12 September 2026 by Jennifer
Only by following your own intuition can you find out what happens if you do.
I was just thinking again recently about a particular section from my zine Creativity is for everyone. I thought I would share it so as to be able to link to it here.
Intuition
An important thing in creativity and in life is your relationship with your own intuition.
Intuitive knowing isn’t the same kind of knowing as knowing a fact. Intuitions can be misleading – e.g. if they were based on insufficient information.
But if you don’t pay any attention to those internal pushes and what-ifs, then you’re missing out on a valuable source of wisdom.
It can be a challenge to learn to trust your intuition – and it can be a challenge to learn when to question it.
Both are important. Both are skills which mainstream culture doesn’t support very well.
If you get time with a good counsellor or therapist, or a friend who’s a good listener, part of what they’ll do is help you tune in to your own intuitions about things, and come up with safe ways to test their truth.
In day to day life, most of us get more encouragement to override intuition than to listen to it.
Intuition and risk
Trusting intuition is partly a matter of owning the risk of it. It’s an act of faith to trust your own sense of a situation even when others disagree or you don’t have conclusive evidence.
Of course there are also risks in following other people’s ideas and overriding the voice of your intuition.
For one thing, you might have been right! By taking the
generally-recommended path, you might miss out, in some practical
sense.
But that risk applies either way: it’s possible you’d miss out on something by taking your path, too.
What you’re also risking by overriding intuition is a loss of valuable experience. I mean like this:
Suppose you thought in the first place that the recommended path was the wrong direction, and then it is. In that case, you’ve missed out on doing your own experiment. In a sense, you’ve done someone else’s experiment instead.
If you follow your own intuition and then it all goes wrong, at least you’ll have some new data. You’ll be fine-tuning your intuition for the next adventure.