WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO FOLLOW YOUR GUT? What does it mean to “follow your gut”? We talk a lot about following your gut, especially when making decisions about people and, let’s face it, the property world is very much a people’s business! Every-day, business is centred around interacting with people – landlords, tenants, team members, trades, the professionals we work with and, of course, other agents. The more time you spend and the more people you see, the more experiential it all becomes and, it’s only when you stop and question your innate decision-making process, that you start to unpick the process and analyze the thoughts, feelings, triggers and cues that you rely on, for the judgements and choices that you make. Recently we’ve been training new team members, which has necessitated quite a bit of deconstruction of the process. The question we get asked again and again, is “…where does this gut instinct come from?” and “ should we listen to it and, if we do, how can we ensure that this fits into the qualitative, decision-making process?” Like all great questions, we’ve needed to go back to the drawing board, in order to provide and answer and it makes for some interesting discussion points. 24
Some things are so ingrained in our language, behaviour and beliefs that it’s hard to look at them dispassionately, to decipher where they come from, this can definitely be said of the almost automatic responses of our gut instinct. Early mentions and definitions can be traced as far back as Plato but, most of us will recognize Jung’s theory of the ego (1916 psychological types) where he describes intuition as “an irrational function” and “perception via the unconscious.” Intuition is the ability to automatically generate solutions without long logical arguments or evidence (Daniel Kahneman). But is it intuition, instinct, impulse, or inspiration and what is the difference and, does it have any science behind it and, most importantly, should we listen to it or discount it as nonsense? In these days of 21st Century sophistication, it’s hard to envisage ourselves as animals. But we are. We are different to other animals, in that we have the capacity for abstract reasoning and introspection (this plus opposable thumbs) but we have a lot of the same in built behaviours, especially in the less advanced and earlier parts of our brains.
