A Beginner's Guide to Business Intuition: How to Trust Yourself When Making Business Decisions

A while ago, in the middle of training to become a quantum field reader, my teacher Yvonne Arnold said something that rearranged my understanding of intuition.

During a reading session nothing came. No image. No sensation. No knowing. I sat there feeling like I'd failed the assignment. "If there's no information," she said, "that too is correct. Ask why."

That too is correct. It's almost the exact opposite of how most of us are taught to make decisions, especially in business. We're supposed to know. Know the strategy. Know the numbers. Know what the customer wants. Know where the business is going. Ideally, know what you'll be doing three years from now and put it into a colour-coded plan.

And when we don't know, our instinct is to close the gap as quickly as possible: more research, another spreadsheet, another podcast, another person's opinion — anything that might hand us the certainty we're looking for.

But what if not knowing isn't always a problem to solve? And what if intuition isn't about becoming someone who always knows the answer?

Why business decisions feel so uncertain

Here's what nobody tells you about intuition when you're starting out: you think the goal is to always have an answer. A flash. A download. A clear yes or no that arrives right when you need it, like a text message from the universe. And when it doesn't show up like that — when you sit with a decision and feel foggy, or numb, or like you're straining to hear something that isn't there — you assume you're doing it wrong.

But uncertainty in business is the actual terrain. Every meaningful business decision happens, at least partly, before the evidence is in. Should I hire this person? Should I take this client? Is it time to change direction? Should I raise my prices? Is this new idea worth pursuing? Do I need to give this strategy more time, or is it time to let it go?

You can gather information. You can look at the numbers. You can research the market, talk to customers, model different scenarios - I believe in doing all of those things. And eventually, you still have to decide without knowing exactly what happens next.

Intuition was never meant to remove that uncertainty. I think it can help us move through uncertainty without losing contact with ourselves. That's a much more useful definition of self-trust than always having the right answer.

The trap of trying to think your way out

I ignored my own knowing for years. Lawyer training will do that to you: all head, very little body. I learned to analyse. Find the evidence. Build the argument. Anticipate the counterargument. Find more evidence. Those are incredibly useful skills, and I'm grateful for them. But they also meant that whenever a business decision got difficult, I knew exactly what to do: think harder. More research. More pros-and-cons lists. More tabs open. More opinions collected from smart people.

Sometimes that works, sometimes you genuinely need more information. But sometimes it just spins you. You end up trying to think your way to certainty about something that was never going to become certain through thinking alone. If you've ever stayed up rewriting the same email eleven times, you probably know what I mean. Or asked six people the same question, secretly hoping one of them would finally hand you the answer that made everything click. Or researched something long after you had enough information to make a reasonable decision.

At some point, thinking stops helping and starts stalling. That's why getting out of your head doesn't mean abandoning logic. It means learning to recognise when your analytical mind has done its job and allowing other information into the room. Which brings us to intuition.

Business intuition isn't one thing

Here's where a lot of beginner advice about intuition gets muddy: we use one word — intuition — to describe several genuinely different experiences. A gut feeling is intuition. An expert recognising a pattern before she can explain it is intuition. A creative idea appearing seemingly from nowhere can be intuition. And an experience of simply knowing something you seemingly had no way of knowing can also be described as intuition. Are all of those the same phenomenon? Probably not.

This distinction is something I spend a good deal of time thinking about in my doctoral research, and I think separating these different forms of intuition makes the subject more useful in business, too. Instead of asking vaguely, "Should I trust my intuition?", we can start asking a more interesting question: what kind of knowing might I be experiencing here? I find it useful to distinguish between three broad forms.

1. Everyday intuition: the gut feeling

The first is everyday intuition, probably what most of us mean when we say I just had a feeling. Something feels slightly off in a meeting before you can say why. You meet someone and immediately feel at ease. You hear yourself agreeing to something out loud while a quieter part of you is thinking, I really don't want to do this.

These moments aren't necessarily dramatic. In fact, that may be precisely why they're so easy to miss. We get small signals constantly. The interesting question isn't really whether you have them. It's whether you've learned to notice them, or whether you've learned to override them in favour of whatever sounds most reasonable out loud.

