Before one particular client session, I felt a pull to clean my workspace. Then, oddly, to put on lipstick, which I never wear, and certainly never for work. It was such a small, specific impulse that I almost talked myself out of it. But I've learned to follow these nudges rather than immediately explain them away, so I lit a candle, cleared the space, and put on a little colour for a video call where, by any reasonable business logic, nobody would have noticed either way.
Later, my client told me why it had mattered. Sure I had my training and my track record that could have made her trust the reading, but it was the fact that she could feel I'd made space for her before we'd even started, that the care itself was visible, even through a screen.
I think about that moment often, because it captures something I forget constantly in business: intuition doesn't only show up as an answer during the big decision. Sometimes it shows up much earlier: in the small preparations, the impulse to wait, the person who suddenly crosses your mind, the inexplicable desire to take a different route into something, the quiet not this you notice before you can explain what's wrong. These are easy things to override because they don't look particularly productive, and I was exceptionally well trained to override them.
Lawyer training taught me to move fast from one file to the next, one argument to the next, no space in between. My husband still teases me about it: I can be mid-conversation about dinner and mentally three steps into a client email in the same breath, without ever noticing I've left the room. Analyse, reason, switch, repeat. That kind of speed is useful in a deal room. It's much less useful when what you actually need is to notice what your body already knows before jumping to the next tab. These five practices are how I've slowly rebuilt the muscle for another way of knowing, in between all that fast switching.
This isn't theory, and it's not five things I think you should do. These are the things I actually do, on ordinary Tuesdays, to keep intuition part of how I run my business instead of a nice idea I read about once.
And if there's one thing underneath all five, it's this: you don't improve your intuition by trying harder to be intuitive. You create the conditions in which you can notice it.
How do you improve your intuition?
I think this is worth saying before we get practical, because when people ask me how to improve intuition, there can be an assumption underneath the question that some people simply have more of it than others. I don't think that's a particularly useful place to start.
You already have experiences of intuition. You get gut feelings. You notice things. You recognise patterns. Something in you knows before you've fully articulated what you know. The problem is often that the signal is competing with a lot of noise. We're busy. We're consuming information constantly. We're moving from one thing to another without transition. And when we have a decision to make, we often immediately look outside ourselves for the answer.
So learning how to tap into your intuition isn't necessarily about adding another skill to your life. A lot of it, for me, has been subtraction: less noise, less rushing, less immediate explanation, less asking everyone else what they think before I've noticed what I think and more space to hear my own signal. These five practices help me create that space.
Practice 1: Slow down
Slowing down is my medicine. It's often hard to swallow, but it's good for me, and it's the precondition for almost everything else on this list. I find it very difficult to tap into my intuition at full speed. When my calendar is packed and my brain is already three tasks ahead of my body, the loudest information tends to win, the email, the deadline, the notification, the thing somebody else needs, the thought that sounds urgent. Intuition tends to be quieter. So I have to create somewhere for it to be heard.
In practice, that means protecting slow mornings and keeping half a day each week where my calendar quite literally says: do nothing. Not admin. Not catch-up. Nothing. When I started doing this, I genuinely wasn't sure it was allowed. I'd sit in the space and wonder whether I should be doing something with it. Some weeks I fell asleep. Some weeks I read. Some weeks I got a sudden urge to take a ferry somewhere with no plan at all. And sometimes an answer to something I'd been thinking about for days would simply appear when I was no longer actively trying to solve it.
Over time, one three-hour island in my calendar became something I looked forward to. Then something I protected. And eventually something I realised I couldn't run my business particularly well without. That empty space creates room for my inner knowing to become audible again. Slowing down doesn’t magically produce answers. Sometimes nothing comes. But if I want to hear something quiet, I can't fill every available second with something louder.
Try this: Before you build your next week, block one stretch of unscheduled time — even ninety minutes — and defend it like a client meeting. Don't plan what goes into it. That's the point.
