How To Listen To Your Gut and Develop Your Intuition

0:07Welcome to today's episode of the Mindset Mentor podcast. I'm your host, Rob Dial. If you have not yet done so, hit that subscribe button so you never miss another podcast episode. And if you're out there and you love this podcast, just do me a favor. Give us a rating and review. It helps more than you can imagine. Today, I'm going to be talking to you about how to develop and trust your gut feeling and trust your intuition so that you can actually start following yourself down the path that you're supposed to go. And you've heard the phrase, trust your gut. Trust your gut, right? Right? Gut feeling and intuition I'm going to use interchangeably today.

0:43But you get a gut feeling about something or you get a gut feeling about someone. And we've heard like, trust your gut. And I get it when you hear like trusting your gut or your intuition or be intuitive. It seems like it sounds mystical. It sounds unscientific. It sounds real woo-woo-y, right? And it doesn't really sound like a great way to make decisions in your life. That's the way I used to think about it too. But there's a whole lot of research that's going into it, a lot of recent research in neuroscience and neurobiology that shows that this isn't just a theory. This isn't just some woo-woo-y thing.

1:19It's actually a fact to pay attention to that gut feeling, to pay attention to that intuition. In fact, it turns out that your gut, your intuition may actually be a really powerful tool for you making the right decisions in your life, especially when it comes to assessing people that you meet. but also like assessing situations, opportunities. Is this right for me? Is this not right for me? Is this relationship right for me? Is it not right for me? Is this business path and starting this business, is it right for me? Is it not right for me? And so often we're taught in this society that we live in to rely solely on intellect, like what we think about it and to be rational and to be logic to make our decisions, which those are definitely important.

2:04And I've made a lot of decisions based off of logic and being rational and all of that. But very rarely do we think to ourselves, maybe I should trust my gut feeling. Maybe I should trust my emotions. Maybe I should trust my instinct. And the reason why is because you kind of think like feelings can be unreliable, right? Feelings can't be trusted. A lot of people, when you go up to them and ask about their feelings, they don't know what they can't attach their feelings to a thought. They can't attach, why do you feel this way? I'm not really sure. There's no logic behind it a lot of times. And there's a phrase that I think is really important that I've kind of lived my life by for a while.

2:42And the phrase is, your fears will scream at you and your intuition will whisper. And so it's like when you're thinking and you're thinking, oh my gosh, I shouldn't do this. I shouldn't do that. Here's the reason why. What are they going to think of me? And you start getting all of these fears. You start getting these limiting beliefs, all of these worries. that's your fear and your fear which comes from your brain will scream at you and the reason why it does that is to keep you in your comfort zone your intuition is like this quiet little whisper that's in the background and it's kind of like that phrase the heart knows what the mind cannot understand and this past week I've gotten this question around intuition twice in the past three days around like hey how do I know what intuition is how do I develop my intuition how do I follow am I gut feeling?

3:27And I was running a call literally this morning with Mindset Mentor Plus, and this question was popped up, like, how do I know what my gut feeling is? How do I know my intuition is? And like I always say, if you want to learn more about Mindset Mentor Plus, just go to mindsetmentor.com. There's information there. But when you think about this thing of like, the heart knows what the mind cannot understand, it's kind of like the gut, the intuitive feeling, the pull that we feel towards something. Sometimes we can't fully comprehend in the moment why we feel a certain way about a person or a situation or whatever it might be.

4:00We're not really 100 % sure in that moment. But that feeling is still really important and worthy of our consideration. And that's the important thing, which is logically it might make sense. We've all done this before, where you meet somebody and you're in front of them, and logically there's nothing wrong with them. There's not anything off-putting about them. They're not saying anything wrong. They're not acting wrong, but you get like a gut feeling of like, something's not right about this person. And we've all done it where you don't trust your gut feeling because logically the gut feeling just wasn't making any sense.

4:35But it's like, I should trust this person. They're good. They're not showing me that they're going to screw me over. And logically it makes sense. And then later on down the road, you find out that there was something wrong with that person. They screw you over. They did something that, that, that, you know, was wrong or off putting wherever it might be and it's like, oh my God, I should have trusted my gut. Have you ever had that happen before? Like I should have trusted my gut with that person. Logically, it doesn't seem to make sense. And your intuitive gut feeling, it ends up being correct later on down the road.

5:07And so sometimes we can't fully comprehend in the moment like why we feel a certain way about somebody or a situation, good or bad. But later on down the road, it makes a lot of sense. Like for me, when I started this podcast almost a decade ago and I decided I had this feeling of like, I feel like I got to go all in on this thing and I need to quit my job and I need to go all in on the podcast. I need to go all into my coaching business and grow it and grow myself. It didn't make sense logically. And a lot of people thought I was crazy to quit my really high paying job when I was 29 years old to go and start a podcast when there was no money in podcasts.

