Now there is more recognition of intuition as a useful part of our lives, even if its not clear how we get to use it. A few years ago Bill Gross, the manager of the world’s largest mutual fund, was on a mat doing his daily yoga session, when an idea came to him. He decided to take 10 of his employees, and get them to travel around “taking the temperature” of America’s housing market. A year later, they concluded that money was being lent to people with no hope of the money being paid back. They’d discovered a housing bubble in America that was just about to burst. So Gross decided not to invest in the subprime mortgage market. (read the original story on the Daily Telegraph website here.)

Gross, who practices at 8.30am every day at a hotel across the street from his office in California, credits yoga with giving him the focus and clarity of thought to sift through the hubbub of noise that swirls around the financial markets. Some of his best ideas, he told the New York Times in 2009, come when he’s standing on his head.

Now, asking people to stand on their head or tie their legs in knots as a means to get hold of intuitive thoughts is not everyone’s cup of tea. I wonder how many of you reading this would be so keen to get useful intuitive thoughts, that you’d go through any exercise, in the hope something would happen. Clearly Mr Gross is sold on his way of finding intuitive thoughts, yet it’s not the only way.

Here at the School of Insight and Intuition (SII), we help people learn how to identify these sometimes elusive sensations we call “intuition” and to apply them to make decisions and bring more innovation and creative possibilities into both their work and their personal lives.

We invite you to subscribe to this blog for more stories and tips about using intuition, and about upcoming courses we deliver in London, both for individuals and organisations. If you’d like to find our more about our training, please do drop us a line via the contact form on this site, or give us a ring during business hours at 0845 815 0089.

And especially for those of you in the financial industry we’d love to help you train to master your very important intuitive skills; because we could all do with a much less troubled money world.

We’re keen to hear your thoughts and stories about intuition, so please do leave your comments below.

But these days, intuition is being recognised as a valuable skill by at least one UK police force. In September 2011, Staffordshire police arrested four suspects in a drug bust involving an undisclosed (but we assume, very substantial) amount of crack cocaine found in a car. Apparently, the driver of the car ignored a no-entry sign, and started driving in the wrong direction on a one-way street. When an officer stopped the car, he had a feeling something wasn’t quite right, and he searched the car, and discovered the drugs (read original story on BBC website here)

Staffordshire police inspector, Neil Hulme, said, “This was a case of an officer using their intuition when responding to a traffic offence to uncover a potentially serious drug crime.”

So we know what happened. Yet how did it happen? How does this mysterious thing we call “intuition” work? And how does it fit in with our demand for policy and procedure? While it is certainly important for policy and procedure to be upheld, especially in policing, in this particular story, police inspector Hulme clearly appears to believe there is a robust connection between a good outcome and the use of intuition

It certainly does beg the question: “What would have happened if the police officer hadn’t used their intuition? What if he had ignored what he has “sensed”?

How many times in your own life have you sensed something that seemed to be unlikely or even illogical? Did you “go with your gut” or did you follow logic and procedure? What was the outcome?

Here at the School of Insight and Intuition (SII), we help people learn how to identify these sometimes elusive sensations we call “intuition” and to apply them to make decisions and bring more innovation and creative possibilities into both their work and their personal lives.

We invite you to subscribe to this blog for more stories and tips about using intuition, and about upcoming courses we deliver in London, both for individuals and organisations. If you’d like to find our more about our training, please do drop us a line via the contact form on this site, or give us a ring during business hours at 0845 815 0089.

And perhaps we’ll even have the pleasure of receiving a call from the police force, so we can help train them to master their very important intuitive skills.

We’d love to hear what you have to say about this, and we invite you to leave your comments below.