What Is Intuition? And Is It Real?

Maurice Jenkens

Hello everyone, and welcome back to the The Intuitive Leader™ Podcast with me, Maurice Jenkens. And today I'm joined by not one, but two guests, Jill Ritchie and Sarah Gregg. Jill and Sarah are the co-founders of the Intuitive Psychology Association, a framework that integrates modern psychology with intuitive intelligence. They believe that the gap to achieving your full potential lies in intuition, and they train coaches in how to trust and apply it. Sarah Gregg is a psychologist and a published author with over 90,000 copies of her books sold. She created the world's first journal, System for Flow, which has been cited in academic publications, including the British Journal of Mental Health Nursing. And Jill Ritchie is a highly sought after intuitive coach who has worked with Olympians, celebrities, and high achieving entrepreneurs, helping them break through inner resistance and trust their intuition. Together, they created the Intuitive Psychology Association and train professionals in trusting their intuition. They also host their own podcast called the Intuitive Psychology Podcast. Jill, Sarah, a big warm welcome to you both.

Jill Ritchie

Thank you so much. What a brilliant introduction, Maurice. Yeah, that was lovely. Lovely hearing that back.

Maurice Jenkens

Yeah, it's fantastic to hear yourself introduced.

Maurice Jenkens

It's really interesting to have you both. It's the two for the price of one. And the topic of today is the science and psychology behind intuition and how to trust your intuition. And I am very curious to learn with you, what is intuition to you?

Jill Ritchie

OK, I'll go first. So intuition to me is our highest form of intelligence. I believe it's also our superpower. It is the part that will never steer us down the path that is not meant for us. It is that part that when we can get still and connect to, it ultimately returns us. To authenticity, to truth, to our true essence of who we are. It is that part of us that is not in a long, complex narrative. It really, it usually comes in one word or a few short words or an image or a symbol. And it's incredible. It bypasses that personal thinking mind and takes us to the heart and to the soul. And it's yeah, it's so, so powerful.

Sarah Gregg

Yeah, I love that. And for me, I think, you know, my definition and experience with intuition has really changed quite rapidly over time. You know, I used to think intuition was a nudge, something that was like vague or fluffy, you know, something that you couldn't trust. Like, you know, I come from a scientific background. I'm always kind of looking for evidence of things. And to me, intuition was something that almost felt spontaneous or passive, something that happened to me. You know, I got a feeling about a person, a place, a decision that I was going to make, but I didn't necessarily know where it came from. But as science has progressed, and indeed my own personal journey has progressed, intuition isn't something that's vague or fluffy. To me, it is an intelligent organising system. And it really is, as Jill said, our highest form of intelligence. It's a rapid non-conscious process and that happens within the brain that enables us to really have these direct insights very, very quickly. And I think it's hugely underutilised within Western society in particular, because we have really over relied on logic a lot. And what's really exciting and what's happening right now with your work, Maurice, our work, and indeed a rise in the collective is there's more awareness of actually this system 2 thinking, this other form of system and processing that we're underutilising, but yet holds so much wisdom for us.

Maurice Jenkens

Yeah, yeah. These are very, very beautiful answers. And I can, from my own experience, share with you that I was surprised how often there seems to be a lack of trust involved in terms of trusting own intuition. And I was just, I really wanted to ask you, like, what is your experience? Can you, what is your experience with your clients and to what extent do they trust their intuition?

