Knowledge Flow & Flourish

What keeps you up at night? It seems this is a question leaders are often asked, and I have yet to see a leader who doesn’t have an answer. We all have worries or hard decisions we need to make. What are yours? Does your mind race at night with all of the worries of the day and the weight of the world?

For as long as I can remember, I’ve been a worrier. When I was 3 or 4 years old, I used to play with our neighborhood cats and would come home with scratches, asking for a band-aid each time. Once, my dad had enough and decided to tell me that if I left a band-aid on my thumb for too long, it would turn white and shriveled, and it would fall off. I was shocked when he was right – when I took the band-aid off, my thumb was white and shriveled, as he predicted, and I laid awake all night, watching to make sure my thumb didn’t fall off. (It didn’t fall off). It took quite a while for me to wear a band-aid again after that!

Many years later, I remember laying awake at night because I thought I forgot to turn in homework, even though I hadn’t been to class yet due to a new middle school schedule that I hadn’t adjusted to yet. (I still got an A in that class). There are so many cases like this that have kept my mind going in circles for days and weeks. It took many years to understand that these worries & other difficult emotions are actually a signal to pay attention. They showcase what we care about and that something needs to change. Worries can be intercepted and turned into something more helpful than ongoing thought spirals.

What if I told you that you have a power of knowledge within you that you were born with to easily manage these worries and that there are simple ways to tap into this power?

This power is intuition, not the rational thinking mind that sends you into the spirals in the first place, and I’m going to share with you today a simple way that I tap into this intuition at work.

WIPs (Worries, Intuition, Possibilities leading to your Works in Progress)

When I find myself getting to a point where worries are starting to cloud my mind and keep me from doing my best work, I know that there’s something I need to pay attention to. It means that I’m not focusing my time on what’s most important and I need to pause. It’s great if you have someone to chat with, like a coach, but I’ve found that just spending a few minutes in reflection and writing can often shift your perception and mindset enough to refocus. The answer has always been within you, after all.

Step 1 – Write out those worries

I love using a stack of sticky notes that I can shift around later, either physical or virtual, like in a tool like Miro. In tough times, I might do this weekly, in more quiet times, it might be less frequent, like once a month. The idea here is to let all of the worries out. Start writing, one worry per sticky, and keep going until there’s nothing else. I’m usually surprised that there are often fewer stickies than I anticipated. The worries seem to magnify in my mind, but when written, there are really one a few nuggets that cause all the anxiety. Don’t try to solve anything yet, just write them all out.

Step 2 – Sort your worries

Do you see any worries that are related to each other? Group together any that might stem from the same problem or worry or that might be approached together. What do they have in common? Are there more, systemic worries that you need to capture here?

Step 3 – Tap into your intuition (5 ways)

Now that you’ve written all of the worries, sorted and made sense of them, it’s time to step away and tap into your intuition.

You might ask, but Rosanna, how do I know I’m hearing my intuition? What if it’s really hard to hear or to know? What if I’m not listening to the right voice?

First, stop trying so hard, and don’t worry. Be kind to yourself and trust yourself.

When you start, there are two types of voices you might hear that can make this confusing. There’s the thinking mind, and there’s the whisper of your heart. The thinking mind screams at you, and your intuition waits in quiet. So many different traditions have names for this, such as Ego vs. Guru (yoga/Ram Dass), Judge vs. Sage (Shirzad Chamine), inner critic vs. inner mentor (Tara Mohr), to name a few.

What you need to do is relax and quiet the mind. Here are some practices I find helpful, in order of difficulty (further down the list requires more practice):

1. Take rest, go for a walk, or do something that sparks inspiration – Walk around the block, notice the flowers, the snow, the clouds, the sun, the rain. Notice your thoughts. What’s working its way through your mind? Do you have a sudden idea? Listen to your favorite music, read your favorite quotes, sit in sunshine. How do you feel afterwards?
2. Pay detailed attention to your senses – Look at something with exquisite detail and notice something you didn’t notice before, or listen for the sounds your hear farthest away from you and those closest to you. This will quiet that screaming voice to make room for the intuition. For more exercises, visit Resources | Positive Intelligence.
3. Meditate for at least 10 minutes. The breathing meditation is the easiest. Follow your breath in and out, the rising and falling of your chest or belly, or the temperature of air coming in and out of your nostrils. Start the meditation by asking your question, do the meditation, and see what arises. This is called contemplation after you concentrate on your breath.
4. Ask your inner teacher – This might be someone you admire, your elder self, a teacher or guru. Imagine this wise being inside of yourself, quiet yourself and ask your question. What answers arise?
5. Follow the glow – I learned this one from Erich Schiffmann. He recommends asking a question, listening, and daring to do what you are prompted to do. Sense what feels or looks most sparkly. Practice this with easy choices, like deciding what you’re going to wear in the morning, or what to buy in the grocery store. Which shirt in your drawer glows beyond the others & sparks joy? He says you know when you’ve tapped into your intuition when the choice is no longer a choice – what he calls the “choiceless choice.”

I’ve been practicing tapping into my intuition for many years and have gotten to the point that I can simply take a deep breath and listen in if I’ve taken care of myself. The whispers are loud enough to send a surge of loving energy. I know something is right when I sense a shift in energy, a sense of relief and of well-being. One of my coaches describes this as a turning of the kaleidoscope. Often, the answers are surprising, as well.

Step 4 – Write out the possibilities

Take a moment to write out a sticky note for each of your worry groupings with the answers that arose during your intuitive contemplations. Step back and take a look. Do you feel settled? Are there still worries? If you’re not yet settled, start at step 1 and iterate through again until you feel grounded and ready to move on.

Step 5 – Make your action plan

I often find that the possibilities I create in Step 4 fall into one of two buckets: 1) Being – ways of being that I need to shift, 2) Doing – tasks or project plans I need to create and follow.

For Being, I keep a list of my intentional ways of being and focus on one per day or week that I set as my intention for that day or week. I add these new ways of being to my list and focus on these for the next week or two.

For Doing, I spent some extra time ironing out the details of a task list or plan and add these to my overall tasks lists and plans for the next week or two.

By taking these actions, I can trust that I’ve done and will do what I can do, following that voice of truth within me, and there is no need to worry any longer. I trust that the way things turn out are for the best at this point.

After a couple of weeks, I go back to my worry list and reflect. Have I made progress? Anything that needs to change? I’ve found that by addressing my worries in this way, I sometimes come up with new ideas that have shifted our organization, such as creating a North Star for my team, and I sometimes find patterns over time of the same worries appearing again and again, such as resourcing constraints. When these continue to appear, I know that I haven’t addressed the root and there’s a bigger action that needs to be taken.

Team worries

This method can also be used with a team over several meetings: 1) List all of the worries as a team & group them, 2) Prioritize the top 2 worries the team wants to address now, 3) Have a brainstorming session with all possible solutions, remembering that there are no wrong answers (build on ideas rather than throwing any out), 4) Decide on the most impactful actions you can take as a team.

Time for you! Question of the week

How do you tap into your intuition at work?