“When you see a red flag 🚩 , don’t stick around for the bunting”…
My fab hypnotherapist said this to me recently and it blew my tiny mind.
It sums up, doesn’t it, how often we have an instinct about someone or something right from the start. But we tend to override it, tell ourselves “you’re being silly”, or “don’t judge a book by its cover”. Only to find that we should have trusted our gut in the first place.
It reminded me of some of the brilliant stuff in Nancy Kline’a book ‘Time to Think’. In particular, the question:
What do we already know now that we are going to find out in a year?
I now apply it to my business and my life all the time.
Because usually I do have a hunch as to how things are going to turn out. The person or situation gives me clues right from the start. And it’s my job to heed them. Not ignore them because I’m too busy/too overwhelmed/just want to tick stuff off my list.
We carry a lot of wisdom in ourselves which we’re not even aware of. Because it’s not front of mind. It’s not held in our pre-frontal cortex, our rational brains. It’s held in our limbic system, our prehistoric brain. And even our body’s brain.
Have you ever had a visceral reaction when you meet someone for the first time? An internal shudder? A feeling of “that’s not my kind of person”. I definitely have.
And when I’m around them, I tend to suffer a sort of emotional hangover afterwards.
This is what I mean by emotional and bodily wisdom.
There have also been interesting studies around awful situations of attacks on women by strangers/acquaintances.
Scarily often the women said they had a feeling about a person/situation but they overrode it because they thought they were being ‘irrational’.
This tendency is also exacerbated of course by the extent to which girls and women have been socialised out of upsetting other people and ‘making a fuss’. All of this left many of us confused and unsure about the extent to which we are ‘allowed’ to follow our instincts.
All of this is to say that we need to get better at developing and honing what I think of as ‘whole brain wisdom’ (notice we’re talking about ‘wisdom’ not ‘knowledge’ which are two different things).
This is why, when people call our TCC (The Carvalho Consultancy) training for lawyers ‘soft skills’, I sort of get it. But it’s sort of more than that. As I say, it’s about developing ‘whole brain wisdom’. And we could all do with a bit more of that.
Please see below ⬇️ my latest art installation which I like to call “Brian (the Brain) And the Bunting’. Together with THE best book on whole brain thinking and the history of how rationality has become prized over and above instinct – ‘The Master and His Emissary’ by Ian McGilchrist.