Jill Ritchie

I think, well, I've worked with intuition, particularly with one-to-one clients since I left my corporate leadership job almost nine years ago. And the most common thing was that people initially didn't trust their intuition. And when they came to work with us, and this is the same for our students, when they're coming to train an intuition, people want to know that it works. And usually when someone is not connected to their intuition, they're in a long complex narrative. They're overthinking. There's a long story around what it is that they want to create, what it is that they want to do or a situation or an issue that they're working with. And with intuition, when we can bring them into come out of the personal thinking mind, and we specialise in techniques. And I'd used these techniques for many, many years with clients. And I was seeing these incredible results over the years. And what was actually happening is I was taking them out of the personal thinking, the mind, and dropping them into the body and working with the body and working directly and communicating directly with intuition. And the difference is huge because they're not in the story anymore. They're suddenly bypassing all of that and without re-traumatisation. And I think a lot of people are concerned around going into work with the unconscious in case, you know, what if something comes up and we don't know how to work with that. We don't re-traumatise clients by taking them into the unconscious, but that is where we're able to access what is the truth and what is really going on and what is essentially holding a client back.

Maurice Jenkens

So what I'm hearing is that the distrust is mind based. It's like overthinking based.

Sarah Gregg

I think it's important to put it into societal context as well. And like, look at the conditions in which we're brought up in a Western society, which is we're trained to trust logic and what we can see. And that's important. So there's a reason why we often don't trust our intuition. And it's not just an individual thing. It's, we've been raised and brought up to see and observe what's measurable to us. And anything that isn't seen and isn't observable is something that we should distrust. So I think when we put that into context, it makes sense then, doesn't it? That actually we would have a hesitation around intuition and like understanding exactly what it is. But I think whenever we start to really understand and indeed the science and psychology is catching up with what a lot of ancient wisdom and traditions already knew to be true, which is intuition has this incredible ability to detect faster than logic can. And our work at the Intuitive Psychology Association, it's not to say that the conscious mind doesn't have a role in a place, that 5%, that prefrontal cortex that helps us rationalise and make decisions absolutely has an incredible role. But it makes sense, doesn't it? That actually we would work with a 95% and we would work with the whole system using each component to its strengths. And if we kind of view the mind like a team, the conscious mind is 5%. And that's really where our discipline, our willpower, our focus and our logic comes from. The 95% is where every thought, every memory, every belief, every action, every interaction you've ever had in your life is stored. So to put this into context right now, as you're listening to this podcast, it's taken around 60 bits of information just to hear me kind of talk. At a maximum, in a flow state, you process 125 bits of information consciously. Now, that's just what you can consciously process, but what's actually happening is you're absorbing 11 billion bits of information per second. And all of that is going into the unconscious mind. So the unconscious mind is this huge treasure trove of information. It's like a huge warehouse where you can go in and elicit the parts that are holding you back. But it's not also just a place where you go to heal. It's also a source of creativity. It's where new ideas come from. That's why we see so many business leaders, scientists, innovators and creators. They have these almost like insights and downloads that come quite rapidly into consciousness. Take Dmitri Mendeleev, for example. He created the periodic table after seeing it in a dream. He dreamt it and he drew it out and it needed just one correction. That's because in that state where we have this relaxed alertness, that's whenever the unconscious and the conscious mind are deeply connected. And we work with intuition in this way. Intuition is the language of the unconscious. And when we can go into a relaxed but aware state, we're able to draw out the relevant information from the unconscious mind in a way that it's very fast and very, very rapid. And indeed, like the latest neuroscience has really evidenced this, where it recognises intuition as a pathfinding recognition system. Something that when we have a clear intention that we can go into this storehouse and like select and elicit the contents that are relevant for us to move forward.

Maurice Jenkens

Brilliant. Brilliant. And now I heard a third definition of intuition, the language of the unconscious. And if I hear you right, are you describing tacit knowledge?

Sarah Gregg

Tacit knowledge. You'll have to explain that one to me. I don't know if I know that term.

Maurice Jenkens

Oh, okay. I'm sorry about that. No, tacit knowledge is the silent knowledge that is stored in our bodies. It's basically what you are describing. I think it's...

