There is no such thing as an unintuitive person; everyone has intuition. The difficulty comes in recognizing and using it. What does it take to effectively use your intuition? Here are a few suggestions.

• Go right to the heart of any problem or decision. Don’t let a myriad of data, analysis, options, and probabilities overwhelm you and push you into catatonic indecision.

• Clear away the clutter—the long lists of pros and cons—and zero in on the central question. When confronted with a problem, say to yourself, “What’s the essence of this? Never mind the details, what’s the important thing?” Don’t dwell incessantly on all the attributes and complexities of a problem. Pare the situation down to its essential elements.

• A useful technique is to distill a decision down to its core and ask a simple question: Does your gut say “Yes” or “No”?

The interesting thing is that delayed intuition generally doesn’t make it less scary. If anything, the more you understand it, the more butterflies in your stomach it’ll give you. Because you’ll uncover all the ways it can go wrong; you’ll know the million things that might kill this idea and your business and your time.

But knowing what can kill you makes you stronger.

And knowing that you’ve already deflected some major bullets makes you stronger still.

Listening to intuition is not the act of concentrating on what you think you want. It is not hedonism, a move toward the most pleasurable short-term alternative. It is not giving vent to the inner emotional child left over from your infancy. It is simply paying clear attention, without mind chatter and emotions, to the most appropriate alternative that comes from the creative Essence.

Our speakers seem to tell us that intuition kicks in precisely when they move through the stress and the frustration to a calm, clear state beyond. At that moment, the appropriate action appears almost as a solid conviction: take the case of Robert Medearis. Instead of emotion, he prefers to talk about energy:

I think everybody has a certain amount of energy about them. And I think that one of the critically important things is to allow that energy to take place. Don’t be afraid of it, don’t try to channel it. Let it emerge. Because that energy is the source, it’s the food for the idea… Allow it to ferment, allow it to come out, allow it to bubble up if you will even though you might think that it’s somewhat negative in origin. Allow it to manifest.

One reason why you get into trouble like this is that you trust reason too much. Human life is rarely reasonable. You may believe that intelligent, well-meaning people can resolve any conflicts, but that assumption itself arises out of a cloudy image of how things work. Insight usually means discovering the madness hidden in an apparently reasonable situation.

By studying some of the most beautiful examples of people whose latent potential popped into view when they came into frame, I became increasingly attuned to seeing and sensing the encodings and fire of those around me.

Then one day, I woke up to realize that my entire emotional state had changed, not just in my work, but across my entire life. Instead of feeling frustrated with what people are not, I’d made a monumental shift to feeling grateful for what they are. I wish I’d made this shift decades earlier but as the Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter pointed out, “Wisdom too often never comes, and so one ought not to reject it merely because it comes late.