A popular business website has an article on it about a woman who wrote a book on why women are making better business choices than men. When I scanned the list, I saw that one of the reasons she has listed is that women use their intuition or gut feeling more often than men. This reason really gets my goat.

Intuition and gut feeling are two different things. If a writer or a teacher (or anyone for that matter) try to lump these two processes into the same category, then that person has never experienced intuition.

Intuition is not a feeling, it is a knowing. It is a knowing that you cant explain. You know it, but you dont know why you know it. Here is an example of what Im talking about:

I was driving to a friends house one day and as I passed a particular retail area, I just KNEW that one of my favorite restaurants was in there. This restaurant, as far as I logically knew, was in another part of the city, but not in this area. So, I looked for it but didnt see it. That was fine because I intuitively knew it was there.

On my way home, the exact thing happened in the exact same place. Again, I looked for it, but didnt see it.

The next week I was on my way back and the same thing happened again. This time I had to stop at the stop light in that area and when I looked over in that area, there was the sign for my favorite restaurant. THAT is intuition.

I never, ever had a gut feeling or a feeling of any kind. I just knew without a doubt that my favorite restaurant was over there, even though there was no possible explanation for my knowing that.

Gut feeling is actually a feeling you get about something. It can be connected to past experience, whether you know it or not. It is not a knowing. There is typically some reason you are having this feeling - whether you are picking it up psychically from someone or something else or whether it is from a long buried past experience.

Usually, people who are experiencing a gut feeling will state it as a feeling, or they might say, Something tells me That is not intuition because intuition does not come from another source. It comes from within.

The next time you hear someone lump intuition and gut feeling in the same category, please tell them the truth. You will be doing your intuition a favor.

Copyright 2006 Wendi Moore-Buysse