How To Trust Your Gut And Make Better Decisions: 14 Tips That Work

14 Ways To Listen To Your Intuition

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Your intuition can be an effective tool to help you make decisions and guide you in life. But to get the most from this inner wisdom, you must know how and when to trust its signals.

Fortunately, you can awaken and develop your intuition and learn how to not only listen to it, but properly interpret it too.

Once you do that, you can act confidently and resolutely based on what your intuition is telling you.

To get your intuition’s input on a particular choice you must make, you can try the following exercises. Remember, intuition is a feeling, and these exercises allow you to tap into that feeling rather than help you think about something logically or rationally.

1. Flip a coin.

A person holding a coin between their thumb and index finger, wearing a checkered shirt and a red top underneath. The focus is on the hand and the coin.

If your choice is a binary one, assign one option to heads and the other to tails. Then flip the coin and see how it lands.

If, immediately upon seeing the result, you feel happy or relieved, it means that is the decision your intuition wanted you to make.

If you feel gutted, it means that, deep down, you know you want to pursue the other option instead.

2. Ask a friend what they’d do.

A woman with dark hair in a bun is sitting on a bed, holding a smartphone to her ear with one hand, and gesturing with the other. She is wearing a white shirt over a pink tank top and appears to be in a modern bedroom with bookshelves and a lamp in the background.

This is slightly more involved than the coin toss because you can hear the reasons why that person would make a particular choice. You must be careful not to be swayed by their arguments—you may even want to get them to give their decision without any accompanying detail.

You should find yourself either in agreement or disagreement with your friend which will reveal what your gut is telling you to do.

3. Visualize yourself in the various outcomes.

A thoughtful woman with long eyelashes and brown hair rests her head on her hand, looking slightly upwards. She is wearing a mustard yellow sweater and appears deep in thought with a calm and relaxed expression.

If you are choosing between outcomes that are fairly certain, you can try to look forward in time in your mind’s eye and picture yourself in each of those outcomes.

Because your intuition leaves you feeling positively or negatively about a choice after it has been made, if you can visualize yourself in the different scenarios, you can pre-empt those feelings and use that to inform you of which outcome you prefer.

4. Engage in unbroken writing.

A man with short hair and wearing a gray shirt is sitting at a desk in an office, writing in a notebook. He appears focused, with a laptop and a potted plant in the background.

Set a timer for 2 minutes. Using pen and paper, start to write out your thoughts about a decision you need to make. While you don’t have to write quickly, you should avoid pausing at any point. Just let the words flow, regardless of spelling, grammar, or even clarity.

Your intuitive mind will automatically prioritize the information it considers most important, meaning that you should have most of what you need on your paper at the end of the 2 minutes.

Both the act of writing and the analysis of what you’ve written should help you get a good idea of your true feelings about something.

5. Distract yourself.

A person with glasses sits on a bed, wearing a yellow sweater and ripped jeans, playing an acoustic guitar. The room has a bright, natural light from a window and a neutral, cozy decor with pillows and a lamp in the background.

Your intuition will struggle to work if you hold thoughts about the decision in your head all the time. You are far more likely to have an epiphany when your mind isn’t thinking about the thing in question.

So do something to take your mind off the decision or thing—something that occupies your concentration and won’t allow it to drift. It may not always work, but you will sometimes get the answer you are looking for at the most unexpected time.

6. Improve your mood.

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According to one study, a positive mood can enhance your intuition, while a negative mood can dull it. So, try to do something that makes you feel happier—or at least less negative—before you attempt to listen to yours.

7. Start journaling.

A woman with curly hair is sitting at a wooden table in a café, writing in a notebook. She is wearing a white top and a knitted cardigan. Her phone and a potted plant are on the table. There is a chalkboard menu in the background.

Journaling is a self-awareness tool that can fine-tune your intuition. It helps you analyze your life, your thoughts, and your feelings. While you can’t think your way to intuitive insight, you can train your mind to see the links between things and the patterns in things.

Journaling is an excellent way to scan for these links and patterns by looking over your journal entries to find themes and the context that those themes are mentioned in.

For example, if you want to know what to do about a friend, you can look for mentions of them and then establish whether those mentions are broadly positive or negative or what the general sentiment is. You may realize that you don’t want to be friends with this person anymore.

In the long term, you’ll start to notice if and when similar things happen with different people and trust that you already know what it means for your ongoing relationship with that person.

