Intuitive Book Extras

THE INTUITIVE WRITER (Extras)

We promised to add extras, anytime we expanded the content. Here’s the page where it will be located. We hope you enjoyed the book. Here’s the link to the Stuck List, if you haven’t downloaded that yet!

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ADDITIONAL THOUGHTS FROM SUSAN ON SPIRITUAL INTUITION

So, I’m pretty sure that the conversation I had this week, about how it’s hard to distinguish spiritual intuition from emotional intuition, was with you. If I’m wrong, then hopefully you won’t judge me as crazier than I am. 🙂

But, I think I figured this out, at least for myself, this morning.

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REVISED CHAPTER TWO

What is intuition? That feeling in your gut? That unconscious decision? That quick picture you can’t quite describe?

Some colloquial definitions of intuition exist and, depending on how much you’ve studied this in the past, you may have some of them in your head. But for the purposes of this book, we will not be using anyone else’s definition because we find a lot of them to be confusing.1 

Our main definition is, knowing something without being able to explain how you know it.

“I just know but I can’t explain why” is the evidence of intuition. 

But intuition isn’t primarily a feeling—which is how it’s often described when people are trying to write it off. “That’s just a feeling,” they say, like you’ve gotten emotional or had bad shrimp. Intuition is a logical and concrete knowing (internally). It just isn’t something you can prove in the moment.

Intuition also isn’t limited to abstract thinkers. There are plenty of concrete-thinking intuitive writers.

Just as an example, Susan and I are both intuitive coaches, but she’s an abstract coach and I’m a concrete coach. I have internal metrics that I’m completing as I hear people talking. Where do they fall on this continuum, or that continuum? How much do I hear their need for stability? How full is their positivity bank? How full of energy pennies2 are they? I’m constantly assessing and adjusting as we move through coaching sessions, trying to make sure I get all the data. 

I can usually rate their experience on a scale of 1 to 10 in any particular metric. 

Do I know exactly what I’m hearing that makes me put them there? Nothing I can explain in the moment. In fact, sometimes I’ll say, “you sound like you’re 80% sure about that,” they’ll ask me how I got to that number. And while I’m certain about my assessment, I have to go back over the data from their conversation and pull it out of my subconscious. I have to say, “if you were 100%, you might have said X or Y, and instead, you said Z.”  

I couldn’t give you the criteria in the moment. But afterward, when we break it down, I can understand why I had that intuitive sense about where they might land.

I also couldn’t teach someone to coach the way I coach, because so much of it is either learned behavior or intuition, and I can’t codify even how I assess the different metrics. That’s how I know it’s intuitive. I just know how to listen for those concrete markers. 

Susan coaches from abstract intuition. And she’s incredible at it. When she listens to a client, she’s taking in all the same data I am, but she’s processing at a speed that doesn’t allow her to be conscious of specifics. She doesn’t need to be conscious, because she knows herself, and she knows she can trust unconscious knowledge.

My conscious knowledge and her unconscious knowledge almost always come to the same conclusions about what someone needs to hear or do. In fact, if you were to watch us coach on video, you wouldn’t necessarily see us doing much differently. But how we’re working internally… it’s completely different.

Two people can process information in completely different ways and still be doing it right.

Of course, this doesn’t just apply to coaches. It applies to writers and thinkers and marketers. It applies to any intuitive.

To intuit is to know before you can give specific reasoning. Susan describes it as “recognition.” She says: 

When I quickly know something, is it understanding? Or is it recognition? Because when you say something and I think, “I agree,” but I can’t explain why I agree, calling it “understanding” feels wrong. But I recognize a pattern, and then I need time to explain the pattern. 

Pattern recognition is why we know something we can’t explain. If we can get our head around how intuition recognizes, I think we will have more confidence in the process.

Like peeking behind the wizard’s curtain. 

So. If we assume intuition is recognition, what are we recognizing?

Data.

We take in data and make connections between the data, and then make meaning out of those connections, even when that meaning is not explicit or available to others. 

It’s a very concrete and logical process. It’s just not conscious.

For instance, when driving on an unfamiliar road, we rely on general principles (like the fact that interstates were designed for higher speeds, so the turns, whenever possible, are wider and more able to be taken at high speed), or past data cues (e.g. if I’ve driven the mountains of Montana, I’m much more likely to feel intuitively comfortable driving in the mountains of Colorado because the data cues are almost identical). We can intuit what the roads will be like in front of us in order to estimate a comfort with a higher speed. 

We might also have an intuitive trust of our own quick reflexes, or a knowledge that we’ve been driving for decades. Recognition gives us confidence. 

But when data changes (bad weather, signs of an accident, heavy traffic), we make new connections between data points (an extra car or two on the road), extrapolating those connections into patterns (there must be more cars than just the ones I’m seeing) and then making meaning out of those points (I should slow down because there might be a stoppage ahead). That intuition is quick pattern-reading and meaning-making. 

Those two parts are essential.

(1) Seeing the pattern in the data. (2) Making explicit meaning where others see disconnected points.

If you’ve ever been in this situation before, you’ve seen intuition at work: You’re in the car and someone else is driving. Someone hits their brakes in front of you and you say, out loud, “better move into that other lane.” The driver looks at you like you are crazy.

“Why would I move over?”

