Don’t trust your guts. Read this instead.

In the world we live in today, we are always looking for a quick answer, for a how-to, and for a way to justify our ‘feelings’. When we run a search on Google, the very first line that shows up is not the best [or sponsored] search result, it is actually the number of search results Google was able to identify and in how long it did so, e.g. 0.71 seconds. That’s how important ‘quick results’ is to us.

So naturally, when someone tells you to trust your gut and go with it, we jump onto the idea and get on-board right away. It is certainly easier than going through pros and cons lists, or cost-benefit analyses!

Let’s step back for a second though. What does ‘trusting your gut’ mean? What is your ‘gut’? Keeping it simple for us non-scientists, let’s say this is basically your mind. Let me add one scientific fact to this though. Our minds are naturally wired to find the most efficient path to get to an answer. Great evolutionary skill, highest efficiency to get to the required goal. That is our ‘gut feel’, that is our minds getting into auto-mode, and taking you to the quickest answer it can, based on the knowledge it has to date.

That’s the key sentence: based on the knowledge it has to date.

Without the proper knowledge, training, and information, it is unfair to expect your mind, or your gut, to get you the right answer. Frankly, it won’t. And if it did, I guarantee it was pure luck, or statistics playing to your favour.

When a businessman or investor tells you they ‘trust their gut’, it is because they’ve been working with companies, reading, investing, analyzing, for a long enough time that their minds have built the paths based on that knowledge, and now are in fact able to get to a quick gut answer that would make logical sense. Or when you hear someone hire a member of their team ‘based on my gut feel’, that is likely because they’ve been working with or interviewing people throughout their career that they subconsciously know what they are looking for.

It is not ‘their gut’, as we like [or hope!] to think of it. It is not this magical feeling or karmic energy we think our subconscious mind has, which we look to follow. It is their experience, hard work, and expertise coming into play. If you asked them to trust their gut with trying to win a hand of poker or adding the right amount of salt to a meal, when they’ve never played poker or cooked before, their gut will likely fail them — even though it’s the same ‘gut’ which made them successful elsewhere.

The point of this is, do not blindly trust your gut. Not until you have become an expert at your craft and you can trust that you have given your mind the tools it needs to give you the right gut feel.

I would take that further and apply it to personal interactions, friendships, or romantic relationships. Which might be a topic for another article.

There is no ‘easy’ way to do this. Work hard, learn, train your mind, let it build those paths, and then maybe you can finally trust it.