When I was in my 20s and looking for my first role, I took a job that impressed my peers and parents, but it was 100% wrong for me. It was in investment management which I thought sounded dull even though it impressed my friends.
I didn’t take to the unfriendly individual who interviewed me; I thought the office atmosphere felt awful and the work would be boring. Even as I walked up the marble steps on the first day, I felt a strong sense of foreboding and thought, “What am I doing here?” I then spent an incredibly unhappy ten months working for a chain-smoking, alcoholic boss.
I stuck it out because no one told me to listen to my inner self. Nobody taught me the importance of using your intuition in your 20s.
During that miserable time, I used to run around the local park after work. One summer day, I had the thought ‘if only I could get a little bit run over then I wouldn’t have to be here’. At that moment I knew I would literally be crushed if I continued, and I started to look seriously for another role in a different industry.
Yet I could have avoided the whole horrible experience if I’d paid attention to the many cues I was receiving.
Learning The Hard Way
But here’s the secret. No one is going to tell you when you’re in your 20s how important it is to begin to recognizing and using your intuition. Yet it is.
Because intuition is the secret sauce that will help you get to the top of whichever career ladder you’re climbing. It’s a key part of every important decision and all the CEOs and senior leaders I’ve worked with always say so.
This means your 20s are an ideal and formative decade to hone your intuitive muscle, particularly because you’ll have such profound concerns to use it on.
For example:
- Is this the right career for me?
- How do I manage my relationships?
- Should I stick to this or go elsewhere?
- What are my long-term goals and aspirations?
10 Reasons Why Your Intuition Can Be Stunted
Although your experiences will vary widely, using intuition in your 20s can be challenging for several reasons. See if any of these resonate for you as any one of them can have a considerable impact, let alone in combination:
1. Trusting your gut: In your 20s, you might not have had enough diverse experiences to be able to trust your gut because you’re not so clear about your intuitive cues.
2. Identity: You’re still discovering who you are and what you believe in, experimenting with different selves and approaches. That can make it difficult to rely on intuition.
3. External pressures: There is often significant pressure from family, peers, and society to make the ‘right’ decisions about your career, relationships, and lifestyle, all of which can cloud your intuition.
4. Self-pressure: If you’re driven and motivated it’s easy to take on too much, get exhausted, and then it’s much harder to listen to inner tuition.
5. Information overload: The digital age provides you with vast amounts of information and opinions, which can overwhelm and confuse your own natural inner knowing.
6. Fear of failure: The fear of making mistakes or the consequences of a wrong decision can make you second-guess your intuition. That’s something that happens to everyone, but it seems to happen more in your 20s.
7. Developing skills: Your decision-making and insight skills are still growing. Intuition often relies on you being able to recognize it for what it is and separating it out from other processes.
8. Overload: In your 20s, you have a lot on your plate to consider and a ton of personal and professional pressures. So it’s easy to rush in and make the wrong move.
9. Social comparison: Everyone compares themselves to others sometimes. But doing that can undermine your confidence in your intuition and decisions. What’s right for others may be wrong for you.
10. Mistakes: Developing confidence in your judgments and decisions takes time and repetition. In your 20s you might have made some mistakes that throw you off and make you doubt yourself.
As someone who helps others recognize and work with their intuition, there is a way through all of this.
Start Learning How To Use Your Intuition
Let me start by defining what intuition actually is. I describe it as a feeling of knowing. Really, I knew when I went for that job interview that in my heart-of-hearts I didn’t want it. I had an internal sense of ‘no this is wrong’. That’s often accompanied by physical sensations.
For some people that’s in their guts which can feel relaxed or contracted, just like the heart or throat. For others it’s a sense of energy, and you feel excited and drawn to do something or have feeling of foreboding.
I also get a feeling of internal alignment or misalignment, and light exciting internal cues versus heavy sinking ones. I might sometimes notice a little internal voice saying, ‘do it’. Or ‘don’t do it’!
Perhaps you’re unsure: that’s when it’s helpful to notice what your attention is being drawn to because that often adds information worth considering. Say you’ve just done a job interview and you get an uncertain feeling about the role.
Ask your intuition to step up and see what you then notice. Is it a car slamming on its breaks? A bunch of red lights or stop signs? Sit with that for a moment and ask yourself what that means, just being curious about your responses. Notice what your mind and body tell you.
If you’re still unsure, sleep on it. Incubation is a great way to prodding your intuition.
Once you’re clearer about your intuitive cues, try exercising them. For example, how will tomorrow’s team meeting shape up? What might a colleague be thinking but not saying? What’s motivating that person who’s behaving unexpectedly? Is now the right time to send this email or not? What might a new client or customer really want? You can test all these hypotheses out and see if you’re right.
But to make profound progress I recommend a mini journal: that way you build insights and confidence in your process. It’s worth making that effort because intuition used effectively saves you time, effort, energy, and resources. And of course, that’s how you accelerate your career, whatever role you’re in.
Final Thoughts On Using Your Intuition In Your 20s
Learning to use your intuition can be one of the most challenging developments your traverse. Yet, you’ll quickly find how rewarding your intuition can be, not only in the successes of your professional development but also in your day to day life. Maybe start considering how using your intuition in your 20s could help you create a better life.
By Jessica Pryce-Jones
Jessica Pryce-Jones is author of INTUITION AT WORK: Using Your Gut Feelings To Get Ahead. She started her career in finance where she learned about numbers, strategy, and leadership. After ten years in the corporate world, she completed a psychology degree – she wanted to understand why some of her bosses were brilliant and others were dismal. Those insights launched a new career facilitating, coaching, designing interventions, and writing.
Clients include multinationals in healthcare, professional services, FMCG, banking, creative, education, manufacturing, publishing, and engineering industries as well as the public and not-for-profit sectors.
Pryce-Jones has also worked as adjunct faculty in leadership development at many business schools including Cambridge Judge, Cass, Cornell, Chicago Booth, Cranfield, London Business School, and Saïd (Oxford); she is a Fellow of Harvard’s Institute of Coaching.
She has written two previous books, Happiness at Work: Maximizing Your Psychological Capital for Success and Running Great Meetings & Workshops for Dummies.
Pryce-Jones divides her time between France and the UK, but works all over the world.
For more information, please visit webpsyched.com.
To connect: www.linkedin.com/in/jessica-pryce-jones
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