• The customer who bought a crappy product.
• The employee who has to answer complaints about the crappy product.
• The stock holder or partner whose investment is melting in shrinking profit margins.

And yet, entrepreneurs want to succeed. They want to make good products. They want proud and happy employees. They want to do business while upholding their principals. The true meaning of sustainable success is to achieve your financial goals while maintaining good relationships with your collaborators.

This is where strategic Business Intuition comes into place. Intuition is a form of intelligence that uses a right brain approach to generate ideas and solutions from a divergent thinking perspective (the famous “think outside the box”). It is based on Emotional Intelligence (the ability to perceive and manage emotions in self and others), a critical skill of successful decision makers.

Business Intuition is rapidly gaining momentum in the business world: 62% of CEOs use their gut feelings when making decisions (2006, PRWeek/Burson-Marsteller CEO Survey). Billionaires such as Trump and Oprah both publicly attribute their success to intuition.

Certain areas are more likely to achieve quick and obvious results from using Business Intuition.

• Marketing efforts
  Does your sales team know how to use their Emotional Intelligence to establish an emotional connection with prospectives clients? Using intuition before and during a call provides you with leverage in cold call situation where you have no other source of information.
• Employee satisfaction
  By using intuition, you can identify the top problems affecting your employees as a group. And you might be surprised by the creative solutions that would solve these core problems!
• Business relationships
  When research doesn’t give you a clear green light on a business deal, intuition can provide much better results than a lucky guess (or worst, a blind guess!). When you see someone who is able to take the right decision in seconds, like Trump, you know they’re not relying just on facts.

Unfortunately, the potential of Business Intuition is still hindered by a poorly structured approach to it. Sporadic “gut feelings” can hardly become a transferable skill within a company. It’s difficult to develop your ability at something you don’t understand.

But more and more entrepreneurs are realizing the unlimited potential of intuition in keeping up with a fast-pace business world. This realization opens the door to a deeper understanding of intuition and its application in business. There’s always a solution. It just doesn’t always come from your left brain!

The challenges of Corporate America can be successfully addressed by relying on the ingenuity provided by a structured approach to Business Intuition.

To some, it’s the only rational way to go:

“The only real valuable thing is intuition”

- Albert Einstein

Elise Lebeau, M.Sc. is a Professional Business Intuitive
providing a result-oriented approach to strategic business planning.
She offers individual consultations and corporate trainings.

by Elise Lebeau, M.Sc., Professional Intuitive

In “The America We Deserve”, Trump declares “I’ve built a multi-billion empire by using my intuition”. During a recent national address to business women in Chicago, Oprah says “my business skills have come from being guided by my inner self – my intuition”. And Gates admits that “sometimes, you have to rely in intuition”.

These famous billionaires publicly recommend the use intuition in business. But what do they mean by that? Do they even mean the same thing? And, most importantly, how can you get in on this intuition thing?

In my career as a Professional Intuitive, I always receive different answers when I ask someone their definition of intuition. Some talk of a “gut feeling”, where they experience a specific emotional trigger that is interpreted as “yes” or “no” for a particular business decision. Others have original ideas that didn’t come from the rational foundation of the mind. That’s how Einstein and Edison describe their creative process. There is also the psychic definition where someone acquires information about other people, places or future events that simply comes to them, without any further explanation of origin.

Even when I talk with other professionals in this field, their definitions differ. And rightly so. Intuition is experienced differently from person to person. As such, there is no need to categorize one type of experience as being better than another…as long as they achieve their ultimate purpose: financial success.

Trump and Oprah didn’t start advocating intuition in business after taking a class and learning a definition for this concept. They built hard core experiential evidence that this works for them, in the form of net worth. This is the approach that I find most productive: business intuition as a result-based method.

We tend to be afraid or ashamed of what we don’t understand. I can’t tell you how many times I have introduced myself as a Professional Business Intuitive only to see raised eyebrows and quizzical looks. But the global market is putting more and more pressure on American businesses to adopt non-traditional business models where success is not determined by a set of pre-defined rules that you learn in your MBA.

So what can you get from Business Intuition? The most useful tool of all: Leverage.

If you think your accountant is tweaking the books, you don’t need an Intuitive Assessment©: you need an auditor. But if your profits are plummeting and you have no idea why or you’re about to partner with someone you don’t know, then Business Intuition can provide leverage in a situation where you have none.

Business Intuition is not about to replace a good market research or a deep understanding of your field. But you know that there is more to it than that. Otherwise you’d be at the top already! Trump and Oprah’s success did not come from sheer luck. Nor is it related to their super human IQ. And yet it is repeatable: they turn every project into a success. And they both admit that Intuition is their secret ingredient to sustainable success.

People who are interested in intuition tend to fall in two categories: they want to learn how to do it themselves or they are looking for a reliable Professional to do it for them. Intuition is no different than accounting: it takes time to learn. As such, most people end up doing a blend of the two approaches. They ask a consultant when they’re in a jam while they develop their own skills with an Intuition Coach.

What ever you choose to do, opening the door to intuition in your company is the first step towards your very own Midas Touch!

Elise Lebeau, M.Sc. is a Professional Business Intuitive, providing a result-oriented approach to strategic business planning. She offers individual consultations and Corporate trainings.