1. Keep a reflective journal
Try writing down your hunches in a journal and notice how they are experienced. This is particularly beneficial if you can capture them before the analytic process takes over.
For this reason, it might be helpful to keep the journal with you during the day. Making a note of your gut feelings about a situation or decision also means you can check them later, to assess how accurate or helpful they were.
Writing down words and phrases as they come to you when considering a problem may also provide you with a different insight. As an alternative or complementary approach, it can be useful to draw pictures or doodles. Drawing tends to slow us down and may tap into more intuitive modes of thinking.
2. identify Your Intuitive Communication Style
People experience intuition differently. For some, it may manifest as an image; for others, as a physical sensation (the classic ‘gut feeling’); yet others identify a more emotional response. Slow down and try to sense how, or where, you experience your intuitions.
3. Practice Daily
Make time each day, or even several times a day if you have an important decision to make, to tune into your intuition.
Today we live in a world where we are constantly bombarded by data. When you add into the mix the fact that modernism prizes a focus on rationality and science, it is understandable that it can be hard to listen to our intuition and just let it flow.
Part of your daily practice is to recognize that intuitive processing can help decision making, and allow time and space for answers to come to you without over-analyzing a situation.
4. Be Mindful
Mindfulness encourages us to notice feelings and thoughts without attaching to them. This can be particularly useful if you are trying to develop your intuition. Watching and accepting thoughts without judgment will allow you greater access to intuitive information.
Another useful mindfulness technique, the body scan, can help you notice sensations in your body, which might relate to intuitive processing. A body scan can be done whenever you have an important decision to make or practiced daily to improve intuition.
Being present and mindful of our surroundings is also likely to help develop intuition, by providing the unconscious with rich data to inform decisions.
5. Keep a Dream Journal.
For the final technique, I turn to Freud himself, who famously said:
The interpretation of dreams is the royal road to a knowledge of the mind’s unconscious activities.
Dreams can provide us with a wealth of information about our unconscious processes. Writing them down upon waking will aid with recall, and the content can be explored to give clues to any difficulties or dilemmas you might be facing.