5:46There wasn't the Joe Rogan money in podcasting back in 2015. There wasn't the Caller Daddy money back in 2015. There was like no money. But I had this feeling of like, I feel like this is what I'm supposed to do with my life. And I feel like I should at least follow it. I should at least give it a shot. And now when you fast forward almost a decade, it's like, oh yeah, looking backwards, it makes so much sense now. Now that we've had over 350 million downloads of the podcast, of course it make sense. But when you're sitting there at a couple hundred thousand downloads, a couple months into it, you're like, this doesn't make sense.

6:22And so I could have followed my brain and I could be working at a job that I still hate and maybe have just done the podcast on the side. But now it makes sense why that intuition was coming through. And it wasn't screaming at me. The fear was screaming at me. I was terrified to quit my job to follow this thing. That was screaming at me. my intuition was like hey trust yourself trust this this is the way it's supposed to go and so it can be a good or bad feeling about somebody or a situation but it could be a good or bad feeling about a circumstance starting a podcast growing your business quitting your job whatever it might be getting out of a relationship getting into a relationship and we will be right back and now back to the show and the good thing about it is that now we can actually kind of put some science to it.

7:06And research shows that our gut feeling or the intuition that we have is actually rooted in our physical bodies. It's not just out there in the ether somewhere in the universe. Oh my gosh, it's out there on Venus. No, it's not like that. It's actually rooted in a place that's called your ENS. It's the enteric nervous system. And it's a network of neurons that's actually located in the walls of your digestive tract. And so neurologists refer to the ENS as your gut and your second brain. And the reason why they call it this is because they've actually found that there's 500 million neurons inside of your gut.

7:45And so there's actually, they call it the second brain. And this was all published originally in the Journal of American Scientists in 1999 by a professor of, his name is Michael Sherhan, if you want to know. And he's a professor of anatomy and Cell Biology of Columbia University. And he found that the gut functions as a separate and independent nervous system from your central nervous system. Which is kind of crazy to think about, right? You've got your central nervous system and you've got the ENS, which is a separate and independent nervous system from the central nervous system. And that nervous system has over 500 million neurons and they call it your second brain and it's located in the walls of your digestive tract.

8:26And so this gut feeling, this gut right there can actually influence our cognitive function and memory. If you want to go down a rabbit hole, check out how much the biology of your gut will influence your thoughts, influence your brain, and the bacteria in your gut will actually make you make decisions. If you really want to go down a rabbit hole, I just don't have time to cover it today. But your gut is this really complex system that's capable of influencing both your physiological and your psychological processes. And this communication between the ENS and the brain is what they call bidirectional, which means that your gut can influence your brain and your brain can influence your gut.

9:05So they kind of go back and forth between the two. And this is why, and this is why it's really important that you often experience physical sensations in your stomach when you're nervous or anxious or excited. So when you have butterflies in your stomach, that is actually your gut, your second brain, 500 million neurons that are actually communicating with you in some sort of way. And so we could be like, oh, I've got butterflies. That's so nice. And not pay attention to it. We could be like, oh, I've got butterflies. What's this trying to tell me? And so what's interesting about the gut is that the gut is also connected to the amygdala.

9:40And if you know anything about the brain, if you've heard me talk about it before, the amygdala is the main part of your brain that processes fear. And this part of the brain that processes emotions and also plays a really key role in your fight or flight response. This means that our gut feeling is not just some vague sense of uncertainty or nervousness or unease, but it's actually a real and physical response to a perceived threat or opportunity, which means that your body is always trying to talk to you at some point in time. The question is, are you listening to it? Are you taking a step back?

10:17Are you being quiet? Are you giving yourself a moment to process like, okay, how do I feel about this, this situation? How do I feel about this person? And actually, when we get a gut feeling about someone or something, we should pay attention to it because it may be our body's way of alerting us to a potential danger or to a potential opportunity and it's alerting us to it because our conscious mind hasn't registered it yet. And so it's really important to use your logic when making decisions, of course your brain, but it's also really important to use your feelings and your emotions when making decisions.

10:55And studies have actually shown that people who trust their gut instincts often have a better opportunity of predicting outcomes and making more accurate judgments, even though they don't have all of the information. It's pretty wild to think about it. There's studies that have shown that people who trust their gut instincts are better able to predict outcomes and make accurate judgments. That's pretty crazy if you think about it. So there's studies that have been showing that if you trust their gut, they make better outcomes, they make better decisions, they make more accurate judgments, even though they don't have all the information, which is like, can your gut kind of see into the, is your body like Nostradamus?

11:36Is it kind of seen into the future and we should pay attention to it more? No, I want you to say like, this is not saying that we should just blindly follow our gut instincts and not have any analysis or any critical thinking. What I'm saying is we should give both our brain and our body and our gut and those feelings that come from our gut, the exact same weight as we would rational analysis and logical decision-making. And so we can use both of them to make decisions. I think both of them are important. And this is something we can train ourselves to get better at. So for me, it's not something that I meant to do over time.

12:12But as I started meditating more, as I started getting more quiet, as I started to trust myself a little bit more, what's interesting is that I actually started getting really good at making intuitive decisions. And even my wife, like if you ask her, she said it to me many times. She's like, yeah, like you have a really strong gut feeling. And if she's even said, if you get a really strong gut feeling about something and it doesn't make sense, I will trust you with it because it's been shown over and over again in our relationship. Like this gut feeling actually is something that kind of seems to predict the future.