Sarah Gregg

Yeah, exactly that. So that knowledge can be in the unconscious. As Jill said, our bodies normally have a reaction as well. There's somatic intuition, like this felt sense as well. So when we tune in and tap into that, it really is an incredible superpower. I wish, my hope is that more people learn about this and understand this because the impact that it has on your life in terms of being able to move you forward, but also being able to harness your creative potential, your decision-making potential, is really, really huge. And I think sometimes it's taken that leap into intuition and being comfortable with the fact that there's an element of it that is unseen and unknown, but the trust that actually when you tap into it, the results that you see are just truly, truly incredible. You jump timelines. If you look at... I've mentioned Dmitri Mendeleev, periodic table. There's lots of examples like that. Paul McCartney woke up kind of humming the tune yesterday, and that kind of came into consciousness. So many scientific discoveries and great decisions in life and business have been made as a result of intuition, but that is just a glimmer of the possibilities that lie with intuition. It's so much more than that.

Maurice Jenkens

Your company or your organisation is called the Intuitive Psychology Association.

Sarah Gregg

Well, my background is in psychology. So me and Jill like to call ourselves the nerd and the magic. I'm a little bit of nerd. Jill's the magic. So Jill operates from like a highly intuitive place. I've known her for years. I've observed her work for years. I've been witness to the change that it creates, and it comes very, very natural to Jill. It really is intuitively led for her what she does. She's not overly thinking. In fact, whenever we deliver sessions together, Jill will frequently say, I can't over plan. I just have to be in the moment. I've got to close down my eyes and I've got to feel into it. I'm slightly different in that I have that intuitive part of me, but I have the science part of me that is just, I don't need to have the evidence of something that works. I'm just deeply curious about why does that work and like what's happening in the background. So the psychology aspect is really fascinating because a lot of psychology supports intuition. If we look at Carl Jung, for example, who was a depth psychologist, he calls intuition the unconscious directly perceived, which is exactly what we were talking about. It's the language of the unconscious. Frances Vaughan called it the memory of the truth, which I just love. I think that's such a beautiful definition. It's like the memory of who we are. So it's that voice within us that is free from the conditions, like free from the filters that we've gone through in our life that remembers who we were before the world told us who we should be. And the psychology is just wonderful in that aspect. But a lot of that psychology is actually from the kind of like the 60s. And it's interesting, more psychology is catching up with it. In fact, I'm a member of the British Journal, British Psychological Society, and one of their recent publications was more on really getting psychology to lean into what is unseen. Because typically, psychology took a different track and a different course when the behaviourists came about. So psychology had all this rich knowledge about intuition, what it was, this unseen, this psyche, this other side of us. And then the behaviourists came in and went, oh, it's just cause and effect. Something happens in your environment, and then you can respond and you just change it from that perspective. But I think we're in a realisation now as a collective and a society where we go, that doesn't work. We have all the information in the world, right? I can go on to YouTube, you can go on to YouTube, and we can learn a new language. We can learn how to breath work. We can learn how to get fit and healthy. We can learn apps. But yet we still don't change. We're bombarded with information. So we really believe that the gap that we have in society is not an information gap, it's an intuition gap. There are lots and lots of gurus out there, lots of people that will tell you how to live your life. However, how much of that are we listening to ourselves? We're not trained or taught to connect into this incredible intelligence system that gives us a nudge in the present moment and says, hey, something isn't right or something's off course. Then we kind of try to logic our way out of it. What if we followed that nudge? What if we worked with that wisdom that floods our consciousness? That's what we do. We follow the nudge and we work with that intuitive wisdom and allow it to reveal the answers that are specific to us.

Jill Ritchie

Yeah, I think the key there, what you're saying, Sarah, is that it's specific to the individual. Your intuition is so unique to you. As Sarah said, we can all go on YouTube and learn the language. We can listen to the podcast. We can go on and get AI and ChatGPT. But how does that feel in your body? How does that feel for you? Your intuition is stronger than any of that, but I think we outsource so much that we start to disconnect from that most intelligent system that is within us. I said at the start, your intuition will never take you down the path that is not meant for you. I think for us, we're so passionate about less outsourcing. Of course, all of these things are great and they have a place, but if it worked, then no one would have any issues in the world. Everyone would be fit and healthy. Everyone would be eating and drinking the right amount of things, taking the right supplements, but they're not. They're not because we are outsourcing too much and we are disconnected from our own intuition and what that represents and what that means to us.

