Trust your intuition

Feeling is “An emotional state or a reaction like a feeling of joy. It is the emotional side of someone’s character; emotional responses or tendencies to respond”. Feelings are everything in life. We need to express ourselves without inhibitions. Feelings are what separate us from robots.

In the modern world of Facebook, Twitter and other social media interactions, most of us have taken feelings for granted. We express ourselves very well in the social media but can’t do the same adequately in real life. We need to express our feelings and respond to the situations with emotions.

Use the weapons of praise and reprimand carefully and judiciously. We need to motivate ourselves with self-praise. Praise in public and scold in private. Praise in public so that it can spur others too to perform to the best of their ability. Scold or reprimand in private, always. A public reprimand is humiliating. A private one could leave the person with a decorum of self-respect. He/she need not feel dejected in front of his/her team members.

We need to thank people. Thank you costs nothing, but shows the acceptance of the help received. That would act as a strong motivation. Similarly saying please will make us more popular. Please can be used even with people younger than us or with subordinates. The feeling that someone has requested will make us accomplish the act with a smile and with genuineness.

The other thing about feeling is something called intuition or the gut feeling. Steve Jobs based his career on it and Bill Gates used it too. Richard Branson too was a big fan of intuition. It helped Einstein devise the theory of relativity and its importance is growing all the time.

Intuition is a form of thinking that is unconscious. You know things, but you don't know why. It is holistic. It sees the big picture. It produces judgements that are affectively charged. It connects to our feelings, rather than our analytical minds. Steve Jobs took the mystical view of intuition, which he says he learned on his youthful trip to India. “Intuition is a very powerful thing,” he said “It is more powerful than intellect, in my opinion.”