Be Your Own Adviser
Deep down within all of us is a fount of wisdom. This is called
intuition. Listening to your intuition is a slow-learned process.
It starts by recognizing that tiny inner voice or feeling that will
tell you when you’ve done something you shouldn’t have. It’s
an incredibly still, quiet voice and needs silence and concentration
to hear it properly to begin with.
You might like to call it your conscience if you like, but deep
down you know when you’ve done something bad. You know
when you’ve got to apologize, make amends, put things right.
You know. And I know you know. I know because we all
know. There’s no getting away from it.
Once you start listening to that inner voice or feeling the feeling,
you’ll find it can help. It will become more than a
mindless parrot perched on your shoulder, chanting, “You
messed up again” after the event. The key is when you hear
your intuition telling you whether something is the right thing
to do or not—before you do it.
Try running stuff past your inner you before doing things and
see what reaction you get. Once you get used to this, you’ll
find it easier. Imagine, in any situation, that you have a small
child standing at your side and you have to explain things to
them. Imagine that she asks questions—”Why are you doing
that? What’s right and wrong? Should we do this?”—and you
have to answer. Only in this situation, you ask the questions
and you answer yourself. And you’ll find you already know
everything there is to know and everything you’ll ever need to
know.Listen, and it’s all there. If you are going to trust any adviser,
who will it be? It makes sense for it to be you because you
have all the facts, all the experience, all the knowledge at your
fingertips. No one else has. No one can get inside you and see
exactly what’s going on.
Quick point of clarification here. When I say listen, I don’t
mean listen to what goes on in your head. Now that really is
where madness lies. No, I mean a stiller, quieter voice. For
some it’s more a feeling than a voice—what we sometimes call
gut instinct. And even if it is a voice, a lot of the time it doesn’t
speak at all—unlike our mind, which babbles on incessantly—
and if it does, you can miss it in the torrent of words
that our mind produces.
This isn’t about predicting what’s going to happen. You won’t
discover which horse will win the Kentucky Derby or who’ll
score in the Cup Final. No, this is the important stuff: what
we’re about to do, big decisions we have to make, why we are
behaving in the way we are. You already know the answer, if
you ask yourself.
RULE 12
YOU KNOW.
AND I KNOW YOU KNOW.
I KNOW BECAUSE
WE ALL KNOW.