Your “intuition” is just your past. If you want to create a different future, you have to get uncomfortable and go somewhere unfamiliar.
“Intuition” is really just your nervous system getting trained on a pattern until it no longer feels surprising – it just feels right.
When I sang in the San Francisco Symphony Chorus, I could pick up Bach or Beethoven and sight-sing it accurately because I’d spent years immersed in that classical music world. The chord progressions felt inevitable.
Then we’d perform modern composers such as Stravinsky, Schoenberg, or John Adams, and the music sounded “wrong” to me at first. Dissonant. Strange. Uncomfortable.
But after a few weeks of rehearsing, those same pieces started to feel inevitable too.
Repetition reshaped my intuition.
The same thing happens in life and leadership.
If you stay in your normal routines, your brain will keep reinforcing the belief that the world works only one way.
But when you step outside your normal by:
• traveling to a different culture
• reading about people who lived differently
• working with teams that think differently
• taking on a challenge that stretches you
…your sense of what is “natural” begins to expand.
New intuition comes from new experience.
And new experience requires discomfort.
Where have you stretched your intuition recently?