Another thing you can do is record every instance where you followed what you think is your intuition. Write down what it felt like, where in your body the feeling was, how you responded to the feeling, and how the situation turned out. This helps you get to know what intuition feels like and the most prominent ways it manifests in you (because it will be different for everyone). It also helps you determine what is NOT intuition.

Write in your journal every day for maximum benefit.

8. Analyze your mistakes.

A woman with long dark hair and a white sweater is furrowing her brows and pursing her lips. She is sitting in front of a bookshelf filled with books.

In order for your intuition to guide your decision-making process, you must become intimately aware of how you make decisions and the outcomes of those decisions. You will learn the most from looking back at your mistakes and picking apart how you came to make that decision.

By analyzing your mistakes, you grow your learned experience. This learned experience is a vital source of information from which your intuition will guide you in future situations—both of a similar and unrelated nature.

You might think of learned experience as wisdom and intuition as the voice of your wisdom.

9. Avoid trying to control everything.

A man with glasses and a beard is gazing intently, chin resting on his hands. He appears deep in thought, with a bookshelf and a lamp in the blurred background.

Intuition responds to things in real-time, but if you have a rigid idea of how events should pan out, you won’t heed that intuition when it tries to advise you.

An open mind and flexible thinking are good ways to unlock your intuition. This means loosening your grip on situations, trying not to have any expectations of how they will evolve, and detaching from your desires.

This is by no means a small ask, and it goes beyond the scope of this article, but know that if you can stop trying to control everything, you give your intuition a chance to be heard.

10. Practice non-judgmental observation.

Your intuition works in a split second and is partly based on what your senses are recording at the time. So, by improving your powers of observation, you will increase the chances of your intuition providing you with the optimal choice.

Living mindfully is one way to become better at observing the environment around you. You can’t absorb as much information when your mind is engaged in overthinking. By being more mindful, you give yourself the chance to take in and process more of the sensations around you.

Sight and hearing are the two most important senses to hone as they provide the most pertinent information in most circumstances. Learning to look and listen in more detail and more depth—without judging what you see or hear—will give your intuition more information to work from.

11. Practice mindfulness meditation.

A woman with long hair relaxes on a bed with pink cushions, wearing a gray shirt. She is lying on her back with her hands behind her head, eyes closed, appearing calm and content.

Meditation is the practice of observing your thoughts while not judging them, clinging to them, or attaching meaning to them. You allow thoughts to happen, you recognize them, but you let them leave your mind.

While each meditation is temporary, a regular meditation practice helps to quieten your racing thoughts. A quieter mind has more “space” for intuition to work.

Meditation also helps to induce a positive mood, and it has been demonstrated that a positive mood improves intuitive judgments. In other words, feeling good helps you to listen to your intuition.

12. Stay curious.

A man with a beard and long hair tied back is sitting on the floor, leaning against a bookshelf. He's wearing a gray long-sleeve shirt and dark pants, holding an open book, with a thoughtful expression.

When you are curious, you are observant, excited, and open-minded to infinite possibilities; these are all traits of the highly intuitive.

Curiosity doesn’t judge—it seeks knowledge, wisdom, and truth. It also helps you join the dots between the external environment and your internal world, which is essential in understanding what your gut is trying to tell you about a situation.

13. Get creative.

A man wearing glasses and a red and blue checkered shirt sits at a desk, holding a pen in his hand. He appears thoughtful and is looking slightly to the side. The background shows large windows with a blurred cityscape view.

Creativity—whether through art or solving problems—is a common companion of intuition. By regularly engaging in creative pursuits, you awaken the full potential of your intuition.

Creativity breaches the divide between the emotional and the logical. It involves feelings and thoughts with an emphasis on interpreting the way you feel and putting that into action. This is very similar to the processes you’ll use when interpreting your intuition and making choices based on it.

14. Forgive yourself for intuitive decisions that don’t go to plan.

A woman with long dark hair and wearing glasses holds her forehead with a hand, appearing stressed or worried. She has a serious expression and is dressed in a light-colored blazer. The background is blurred.

Intuition involves trusting yourself to know which direction you should be heading in, but nothing can ever run perfectly to plan all the time.

If you are to learn to trust your intuition, you must not berate yourself when things go wrong. Criticizing a decision only erodes trust, so rather than looking at something as a disaster, look at it as a learning experience.

Forgive yourself and remember that no sea is perfectly flat and no journey on it will be without its ups and downs.