12:41And we do that with each other where she has a really strong gut feeling where I'm like, hey, what does your gut say about this? What does your body say about this? And she's like, it feels like this. I'm like, okay, I can trust that. I can trust that. We can see how it goes. So it's something that we can train ourselves to be better at. our gut feelings can be honed. They can be refined through practice, through self-awareness, and by paying attention to how our body responds to different situations in different people. And so even the other day, we had something that happened with the baby and Lauren started getting really worried.

13:11And I was like, hold on, let me check in real quick. Let me get quiet. And I got quiet and I was like, I don't feel any fear. I don't feel like there's anything that's going to come of this. And she was really worried about the situation and I wasn't. and you know, weeks down the road and it being nothing, but I'd like checked in with my body. And I was like, is this something I really need to be hardcore and worry about? And obviously I get it. Like, that sounds kind of weird and woo woo. Like this is, it wasn't like a massive safety thing for our child. That would have been different, but it was like, I feel like this is safe.

13:41I feel like this is okay. I feel like there's nothing wrong here. I feel like we're going to be okay. And we just learned to kind of trust that if my body's like, there's something wrong, there's something wrong, then I'm going to trust that as well. And so we can learn over time, like this is something I've been trying to hone and trying to develop for, you know, 12 years at this point, we can learn to kind of recognize patterns and signals that kind of say, hey, you're safe or hey, you're not safe. And those signals may not be apparent to the conscious mind immediately. And so it's the exact same example I was given at the beginning, which is like, you might have somebody that they come into your life, they seem like the perfect business partner.

14:19They seem like they're really good with money. It seems like they're really good with marketing and they're like the perfect fit to your business. You're like, I need to bring them onto my business partner. And then six years later down the road, they leave with all the money in the business. You're like, damn it. I knew it. Cause I had that feeling when I first met him. I feel like there's something wrong with them, but logically it didn't make any sense. It's the exact same thing for like what I was saying with the podcast. It didn't make any sense, but now it makes sense. And so what I really want you to understand is like, don't dismiss it as irrational or unscientific.

14:48Instead, try to really take a step back and consider it as a piece of information that can help you make better decisions. You can use your brain and your gut to make better decisions. And so remember that your gut feeling is not some random emotion or anything like that. It's a physical response that's deeply rooted in our bodies and our minds. Your mind is picking up on something. Your mind is getting something from somewhere, I don't know, from another person's body that's sending the saying, yes, this is good. Or from the other person body saying, no, this is not good. And it's something's in resonance or it's not in resonance.

15:21And so the thing that's, that's super important about it is that, like I said, a lot of time it doesn't make a lot of sense, but usually it makes sense later on down the road. Later on, it makes sense down the road more than anything else. And so the question I always get from people is how do I develop my intuition? How do I get better at finding my gut feeling? How do I get better at it? And I think the most important way to do it is to shut up, right? Like do less, be quiet more, give yourself some more space. Because if it is true, if your fears scream at you, but your intuition whispers, well, then I need to get myself to be quiet.

15:57I need to meditate more. I need to do more breath work. I need to give myself more moments of silence. I need to give myself 45 minutes in the morning to drink my coffee and stare outside and just start to think about life and see if maybe there's a little bit of a whisper that comes through, a little bit of an idea. My best ideas come when I'm doing nothing. That's why a lot of people's best ideas come when they're in the shower. Not even when they're on the toilet anymore because people on their phones were on the toilet. But your best ideas come in the shower? Why? Because you're quiet. Because you're sitting there.

16:28You don't have your phone with. You're not talking to anybody. You're not at your computer. But it's like you give yourself those moments, those little gaps of space. And that's usually, that's where I believe those in silence is where God or the universe or your higher self, whatever you want to call it, communicates with you through feelings, through a little bit of an idea that pops into your head. And so I want you to think about this, like think about like really hone this in, in your, in your own brain, your own body. When's the time when you didn't listen to your gut feeling and it backfired?

16:56Can you think of one time? And then when's the time when you did listen to your gut feeling and you ended up being, ended up being right. And so I want you to understand like there's a lot of science that's starting to show and I believe over the next few years there's gonna be more and more and more science that's going to show this but when you want to make a big decision I think it's really important to check in with your logic with your brain and check in with your gut and your feelings and your emotions and use both of those two to make the best possible decision that you can for yourself so that's what I got for you for today's episode if you love this episode please share it on your Instagram stories tag me in at robdial Jr.

17:28R-O-B-D-I-A-L-J-R. The only way that this podcast grows is when you guys share it. And so if you would share it, it would allow us to impact more people's lives. And it's just the best way for you to be able to say thanks. And besides that, if you want to learn more about coaching with me, coaching with my team, go ahead and go to mindsetmentor.com. We have some information on there on the next step. So once again, mindsetmentor.com. And with that, I'm going to leave you the same way I leave you every single episode. Make it your mission to make somebody else's day better. I appreciate you. And I hope that you have an amazing day.