This article is from my archives, and I think the information is worth repeating.
From the CEO to marketing to creative services to the shipping clerk, intuition is our best friend in the workplace. Over the years, I’ve presented ways to increase and work with intuition, or instinct if you prefer, to aid educators, police officers, medical personnel, and people in just about every walk of life you can name.
It all began back in 1984 when the Vice President and Director of the Creative Services and Marketing Department of a Fortune 500 company in Ohio and I went out on a limb together.
At the time, I had recently moved from liberal California to conservative Ohio. While talking to the director about freelance writing work, the subject of intuition and the importance of using intuition to find work you love came up.
The director asked me if I would consider putting together a breakfast seminar for his group on these very subjects. Although I had experience as a speaker, including substituting for my former boss at UCLA on occasion, my main work experience was as a writer, not as a speaker. Still, I listened to my intuition and said yes.
I knew my job was to inspire the director’s team, to offer them something they hadn’t heard before, or at least hadn’t heard the way I would present the information. They needed to be motivated, and I was the one hired to do that.
Perhaps I was influenced by years of living in California, fostered by the director’s faith in me, but that limb we went out on came with the last line on the agenda. It read: “The ‘L’ Word.”
In today’s culture the “L word” might be easier recognized, but this was 1984 and most business people in a Fortune 500 conservative corporation in Ohio weren’t thinking of the “L word,” let alone speaking it out loud in front of coworkers.
I explained to the group that three letters followed the “L” and this word had a lot to do with their work as well as their personal lives, and that this “L” word was needed to use their intuition.
Throughout the morning, there was a lot of hemming and hawing, with a few guesses—luck, labs, lack, and so on—but no one came close…except one man, the vice president and director of the department. He sat there smiling while his staff kept guessing. Finally, I nodded and he gave the answer.
“Love,” he said. “To be good at your work, you have to love it, and if you don’t love what you’re doing, you don’t belong in this department.”
After a long moment of silence, I heard people starting to breathe again.
“I love what I do,” he continued. “That’s why I’m so successful.”
Heads started nodding and everyone smiled. They got it.
Okay, you say, I get that love isn’t a dirty word in business anymore, but what does love have to do with intuition?
To be successful in one, you need the other. It’s the combination of love for what we do, coupled with intuition that takes us beyond knowledge and leads to our success, whether that success is leading a company, knowing what clerical backup is needed before it’s asked for, or moving out of harm’s way if a tower of boxes start to tumble.
Loving our work gives us the passion and motivation to put in the effort to learn and grow in the business of choice. There’s no substitute for knowledge and experience, but success comes with that extra step–intuition, aka, that “gut instinct.”
In the Harvard Business Review Modesto A. Maidique wrote:
“Gut,” replied Carnival CEO, Micky Arison, when I quizzed him, while interviewing him for a research project on CEO decision making, on how he arrived at the most important and fruitful decision of his career: the $5.45B acquisition of Princess Cruises. I must have seemed somewhat puzzled for Mr. Arison emphatically clarified, “I trust my gut.”
One of the most famous CEOs of all time, Steve Jobs, stated the importance of intuition and love. He said, “Have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”
Everything else is secondary indeed. Without using your intuition, you may flounder, missing your dream. And the love, well, we all need love to survive and for our work in the world to have meaning.
Do you need a speaker for your group? Contact DianaRankin1111@gmail.com, or call 937-362-2117. To see more of my work, please go to www.DianaRankin.com and click on blog: to see my videos go to youtube.com/c/dianarankin1111