Intuition, that illogical yet valuable knowing, can separate the leader from the follower in business, industry and yes, coaching. The titans of technology, the leaders of Apple, Microsoft and Google – just as those of the industrial age, Carnegie, Ford and Rockefeller – had no one to follow but their own gut instincts. And when it comes to coaching, the people who excel learned to trust their intuition early on.
The current times, highlighted by fear and framed in economic losses and global natural disasters, call for unusual responses and solutions from our clients. Working with people to reinvent their careers since 9/11 and more intensely in the last three years has only strengthened my resolve that coaches are the voice of their client’s intuition. We receive feedback and champion the truth about what our clients want at the deepest level. Those truths are leading people to new, satisfying ways of working, jobs they never thought they’d get and career and life changes that make people greater contributors in the world.
If that is the promise that following our intuition holds, it is unfortunate that intuition is a subject that often gets stuffed into ‘the closet’ for safe-keeping.
Why Only Behind Closed Doors?
If it’s truly time for out-of-the-box thinking and game changing innovation, what causes so many of these deeply truthful conversations to happen in a shroud of secrecy and hushed tones?
Corporate client conversations are often more secretive, but both personal and executive clients speak of their intuitive instincts as a strange disease they must only mutter of in the deepest of caves, away from civilization – and we, as coaches, let them.
We coaches hide too. Many have had bad experiences when they’ve let their intuitive interest and abilities become public knowledge. One coach, who ironically asked to remain nameless, revealed during an interview that she lost six Fortune 500 contracts upon clients finding her personal website that spoke of the alternative trainings she had taken and the work she does as an intuitive. Yet one of those same clients, when they met to say good-bye, confided that he now understood why she was the best coach they had.
This begs another question: Does it matter if it’s secret, as long as people get what they need?
I think it does matter. Imagine if practice and permission were less taboo. Just as alternative medicine is more and more accepted in hospitals, coaches could work openly and get highly compensated for their unique skill. Clients would learn to tap the renewable resource that everyone has at one level or another. People who honor their intuition raise their kids differently, they lead differently, they create work environments where good ideas can flourish and fear is reduced for all. Wouldn’t that make a difference to the global situations we face?
Intuition Plus
Among coaches are some very gifted intuitives. There’s intuition and then there’s what I’ll call “Intuition Plus” – when someone is so intuitive that people might call them psychic. Somehow, ‘psychic’ has a colloquial negative connotation but in truth, the word derives from the Greek for ‘of the soul.’ Again, more vocabulary that can scare away the strict five-sensory person.
In reality, anyone who is…[click below to read more]
This article first appeared in choice (vol. 9, no. 4) by Laura Berman Fortgang. The full article can be downloaded by clicking the button below
Download Article 1K Club