2. Expertise-based intuition: when experience becomes knowing

The second is expertise-based intuition. This develops through experience: do something hundreds or thousands of times and you gradually build an enormous internal library of patterns. Eventually, you start recognising those patterns before your conscious mind has caught up. An experienced founder senses that a negotiation has shifted before she can identify the sentence, tone or expression that gave it away. A designer looks at a customer journey and immediately spots the problem. A lawyer reads a case and has a hunch about where the real issue is before she has consciously worked through every document.

That doesn't require a mystical explanation. It can be expertise moving faster than conscious thought, the kind of pattern recognition, heuristics and unconscious processing researchers such as Gigerenzer and Kahneman have explored. This is one reason intuition can become particularly valuable as you gain experience: you may know far more than you can immediately put into words. Some of your knowledge has become tacit. Your conscious mind may need twenty minutes to build the argument for something another part of you recognised in twenty seconds.

3. Super intuition: direct knowing

And then there's a third, stranger category, my own entry point into researching intuition: what researcher Asta Raami has described as direct knowing intuition, or super intuition. This refers to a form of intuition that appears to extend beyond ordinary sensory perception, previous experience or analytical reasoning (Raami, 2015). Related phenomena have also been discussed using terms such as accurate intuition, direct knowing and noetic knowing (Kautz, 2005; Raami, 2015, 2020; Mälkki & Raami, 2019).

Put much more simply: it's the experience of knowing something when you can't identify an obvious source for what you know. Not something you remember learning. Not an obvious pattern matched from experience. Not something you saw, heard or consciously reasoned your way toward. It's just... there.

This is also territory I've encountered through my training in quantum field work. Sometimes I can trace an intuitive impression back to something I already half-knew. Sometimes I suspect my mind caught a pattern before I consciously did. And sometimes I genuinely can't explain it. I don't think the honest scientific answer about experiences like these is fully settled, and I'm not interested in pretending otherwise. For me, that unresolved edge is exactly what makes the phenomenon worth researching rather than automatically believing or dismissing.

How do we know what we know?

I find that question endlessly fascinating. What does all of this have to do with intuition in business? Quite a lot, actually, because you don't need mystical downloads to have strong business intuition. Most of what you need, most of the time, may live in the first two forms. You notice something. You recognise a pattern. Your body responds before you can explain why. Years of experience tell you something that hasn't yet become a fully formed thought. All of those can become useful sources of information and then, occasionally, you may experience something harder to explain. You can remain curious about that without making it a requirement for being an "intuitive" person.

So when I talk about intuition in business, I'm not talking about a magical internal CEO who always knows the correct answer, and I'm definitely not suggesting that you throw away the strategy because something "feels aligned." I mean something much more grounded: business intuition is about allowing quieter forms of information into the decision-making process alongside the information you can consciously analyse. Your revenue matters. Your cash flow matters. Customer research matters. Contracts matter. Evidence matters. And your experience matters. Your body matters. The patterns you notice matter. The thing you keep knowing before you can quite explain why may deserve your attention, too.

For me, the question has never been intuition or strategy. I want both. Give me the spreadsheet. Give me the customer research. Give me the facts. And then give me five quiet minutes to notice what else I know before I explain it away. The spreadsheet and the signal belong in the same room.

Can you actually trust intuition in business?

This is where I think the word trust can get us into trouble. When someone asks can I trust my intuition?, there's often another question underneath it: can I trust my intuition to always be right? I don't think that's a useful standard. Your rational mind isn't always right. Your business plan isn't always right. Your forecast isn't always right. Customer research can be interpreted badly. Experts can be wrong. And intuition can be wrong, too.

So trusting your intuition doesn't have to mean treating every gut feeling as truth. It can mean something much more nuanced: trust yourself enough to notice the signal before you dismiss it. Then get curious. What am I noticing? Where might this information be coming from? Is there a pattern here that I recognise from experience? What does the evidence say? Is this fear, or is this what I want to be true? Am I picking up on something I haven't consciously articulated yet, or am I desperate to know?

