you had all the insights from this understanding? How would your performance at work improve? How would your relationships change? How much more successful could you be?
As you answer the questions above there is no doubt, intuition is a priceless superpower!
In the DeRose Method we have a technique focused on teaching you to be able to access intuition and to be able to make use of its insights. So how can you access this? (and incidentally, what the hell does this have to do with economics?!)
This is exactly where Economics can help! One of the simplest ways to describe Economies is to break it into two very broad areas: Macro and Micro Economics. Micro is the specialty which deals with the details, with the individual agents of a system, with rationality, with single units. Macro is the other side of the coin: looking at the very broad patterns, at the system itself, at how all the individual units make up and make the system behave.
In a sense, Intuition is to you much the same way that Macro is to Economics. For an individual, intuition is a layer of information which provides instant understanding, but it has a much broader scale. As opposed to getting an insight into a specific problematic client relationship, you may get an insight into the types of clients that you attract or an insight into the types of questions your clients may have.
Many of my students at DeRose Method TriBeCa have started experiencing intuition since beginning to practice, for example Marcelo, a COO of an agricultural machine business has been changing the processes and the way that teams work based on what he has learned by applying the DeRose Method and tapping into his intuition. Richard has been succeeding at making more profitable decisions for the bank he works for. Roy has seen significant gain in his racing performance over the competition and also outside of the track, in his every day life.
There is a consistent pattern: the people who practice the DeRose Method are able to access and reap the benefits of their intuition.
Yet, often times they are unaware that they are using their intuition and often will be frustrated that they do not feel like they had an insight about a specific issue such as dealing with a rowdy co-worker. Therein lies the powerful analogy of Macro Economics and more.
Firstly, to be able to observe the effects of intuition we need to bring the perspective higher, to observe from afar so that we can become aware of the shifting patterns. Secondly we have apperception issue. This issue goes back to our very definition: an insight without conscious reasoning. As a result of this process becoming aware that you are having an intuition is at best a distracting and wasteful activity. But we want to both feel we are having many insights and have them solve the smallest issues.
Oftentimes our focus is misdirected by the desire to be able to experience the process of having an insight rather than to listen to intuition, wasting the understanding. This is one of the key barriers to actually accessing intuition. The solution we have adopted at the DeRose Method is to have a teacher, to have someone who has trained to teach you the techniques and concepts but who is also walking alongside you so that an additional perspective can be brought in as well as experience to be able to identify the success. Finally the teacher is also there to be able to show the next steps.
When an economist is able to see the patterns of ever changing economic behaviors and build more experience with the bigger picture, it is not possible to start to identify more details and eventually detect such fine detail that it approaches Micro economics. The same will happen with your intuition.