You stop, unable to communicate for a moment. You both saw the same data points. Why is the driver not responding the same way you would? Chances are good, they aren’t an intuitive processor (especially perhaps when it comes to concrete experiences like driving). That means, the two of you are seeing the same data, and you’re creating meaning between those data points where they are not. 

Because it happens so quickly, you might have a difficult time explaining why you think they should switch lanes or slow down. But sure enough, if you don’t switch lanes, you end up in the slow lane, and in a traffic jam, and at that point, you can usually explain what it was you saw.

In the original moment, though, it might be impossible to explain.

You just know.

The same thing happens with emotions and numbers and people and places and events and decisions. It will be a pattern over your lifetime. 

A lot of intuitive people will say, “but I like numbers,” or “but I like data,” or “but I like explanations.” There is a segment of intuitive writers who absolutely do like numbers. However, many of us have learned to compensate for intuition by liking numbers. Because we’ve been challenged so often (or because our intuition is often disbelieved), we like having numbers for non-intuitive thinkers. Numbers are proof our intuition is right.

Here’s a for-instance.

I first started coaching authors in 2009. It didn’t take me long to see that there were extremely distinctive patterns in the way authors think. But I’d only coached a few writers at that point. Less than a hundred. I didn’t have anywhere near enough data to “prove” my intuition correct. But I know people. So while I was coaching on the whole “thinking is working” concept long before I had the data to prove there were some authors who needed to think in order to write, I wasn’t publishing my research.

I couldn’t bring myself (with a background in academics) to make an assertion I knew to be true without the data to back it up. So, three and a half years ago, I finally published my first book on the patterns I saw among writers, almost a decade after I first started to see the patterns and wanted to do something to help writers who needed to think in order to write.

If I’m in a group of writers, I will say, “I love data” because I have the data now. And because I know there are some people who need to know the patterns have been validated. But the reality is, my intuition as a coach knew what the patterns were long before they’d been validated. 

I couldn’t explain why in the moment. I just knew.

And I know there are people reading this who will get frustrated that I’m telling a story from my own history, but as an intuitive person, it can become problematic to tell other people’s intuitive stories unless we’ve waited long enough for there to be data to back up the intuition.

I will still try to tell other writers’ intuitive stories because I think it’s important to validate this intuitive pattern through more than just me, my experience, or my intuition.

There’s a famous urban fantasy writer named Yasmine Galenorn who has been doing YouTube videos about being an intuitive writer for a couple of years now. When she and I first discussed her writing process, I remember smiling and thinking how perfect an example of intuitive writing it was. She just knows the story and tells the story. (In fact, if you watch her YouTube videos, she often comments about how knowing too much about the story won’t help her write the story.) It was one of the reasons she started making the videos.

Once she realized there was actually a structure to her process (that following intuition on its own was a process), she started making the videos talking about her writing. Of course, she had always known this was her process. In fact, one of the most consistent things she said when I first met her was, “I can’t do it any other way.” 

Life had taught her she was an intuitive writer and she validated the pattern by letting herself off the hook for being any other way. Additionally, because she’s had such great commercial success, her pattern has been validated. She knows she can write a great story by intuition, and not all intuitive writers have that validation yet.

And there are many more hundreds of famous writers who are also intuitive, although I’ve found that very few are openly discussing how intuitive their process is. (The reason being, of course, that they feel they “should” be doing it the plott-y way, and just can’t.) They often think they are a fluke. Instead of fitting directly and neatly into a pattern.

Outlining and plotting are easy to teach because they are concrete and objective. And partly, of course, because (like Aristotle’s Poetics) they are built on noticing the patterns in works that have already been written and proven to be successful. 

Intuitive writing is hard to teach because it is perceptive and subjective. 

So if I’m a smart person (who can usually teach what I know to do) or I loved school (so I have an implicit bias toward things that are “teachable”), I might assume that intuitive writing is wrong simply because I couldn’t teach others how to write this way.

That’s often what intuitive writers say about their writing process. “I couldn’t teach someone how to do this.” It feels so strange, the combination of need-to-know and need-not-to-know, they don’t see there’s any viable pattern in their process.

But there is.

The autopilot. 

The intuition autopilot.

In this first section of the book, we first want to understand intuition, and then we’ll look at how that autopilot works, and then look at how to hone it, how to put it to work, and how to control it.

So… easy, right?

Piece of intuitive cake.

1 There are, of course, the colloquial definitions–if you’ve ever taken one of the Jungian-style assessments with the four-letter archetype designations (MBTI, Kiersey-Bates, etc), you have one definition of intuition. A sense of abstract, big-picture thinking that is primarily opposite concrete thinking. That’s not the definition we’ll be using. 

In some ways, the opposition of personality traits (concrete vs. intuitive) is one of the reasons intuitive people don’t trust themselves. So while we do occasionally have to differentiate abstract vs. concrete thinking, it’s possible for concrete thinkers to be intuitive because intuition isn’t primarily about abstraction. It’s about knowing before you know.

2 Each thing we has a potential to either cost us energy or give us energy. We use the metaphor of pennies so there’s a “spend and save” extension to the metaphor. I always want to apologize to spoonies for not using “spoons” language, but I’ve been using energy pennies as a concept since before I heard about spoons and it’s embedded in the style of coaching I do (where we have a lot of metaphoric language).

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