Trust gut feeling when making major decisions

It is not easy trying to convince yourself to follow your sixth sense, but sometimes that’s the best thing to do. Graphic/fotosearch 

By Canute Waswa

In Summary

• Most of us know a story about a person who ditched a 20-year career to pursue something completely different—the journalist who gave it all up to rear quails or the auditor who quit her accounting firm to start selling baby clothes—and is the happier for it
• Often, we feel guilty about choosing from the gut, because we feel like our choices ought to be based on facts. Gut feeling judgments are complex—they involve a large number of intersecting factors and those factors change over time
• However, it is useful to remind ourselves of another commonly held truth: entrepreneurs are skilled at relying on their gut feelings

December is quite an interesting month for those of us who are in consulting and career coaching fields. I was reminded of this once more when a good friend of mine gave me a phone call last week.

He is smart and talented. But he has lost his passion for work. He no longer looks forward to going to the office yet remains stuck without a visible way out.

He is not seeing himself going back to work in January. He is actually thinking of resigning and taking the plunge into entrepreneurship.

This was his million dollar question to me. “Am I doing what is right for me, or should I change direction?”

Most of us know a story about a person who ditched a 20-year career to pursue something completely different—the journalist who gave it all up to rear quails or the auditor who quit her accounting firm to start selling baby clothes—and is the happier for it.

Yet this is one of the most pressing questions in the mid-career professional’s mind today.
The number of people making major career changes, not to mention those just thinking about it, have risen significantly over the recent past and continue to grow.

Welcome to the world of following your gut feeling. Psychologists suggest that there are two modes of thought people use to make complex choices. The first involves looking carefully at the features of a set of options and making decisions in a reasoned manner.

The other way is more intuitive and involves responding to the feelings that come up during the process of making choices, or following your gut.




Often, we feel guilty about choosing from the gut, because we feel like our choices ought to be based on facts. Gut feeling judgments are complex—they involve a large number of intersecting factors and those factors change over time.

And this is because gut feelings have to do with emotions. We have a strange relationship with our emotions. Often we try hard not to be emotional, especially when it comes to big decisions. We try not to get carried away. We try to be rational.

However, it is useful to remind ourselves of another commonly held truth: entrepreneurs are skilled at relying on their gut feelings.


Emotions, moods and feelings are integral to decision making.

This is especially when choices are complex, information limited, time is constrained and outcomes are uncertain.

We are such socially oriented creatures is that we’re extremely susceptible to the opinions and doubts of other people. If you’ve been feeling confused about your career direction for a while, my guess is that the true issue probably isn’t a lack of knowledge of what you want.

Instead, the confusion stems from the fact that what you want conflicts with what the people around you tell you is acceptable or possible.




Often when this occurs, we dismiss what we truly want and instead try to conform to others’ expectations.

But I can’t blame you too much. Ever since the Enlightenment of the 17th and 18th centuries, virtually all university teaching has stressed the need for reasoned, logical analysis.

You make decisions by gathering all the relevant information you can, then weighing it up carefully and logically.