Practice 2: Create mindful transitions
I used to go back-to-back with everything. It reminds me of travelling somewhere beautiful and trying to see thirty churches in one day instead of actually experiencing one. Church, photo, next. Church, photo, next. You technically saw everything. But did you experience any of it?
I brought exactly the same habit into business: five decisions, three calls, a client session, emails in between, lunch at the laptop, no space around any of it. It felt productive. But it also meant I rarely had a chance to notice how I actually felt about something before I'd already moved on to the next thing.
These days, I try to work with one core desire per day. One. There can obviously be smaller tasks around it — I'm still running a business and living a life — but there is one thing that gets to be the centre. And somehow, the small stuff still gets done.
What fascinates me is how much information appears in the transitions. Sometimes it's not during the meeting that you realise something felt wrong, it's in the sixty seconds afterward. Huh, why do I feel drained? Or: that was easier than I expected. Or: I really want to work with her. Or simply: no. That tiny space after something ends can contain information that disappears the moment you open your inbox. Skip the gap, and you may skip the information that lives inside it.
This is one of the simplest ways I've found to get out of my head, because I'm not asking myself to analyse the experience. I'm just giving myself enough time to notice it.
Try this: Before your next meeting or task starts, take sixty seconds of nothing in between. No phone, no email, no preparing for the next thing. Just notice what is still there from the thing that just ended.
Practice 3: Make joy the boss
For a long time, there was very little joy in my business. There were steps to take, tasks to accomplish, things serious business owners apparently did, and I was very good at doing them.
These days, when something feels persistently heavy and joyless, I don't automatically conclude that I need more discipline. I get curious. Why does this feel heavy? Is it difficult because it's stretching me, or because I don't actually want it? Is this fear, duty, guilt, habit? Am I doing it because it genuinely matters to me, or because somewhere along the way I decided this is what a serious business owner is supposed to do?
That distinction matters, because not everything meaningful feels easy. Sometimes the thing I most want to do scares me enormously. Sometimes the right decision involves a difficult conversation. Sometimes meaningful work is simply work. So when I say make joy the boss, I don't mean only do things that feel fun. I mean joy is information, and I've learned to take that information much more seriously than I used to.
One reading I did around my own business named something I'd already begun to notice: worry had become the driving motor behind certain decisions. I was creating from what if this doesn't work?, what if I don't do enough?, what should I be doing? And the invitation was to experiment with something radically different: what happens if ease gets a vote? What happens if joy gets a vote? A seat at the table. For someone trained to make the reasonable choice, that can be surprisingly revolutionary.
Try this: Look at tomorrow's to-do list and ask of each item: joy, obligation, or something else? Don't immediately change anything. Just collect the data. After a week, look for patterns.
Practice 4: Check with your body
I was completely disconnected from my body for years. I lived inside my head. Now, before certain decisions, I pause and notice what happens physically. Expansive or tight? Heavy or light? Settled or activated? Warm, cold, or nothing at all?
This is where body wisdom becomes interesting to me, because I don't treat those sensations as instructions. Tight doesn't automatically mean no. Expansive doesn't automatically mean yes. Fear lives in the body, too. So does excitement. So does anticipation. So does an old experience being activated by something happening now. Your body isn't a Magic 8 Ball.
Instead, I think learning to use body intuition means gradually becoming familiar with your own patterns. In the more formal energy work I've trained in, there's a specific physical sensation I've learned to recognise as a signal that I'm genuinely tuned in rather than simply guessing. It's distinct — I know it when it arrives — and yet I still can't fully describe it to someone else. That's actually the point. Your signal will be yours, not mine. Someone else's intuition dictionary isn't particularly useful if your body speaks a different language.
Part of why it's so hard to describe is that these signals are soft. They arrive as a coincidence you almost dismiss: a name that crosses your mind right before it calls, a detail in a conversation that suddenly matters more than it should, an impulse to wait that you usually override before you've even registered it. They're gone as quickly as they came. Ten minutes later, it can be genuinely hard to prove to yourself they were ever there at all.