Maurice Jenkens

I really love how you both are putting it. The intuition gap and the outsourcing of our inner knowing to ChatGPT or something like that. Brain freeze basically.

Jill Ritchie

Yeah, for sure. It makes it easier in so many ways, but actually we, because it's easier to ask ChatGPT something, it can give you it and it actually can start to sound like you as well. It starts to sound like you and it's so clever, but again, it's taking us further away from feeling and from trusting ourselves. That real trust. I've worked with hundreds, probably thousands of people, whether that's on one-to-one or in group or in speaking in stages and stuff. People are so hungry to trust themselves again. For me personally, to really connect to my intuition, I need to close down my eyes. When we close down our eyes, it's that invitation to go inward. We stop actually physically looking around us for cues. Is this working? Is this okay? Then we get in our heads and actually it just allows us to quieten down the mind, to drop in and connect very, very quickly. The more that we do that, and not only the more that we do that, we start to trust it, whichever word comes through for us that we need that day. The more we start to trust it, it's like exercising that muscle. We start to get there faster. Suddenly when we close down our eyes, we're not having to go into a long, deep meditation to get access to our intuition. We can drop in in a millisecond and we know we can elicit. When we have a lot going on, the temptation is to do more. Actually, we really achieve more by doing less, especially when we're in this space of intuitive work. That is the work, doing less and being present and having space. That is the work, especially I think for a lot of people, but especially for us that are in this work, we see it as like, oh, I've not really got time. That is the time that we should double down on doing. I know it sounds counterintuitive, but it's so true because that's when we can get into a flow state. Sarah and I have been there so many times when we have been in flow and we've been literally able to do three weeks worth of work in three hours. Then there's times when we've pushed and we have had to redo work because the work that we have put out when we've pushed has been misaligned. It's been maybe out of flow or out of integrity and it's not been our best work. In those moments of deep surrender and trust, so much magic, so much wisdom, so many insights and so many truths come through. That's not just for us, that's for everyone, I think.

Maurice Jenkens

This is all very beautiful and the minding of time is going really fast here. Is there any last words or question that's on your mind? Or are you happy?

Sarah Gregg

I'm happy. I would say just be open.

Jill Ritchie

Be open and curious. As I said before, it's not just for a select few, it's for everyone. If you're not working with intuition, there's so much that you're missing out on. Get open and get curious and have fun with it because although there's so much in there, there's also a world full of your unlimited potential and dreams and desires that are waiting to be woken up and activated.

Maurice Jenkens

Thank you for coming today and both answering the questions as well as giving your life experience. See you soon again.

Sarah Gregg

See you soon. Thanks.

Maurice Jenkens

Thank you, Jill and Sarah, for a lovely talk today. My way of summarising our discussion today, life flows a lot better with our intuition if we use our intuition. In order to go from insight or knowing to actually acting upon it, we need to understand what our intuition is actually telling us, what it is actually saying us. In order to do that, we need to be aware of what our intuition is in the first place. If we navigate uncertainties, if we have to make life decisions, whether it's for business or in private, at some point, it goes easier and faster and better if we trust our intuition. To get there, to get from knowing it somehow to actually trusting it, to actually acting upon it, that's what Sarah and Jill do in terms of educating and accrediting coaches and that's what I do with founders and leaders in the programme Decoding Intuition™. If you're interested in reading or learning a little bit more about what Decoding Intuition™ is and how it works or other ways of how you can, with free resources, trust your intuition, have a look at the website link right here in the show notes, intuitiveleader.net/start. Thank you for watching, thank you for listening, and see you back soon. Bye-bye.