Hunch Part 1

Part One: What’s Stopping You?

            Bernadette Jiwa begins her book, Hunch, with a quote from Anne Lamott where she says, “You get your intuition back when you make space for it”. Today we are surrounded by data that is supposed to make us smarter, but is it? It certainly doesn’t look like it’s making us wiser…You see we know a lot more than we think we know and data is only telling us part of the story and has the tendency to dampen our inherent and vital curiosity. You see, data and our human need for certainty is keeping us from developing our emotional intelligence and cultivating an imagination that could change this world for the better.

            You see, here’s the deal. We actually know more than we think we know. However our feelings of a lack of certainty, even though we can never be 100% certain about anything, is keeping us from acting. We just don’t like to ‘not know’. We don’t want to hear that sometimes the questions are even more important than the answers.

            According to Jiwa, scientific discoveries happen not through method or magic, but from being open to discovery by listening to one’s emotions and responding to intuition. Like a poet, the researcher, as well as the therapist, needs the ability to imagine what the truth might be. We need to let go of the need to have answers in order to be able to come up with the right questions.

      

      The ever-more important innovation is more complex than the simple ‘Aha’! Innovations come from prolonged practice of being curious, empathetic and imaginative. Too many of us are relying on IQ scores and the retention of knowledge. Too many of us also rely on ideas. However, ideas are nothing if they’re not adopted and used. Sometimes the big ideas don’t go anywhere right alongside all that knowledge. And sometimes the next big thing isn’t something that anyone, at its genesis, would have believed would have been the billion-dollar idea.

            Common big, but often false ideas, are often based on technology. However, sadly, technology is often hijacking our minds. Thus, we are noticing less and less and are missing more and more in our ever-increasing technological world. Frequently, we’re throwing away opportunities to think and reflect- to be the kind of person that actually can make things better for ourselves and everyone else in our circles as well.

Too often, distraction is the enemy of insight. Some research suggest that people are checking their phone up to 150 times a day. Often, we feel that we are close to something big and important, but yet, we still don’t make the space to do what it takes to immerse ourselves waist high and elbow deep in the things that cultivate our curiosity and imagination.

The truth is that we can do good work when we create an environment that allows us to do so. However, we have to change some of our behaviors and have a mind-shift that changes our priorities to things that matter and deserve our time. If we want to do something big, then we need to stop wasting our time on things that just aren’t that important.

Dan Blanchard is an award-winning author, speaker and educator. To learn more about Dan please visit his website at: www.DanBlanchard.net. Thanks.