December 30, 2003

Intestinal Certitude: Heeding Your Inner Expert

By Laura Sessions Stepp
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, December 30, 2003; Page C10

Trust your gut. We've heard it a thousand times.

But can we really? Should we pay attention to that feeling in our stomach, or that compelling inner voice, as we consider whether to proceed with surgery, accept the company buyout, or believe our dour daughter when she says, "Nothing's wrong"?

People such as Linda Rose say we should. Rose, a clinical hypnotherapist in Bethesda, is a proponent of intuition, or knowing something immediately without thinking about it. First instinct is not the only tool at our disposal, she says, but it certainly is an important one.

"What you think, feel and know are all parts of a decision-making team," Rose says. "When making a choice, why not use a full deck?"

Some business executives are legendary for using their intuition successfully. Robert Lutz, GM vice-president of product development, built the macho Dodge Viper sports car on a hunch while at Chrysler Corp., changing that automaker's old-fogy image and breathing new life into the company. Sony Corp. co-founder Masaru Ibuka, asked about his commercial success, said he drank herbal tea before deciding any major business deal. If he got an upset stomach after drinking the tea, he didn't do the deal.

Howard Dean's current presidential campaign has raised millions of dollars by encouraging supporters to act on their instincts without requiring approval from senior staff.

Today, a growing industry of people calling themselves intuitive coaches teach people to trust their intuition and how to use it. Rose, recently hired by two high-level government agencies and a major D.C. area hospital, is one of them. Caela Farren, president of a McLean-based career development firm called MasteryWorks, also teaches intuitive strategies in her management training seminars.

Instincts help managers recruit and develop employees, according to Farren. "Say a manager has a feeling about somebody. We help him or her find the words to describe that feeling. What is it about the potential employee that seems extraordinary? What has been a current worker's major contribution to the company? The gut is the lead. Then the mind and the conversations that follow open up what that instinct is all about," she says.

"When I go against my gut, I'm always wrong," Farren admits.

Our instincts evolved a long time ago to keep the species vigilant and safe. The biological process is essentially the same today as it was then: When the brain takes in or produces information, amino acid compounds called peptides are produced in the cells of the stomach as elsewhere, suggesting action.

So why do people pay consultants to remind them to do what their ancestors used to do without thinking?

Partly because other people whom we consult -- schoolteachers, psychologists, psychiatrists, senior fellows, talk show hosts and journalists who make it their business to tell us our business -- say we should trust facts over feelings. As Farren observes, there are "so many people speaking and so many hundreds of channels, you can get lost if you don't get in tune with yourself."

Convinced that we don't know enough, we return to the experts again and again for more facts. We are inheritors of a Western process that took shape in the Age of Reason and has been bemoaned ever since by geniuses such as Albert Einstein, who said, "The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift."

Of course the gift might never reach us without the servant. In order for our bodily reaction to be of value, we need to define what we're feeling, says Jennifer Lerner, assistant professor of social and decision sciences at Carnegie Mellon University. Is it delight? Fear? Anger? Where does it come from? From an experience two weeks, two years or two decades ago that resembled the one we're facing now?

Say a teenager is arguing to extend his curfew past midnight, and our gut tells us to say no. Is that because we got angry the last time he broke curfew, or because we had a midnight curfew when we were his age and resented it?

"I can't begin to tell you how much emotional carryover there is" in decision-making, Lerner says.

It helps to talk over our gut feelings with another person, according to Lerner. He may tell us we need more facts before we can make a decision, or that we're not the person to make the decision.

Our instincts may tell us the same things, if we practice using them.

Joe Simone, president of the International Spirit of Life Foundation, a cancer organization, says his training with Linda Rose taught him that his subordinates, not he, should hire for certain positions. It also assisted him through medical treatment for two cancers.

Our gut helps us come to grips with what we are able and not able to do," he says.

The impact of feelings on decision-making has only been researched seriously in the last decade, Lerner says. Some of that work suggests that we should rely entirely on our gut for hedonistic preferences, such as what kind of jelly we prefer. When subjects are pressed to explain why they like certain things, they end up not liking those things as much as they did initially, according to Lerner. Too much thinking can spoil the taste of blueberry jam.

Too much thinking also can result in second-guessing our favorite golf swing, sending the ball into the trees. But too little thinking can result in sending an innocent man to jail. Balancing knowing and thinking, feeling and fact, takes practice.

No matter how we make choices, Lerner says, we shouldn't assume we know how we'll feel once our decisions come to pass. People are really bad at predicting future emotions. Generally, the outcome is neither as wonderful nor as horrible as they expected.

If they pay attention, their gut will tell them that.