You don't have to obey every intuitive impression. You can investigate it. That, to me, is a much more mature form of intuitive decision-making.

Learning to let go of control

The hardest part of this practice, for me, has been learning to let go of control. Not letting go of responsibility but letting go of the illusion that gripping tighter produces better outcomes. 

I recognize that impulse in business. We collect the information. We make the decision. And then we keep reopening it, checking, rechecking, asking someone else, looking for another sign, running the numbers one more time. We try to control not only the decision but the outcome. And of course, that's the part we never actually controlled. You can do impeccable customer research and launch something nobody buys. You can carefully interview someone who turns out to be the wrong hire. You can make the most sensible decision available to you and discover six months later that circumstances have changed.

Intuitive decision making doesn't remove any of that. It still requires making decisions under uncertainty. At some point, you have to let the information you've gathered be enough. For me, letting go of control means doing the research, listening carefully, making the most honest choice I can with the information available, and accepting that I still don't get to know exactly what happens next. That is responsibility without the fantasy of certainty.

Not knowing is data, not failure

This might be the part of intuition I find most interesting. In my training, I spent an entire module on what was called the not-knowing protocol, collecting every "I don't know" that showed up, in the work and in ordinary life, rather than immediately trying to make it disappear. Over time, I learned to notice that not all not knowing felt the same. There was a heavy kind, tangled up in fear, resistance or noise that needed attention. And there was an open kind, which felt more like not yet, something still ripening.

Business doesn't particularly reward this state. We're much more comfortable with the person who confidently says here's the plan. "I'm not sure yet, and I'm going to give that a little more time" doesn't make for a particularly impressive LinkedIn post. But some of the best decisions I've made have started exactly there, in a fog I didn't rush to clear.

And this brings me back to Yvonne. If there's no information, that too is correct. Ask why. Maybe you don't have enough information yet. Maybe you're asking the wrong question. Maybe the opportunity isn't fully formed. Maybe fear is making it difficult to hear anything else. Maybe you're trying so hard to receive an answer that you're manufacturing one. Or maybe you simply aren't supposed to decide today. Sometimes not knowing may be the most honest information available to you, and the real information arrives later, if you don't force it early.

How to trust your intuition when making business decisions

So where do you start if all of this is new? Not by trying to have a mystical experience. Start smaller. Notice the decisions where your gut and your spreadsheet already agree; that's wonderfully low-stakes practice ground. Notice what happens when you meet someone you immediately trust. Notice the moment you know a piece of work is finished. Notice when you know you've said yes to something you didn't really want. Notice when a client situation feels familiar because you've seen the pattern before. And then look backward, too: what did you notice before a decision that turned out well, and what did you notice before one that didn't?

You aren't trying to prove that your intuition is infallible. You're learning your own language. Over time, you may begin to distinguish between: this is fear. This is experience. This is what I want to be true. This is a bodily signal I recognise. This is something I know but can't explain yet. And: I genuinely don't know. That last one counts, too.

Trusting yourself doesn't mean always knowing

Perhaps this is the biggest thing my work with intuition has changed for me. I used to think self-trust would feel like certainty. Now I think it looks more like being willing to stay in relationship with yourself when certainty isn't available. I can look at the facts without abandoning what I'm sensing. I can listen to experts without automatically replacing my own knowing with theirs. I can follow intuition and still change my mind when new information arrives. I can recognise when fear is running the show. I can admit that I don't know. And I can make a decision without requiring a guarantee that it will turn out exactly as I hope.

That's a very different kind of trust. Maybe the goal isn't to become someone who always knows the answer. Maybe it's to become more conscious of how you know what you know and more willing to listen when something quieter has information for you.

The rigour and the mystery. The spreadsheet and the signal. The strategy and the soul. You don't have to choose between them. You just have to start listening for the second one.

If you want the concrete, day-to-day version of this, the actual things I do to create more space for intuition, not just the thinking behind it — read next:

How to Improve Your Intuition: 5 Practices I Use in Business →

And if you'd like a little practice noticing your own signal before you go, I made The Intuition Check-In — a free voice note to help you sit with a real decision and hear what's actually there, underneath the noise. No pressure, just a starting point.