The Small Voice

“How do you know that’s going to happen? You haven’t even examined her yet,” asked my student.

“I just know. I feel it. My sense is that it will,” I replied.

”How am I supposed to do this? I mean there’s no information, no range of motion or strength or anything so I don’t understand,” said the student.

”The conversation is loaded with information. Tone of voice, body and facial movements, hesitancy, the energy in the answers. The information is there it’s just not anything you can measure,” I replied.

We all have it but we don’t all pay attention to it and if we do, not all the time.

It’s a hunch, an intuition, a whisper. You feel it more than hear it but if you’re not used to it, you’ll dismiss it. I know I have a number of times.

Some call it a “small voice”, the “voice of intuition”, a hunch, or “sixth sense”.

The word intuition comes from the Latin intueri – “to look at, to consider” and it’s associated with the non-linear part of your mind – the right side of the brain. The part that doesn’t always make sense. That would be the left side, the rational, logical side.

On Saturday October 5, 2019, my wife and I attended the wedding of someone who was hired by my “sixth sense”. Her name is Lauren Williams, well now it’s Reeves, and when I met Lauren in a job interview many years ago, I had this strong feeling that I should hire her. It just about clobbered me.

I failed though to translate this feeling into enough hard data to convince my partner at the time. Lauren didn’t have the experience, she was young, and someone else who my partner believed was “better for the job” got hired.

I said it was a mistake. It wouldn’t work.

And this other person quit before she even started the job.

I then called Lauren and it was the best thing I ever did. She started as a receptionist and worked with her way up to Chief of Operations. She basically ran the place. I just did what she suggested more often than not.

After I sold the practice in 2013, about two years later, Lauren left the practice for a new life as a dive instructor in Roatan where she met her husband to be.  Lauren is now a dear friend of mine. Someone I would do anything for.

Why am I telling you this? What does this have to do with the body or joints or pain or well, really, anything?

Because the same whisper that told me to hire Lauren is the voice that tells you you shouldn’t run on that achy knee. Or that you should skip the wine with dinner, get up earlier and walk the dogs, turn off your phone in the evening. It’s this voice that “knows” what’s best for you.

It’s like your personal GPS. And like anything else, you get better at it the more you use it.

Of course, like with my student and partner, I can’t prove it. I have no data, no studies, no science. I have experience having paid attention and experience not having paid attention. So, I’m sharing that with you.

How do you know if what you’re sensing is really the thing to do or not? Well, a friend of mine, Christine Springer, often likes to say that intuition has a kind of peaceful, settling quality to it. If you have a hunch and you’re uneasy, nervous, rattled, well, more often than not, it’s not intuition speaking. That’s fear.

Thanks for reading.

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