I've come to think of each of these small moments as carrying far more than its size suggests, a kind of world within a world, holding more information than its brief appearance would ever let on. And this is the part that took me longest to accept: you can't find that information by searching for it. You find it by sitting in it. By giving it room to arrive in its own time, without demanding it show up on schedule or prove itself before you'll believe it.
So rather than deciding that goosebumps mean yes or tight shoulders mean no, become a researcher of your own experience. Notice. Record. Compare. What did you feel before a decision that turned out well? What did you feel when you said yes but later wished you'd said no? What does fear feel like, versus excitement, versus a quiet yes? Over time, patterns may begin to emerge. That's how I think about how to develop your intuition, as becoming increasingly literate in your own signals.
Try this: Before your next small decision, pause for three breaths. Notice what happens in your body. Write it down without interpreting it. Then come back later and compare the signal with what actually happened. You're building your own dictionary rather than borrowing somebody else's.
Practice 5: Ground before I work
Before client sessions, I ground myself. Sometimes it's tarot, sometimes meditation, sometimes breath, sometimes journaling, sometimes I simply sit in silence before I open the call. I usually arrive early and sit quietly rather than using those last minutes to prepare more, which is surprisingly difficult for the part of me that believes one more look at the notes will surely make everything better. But what I'm actually doing in those minutes is listening. Feeling into what needs to be heard. Letting the noise settle, so that when the other person arrives, I bring my presence into the room, not my noise.
This is the practice that connects the whole thing back to the lipstick. That little ritual of clearing my desk, lighting a candle, getting myself ready. It wasn’t for the show, nobody needed to know. It changed the way I arrived. And apparently, somehow, my client could feel that.
Grounding doesn't have to look spiritual. You don't need tarot cards, candles, or a belief in energy fields. Your grounding ritual could be making tea, taking three breaths, walking once around the block, putting both feet on the floor, or closing every tab on your computer before you begin. The ritual matters less than the transition it creates. For me, grounding is the on-ramp back into my own intuitive knowing, and I've learned that skipping it doesn't really save time. It often means I spend the first ten minutes of something important catching up to myself instead of actually being there.
Try this: Before your next important call, piece of work or decision, give yourself three minutes of total stillness first. No notes, no preparation, no phone. Just arrive. Then notice what's still there once some of the noise clears.
How to tap into your intuition without forcing an answer
There's one final piece I want to add, because it's easy to turn even intuition into another thing to perform well. You do the practices. You slow down. You breathe. You check your body. And then, nothing. No answer, no knowing, no magical clarity. That doesn't mean you failed.
One of the most important things I learned in my quantum field training was a practice around not knowing. Not every question produces information immediately. Sometimes the honest answer is I don't know yet, and that's still information. Learning how to trust your intuition also means learning not to manufacture an intuitive answer simply because uncertainty is uncomfortable. Sometimes you need more evidence. Sometimes you're asking the wrong question. Sometimes fear is making the signal difficult to distinguish. Sometimes something is still unfolding. And sometimes there is simply nothing to know yet. You can let that be true.
How to improve intuition? Create the conditions for listening
These are my practices. They're the things that took me from someone who lived almost entirely in her head to someone who tries to run a business with both strategy and soul. None of them require you to become more mystical. They require you to become more observant: slow down enough to notice, create space between things, let joy give you information, learn the language of your own body, ground yourself before you walk into something important, and allow not knowing to be an answer sometimes, too.
Because I don't think you improve intuition by forcing yourself to know more. You create better conditions for noticing what you already know. And then you practise. You notice. You test. You get it wrong sometimes. You learn your signals a little better. And perhaps, over time, the quiet voice becomes easier to recognise because you stopped talking over it.
If you want the deeper thinking underneath these practices — including the difference between everyday intuition, expertise-based intuition and direct knowing — read my companion guide:
A Beginner's Guide to Business Intuition: How to Trust Yourself When Making Business Decisions →
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.