I knew this would happen! – intuition vs creation

Something happens and we think to ourselves ‘I knew this would happen!’ But how did we know? Is it a hunch, intuition or maybe a self-fulfilling prophecy? If we know in advance, can we maybe change the outcome? How our own attitude and actions affect our results? What if we act like we know we’ll succeed?

Lately, I’ve been trying to develop my connection to my intuition and learn to understand what my body is telling me better. In the past I had completely lost my connection with myself and trusted only my logical judgement. But what really is intuition (when we have a gut feeling about something) and how can we tell it apart from instinct (physiological reactions) and ‘self-fulfilling prophecy’ (when we actually create the outcome)?

According to the Cambridge dictionary INTUITION is an “ability to understand or know something immediately based on your feelings rather than facts” [1]. It is also believed that “intuition is the subliminal processing of information that is too complex for rational thought (…). And that the processes that make up intuition are learned, not innate” [2]. To follow intuition I should notice how I feel, what my body is telling me rather than trying to make a rational judgement. Sometimes things just don’t feel right, a newly met person behaves ‘weird’ and we can’t really say why but we just don’t want to spend time with them… It’s the “feeling of knowing that is a combination of our ancestors’ experiences and our own experiences” [3]. Based on this experience you subconsciously can process info so fast, that the logical brain doesn’t follow and you just get a ‘hunch’. That’s intuition.

To complicate things a bit, we also have INSTINCT, which is considered to be a “reactive behavior based on our inherited patterns” [3]. That’s the thing we have in our DNA, “an innate, typically fixed pattern of behaviour in animals in response to certain stimuli” [4] and it’s mostly connected to survival. When you see a bear while walking in the forest, you decide to fight or run, not because you’ve seen it in a movie or someone told you so, it’s because your survival depends on it and you just know what to do.

Once we understand the diffidence and learn to recognize symptoms of each, using our intuition and our instinct makes our life easier. Makes us feel more connected to ‘the source’, helps to learn the life lessons faster, without repeating the same mistakes. Enables us to move quicker towards set goals because we waste less time on overthinking.

But we have to be careful. Thanks to our instinct & intuition, we are able to ‘guess’ the meaning of something and that’s very helpful. However, because of our limiting beliefs, subconscious values and fear based on past difficult experiences, we are also able to create a meaning of a situation or even create the situation altogether! And it all depends on how we got used to think. In simple terms, we can put it down as positive and negative thinking that leads to creation of the results in our life. I’ve recently got to know the positive/negative thinking creation circles (see below) [5] and they have one thing in common – it both thinking processes at some point we tend to think ‘I knew this would happen!’ and it has nothing to do with instinct or intuition…

When we are self-confident and we love ourselves, we tend to think more positively, we believe in ourselves more, and also trust in the desired outcome. Thanks to that we create more positive results. Let’s have a look at an example below – You’re studying for an exam – what is most likely to happen when you think positive:

Unfortunately, based on our limiting beliefs and habit of ‘better be prepared for the worst’, that negative thinking is hiding behind, we have tendencies to think negative thoughts and put ourselves down. This inevitably affects our actions and creates undesired results. Let’s look at the example of an exam preparation from a perspective of a negative thinker:

Because we are used to positive/negative way of thinking – we learned it at some point in our life and accepted it as ‘the truth’ – the way we think now happens on the subconscious level and we often believe that This is how I am and I can’t change it. That’s not true. The good news is that at ANY point of our life, we can change the way we think. As I said last week – We are, what we think and because we are thinking those thoughts we have a choice. By using conscious mind we can chose positive thoughts every day, every minute –  notice the negative thoughts and consciously change them to more positive. And with practice, this new thinking pattern will become unconscious, so effortless.

Intuition and instincts are our allies. No doubt. They also happen at the unconscious level. But there is a difference when you say ‘I knew this man would try to steal my wallet‘ and ‘I knew I would fail the exam‘. The first one is our intuition warning us from something external happening to us, the later is us creating the situation we ‘predicted’, making our ‘wish’ come true.

I hope that knowing the difference, will help you to notice and use your instinct & intuition to your advantage. But most of all, I trust that now you will be able to consciously decide if you are happy with your current thinking pattern, and if not, be brave enough to change it and create more results you want in your life. Now you know how 🙂