How to Train Your Subconscious Mind So You Have Amazing Gut Instincts

You’ve heard the advice to “trust your gut.” From business ventures to relationship advice, trust your gut is common advice given from would-be wise men everywhere. But is trusting your gut always a good idea?

Think back on your life. Remember times you trusted your heart, or your gut, or any other kind of visceral bodily intuition. Did that end up being a good idea?

Sometimes, yes. We all have examples of times we trusted our hearts, made a big decision, and were better off for it. But we’re honest, we also have memories of times we trusted our gut intuition and ended up screwed. The business venture we “just knew” would be a big hit, the relationship we were so sure would work out in the end.

We can all call to mind examples of people we’ve known who trusted their gut and ended up in one of life’s many ditches. Trusting your gut doesn’t always get you where you need to go.

How can you tell the difference between the times you should trust your gut and the times you should trust cold rational argument?

You should trust your gut when you have reason to believe you have reliable instincts. If you are well-educated on a particular topic, have a lot of exposure, or a history of good results, you have good reason to trust your instincts.

You should trust rational argument, on the other hand, when your instincts have proven less-than-reliable. If you have a pattern of toxic or abusive relationships, failed investments, or broken friendships, it might be time for you to consider if maybe your instincts aren’t so trustworthy.

You Can Train Yourself to Have Killer Instincts

The good news is, we have every reason to believe we can train our instincts to become more accurate, helpful, and trustworthy.

In Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, author Malcolm Gladwell investigates the psychology of decisions that are made in the blink of an eye. Decisions we make on instinct.

In the introduction, Gladwell tells the story of a greek statue called a kouros bought by the J. Paul Getty Museum in California in 1983.

When museums buy art, they first submit the art to thorough authentication processes. The materials are carbon-dated, ownership is traced as far back as humanly possible, and every expense is paid to make sure the art is not a forgery.

The Getty paid this every expense to authenticate the kouros, and it passed. They bought it for $10 million and put it on display.

But nearly immediately, professional art historians all over the world were repulsed by it.

Georgios Dontas, the head of the Archaeological society in Athens, saw the statue and immediately felt cold. “Anyone who has ever seen a sculpture coming out of the ground,” he said, “could tell that thing has never been in the ground.”

A symposium of art historians convened to discuss the statue, and they all shared the same feelings. The statue was a fake, they knew, although they couldn’t tell you how they knew.

Who was right?

For a time, it wasn’t clear… but then, bit by bit, the Getty’s case began to fall apart.

The chain of ownership turned out to be fake. A letter dated 1952 had an address that didn’t exist until twenty years later. The marble turned out to be forged. A patina that was thought to only be possible with hundreds of years of age could be faked using potato mold. Deep analysis of the art styles revealed subtle chronological contradictions.

The instincts of the art historians were right, and the science of the Getty Museum was wrong. (The rest of Blink is about what makes that possible).

It stands to reason if art historians can hone their instincts for such a specific and unintuitive kind of calculation, we mortals can hone our instincts for many different kinds of decisions.

If you have poor gut instincts, don’t worry. You can improve them.

You Can Improve Your Instincts Through Education

What kinds of decisions, exactly, can we hone our instincts for?

In Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World, author David Epstein explains that in learning theory, there are two kinds of problems: kind problems and wicked problems.

Kind problems are problems that are easy to learn from. You get accurate feedback when your answer is wrong and answering correctly leads to successful outcomes. Discrete skills like learning chess are kind problems.

Wicked problems are harder to learn from. Bad solutions often lead to false positives, good solutions take time before they work, and arriving at generalized information is difficult. Functional medicine and psychology are wicked problems.

For kind problems, honing your instincts is simply a matter of learning the skill. Play enough chess, and you’ll have good instincts for the proper moves in chess.

Most problems in life, though, are wicked problems. Finding a romantic partner, building a career, nurturing a family — these happen in unpredictable and constantly changing environments.

What that means is we can’t just try over and over and hope to get it right eventually. Results are too unpredictable and there’s not enough time. We have to take it upon ourselves to sharpen our own abilities to understand & accept reality, process our emotions, and make grounded decisions.

How to Develop Your Own Killer Instinct

The best way I’ve found to develop my instincts is to read a lot of books.

Read books about the subject at hand for you. But also read books that educate you about the world. Read books about human bias, like Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely. Read books about making good decisions, like Think Again by Adam Grant. Read about global health and wellness in Factfulness by Hans Rosling. Read books about emotional health, too.

These books give you the educational background you need to put everything else in context. Without them, you’ll be a ship lost at sea; full of facts and figures but unable to use them to navigate your way through life.

The next best way to develop your instincts is to look at the results of past decisions in your life. Spending your college years drinking and skipping class —you may remember it fondly. But be honest: did that decision actually pay off for you? No. We can use lessons from the past to change how we make decisions in the future if we’re mindful enough to do so.

In Conclusion

People often give out the advice to trust your gut, but that advice doesn’t work in isolation. If you’re to trust your gut, you need to be able to trust that your gut will give you good advice. And the fact of the matter is, it usually doesn’t.

But you can train your gut to give great advice. Feed your mind with accurate and useful information — both about the subject at hand and about how the world works in general.

I’m new to educating myself in this way, but I’m already starting to see my hard work pay off. I’m developing a better sense of what kind of strategic career moves will pay off. Relationships in my life are developing in a new and authentic way.

You don’t have to take my word for it. Spend a few months giving it a try and see how it works for you.

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