I Just Have A Feeling
Why Trusting Your Intuition is a Radical Leadership Move
I’m doing an 8-week health challenge right now, and part of the commitment means I’m tracking EVERYTHING: my sleep, water intake, exercise, macronutrients. I’ve got my fitness watch logging every step and heartbeat, and I’m inputting all this data into an app for my trainer to review.
It’s super annoying, but I get it. As my trainer put it, “If we can measure it, we can manage it.” But it’s got me thinking: we live in a world obsessed with measurements and tangible results. We spend so much of our time tracking, proving, documenting, and basically chasing validation in the form of numbers.
So of course, in my rebel leader mindset, I had to poke at this. I mean, come on. Isn’t it funny? As though our worth is measured in grams of protein or the number of steps we take in a day.
It made me wonder: What would the rebel leader version be? What if, instead of managing by metrics, we led with our intuition?
I know it sounds laughable. Unprofessional, even. I can’t think of a single conference room meeting where I’d have felt comfortable saying, “I don’t have data to back this up, but I just have a gut feeling we should go this way.”
And maybe that’s exactly why we need it now more than ever.
So... what is intuition?
Intuition isn’t magic. It’s not woo-woo. It’s wisdom.
It’s been called many things—gut instinct, professional judgment, common sense—but at its core, it’s this: The ability to understand something immediately, without the need for conscious reasoning.
Intuition doesn’t mean guessing, it means paying attention, on levels we don’t always realize. It means listening to our bodies, our hearts, our guts, without rushing to justify or rationalize.
And for many women, that knowing has been trained out of us.
We’ve been taught to defer to outside voices. To trust the data over our own bodies. To perform being “reasonable,” even when our entire being is screaming this isn’t right.
The irony? Women are often hyper-intuitive because we’ve HAD to be.
When my kids come home from school, I usually sense when something’s off (I call this my Mom Spidey Sense). Is this intuition? Maybe. But what’s really happening is that I’m unconsciously reading subtle cues: the tone of their voice, their body language, a feeling in my own body that remembers what it’s like to be nine years old and holding something in.
Women are often better at this kind of pattern recognition—not because we’re magical, but because we’ve been trained to scan our surroundings constantly for safety, belonging, and survival. This skill has undoubtedly saved lives, or at least saved us from dangerous situations.
But the kind of intuition I want to talk about today isn’t just about reading others. It’s about learning to hear your own inner voice. The voice that tells you when it’s time to walk away. Or speak up. Or start something brand new.
It’s the voice that doesn’t show up in your Slack notifications or your fitness tracker. It’s the voice that emerges when you’re brave enough to get still.
Collective Intuition: Remembering What We Forgot
Part of what makes intuition feel so radical in today’s world is that Western culture has trained us to treat it as suspiciously unscientific, unreliable, maybe even dangerous. But this hasn’t always been the case. And it’s certainly not true everywhere.
Many Indigenous, ancestral, and earth-based cultures have never lost touch with intuition. In these traditions, intuitive wisdom isn’t something to apologize for, it’s something to honor. It's a sacred skill, passed down through story, ceremony, and lived experience. Decisions are often made not by who can speak the loudest, but by those who can listen the deepest.
I think about how many cultures have relied on dreams for guidance, or how elders are revered not because of their data but because of their deep, embodied knowing. I think about how African, Asian, and Indigenous cosmologies often see the world as inherently relational, where intuition is not just personal, it’s collective.
In this way, reclaiming our intuition isn’t just personal growth. It’s a decolonial act. It’s remembering something ancient that capitalism and colonialism worked very hard to make us forget.
How do we reclaim that voice in a world screaming for our attention?
But if you were born and raised in a Western world, remembering this wisdom doesn’t come easily. Here’s what helps me, and what I offer to rebel leaders like you:
Meditation + Stillness: You can’t hear intuition over the monkey mind. It’s like a friend whispering advice at a rock concert—you won’t catch a word unless you turn down the volume. Try sitting for a few minutes without doing anything, and just count an even inhale and even exhale. You don’t have to be a meditation pro. Just pause.
Work with your menstrual cycle: This could be a whole post on its own, but here’s the short version: I’m way more intuitive and less tolerant of BS the week before I bleed. I truly believe PMS has been labeled irrational because women are SO MUCH clearer during this time. Start tracking your thoughts and emotions during the phases of your cycle, and you’ll see. (If your menstrual cycle is on hold, or whackadoodle because of perimenopause, you can try tracking your response to the lunar cycle to see what wisdom you gain.)
Bodyfulness (not just mindfulness): Your body holds wisdom. Notice what happens when you’re in a situation that doesn’t feel right—tight chest? Sinking belly? Goosebumps? These are feedback loops. Your body knows what your brain hasn’t caught up to yet.
Pause before you decide: Ask yourself a question, then wait 1–2 seconds. What flashes up before the excuses, justifications, or polite responses? That moment? That’s your intuition trying to speak.
Play: Intuition flows best when we’re not gripping too tightly. Play with your kids, roll on the floor, dance in the kitchen. Tickle fights and belly laughter are nervous system resets. They pull us out of overthinking and back into feeling.
Yes, it’s hard.
Of course, there’s a time and place for measurements and data. This isn’t an either/or conversation, it’s a both/and. Learning how to balance rational, linear thinking with the intuitive, uncertain “knowing” is a skill. We know the world doesn’t reward people (especially women) who say I just know. We get called emotional, unprofessional, and irrational. The backlash is real.
But when you lead from balanced intuition, you start making aligned decisions without over-explaining. You start saying no sooner. You stop bending yourself into palatable shapes to make other people comfortable.
You become less interested in being “reasonable” and more committed to being real.
Rebel leaders don’t just break rules, they trust what they feel in their bones. Intuition isn’t a soft skill. It’s a sharp one. And it’s time we stop hiding it.
What’s Next: A Whole Intuition Series
There’s so much more about intuition than I could fit into one post, so I’m going to keep going!
This is the first in a series of Rebel Leaders reflections on reclaiming intuition in a world that rewards rationality over wisdom. In the coming weeks, I’ll be exploring:
Intuition at Work: A more practical and neuroscience-informed look at how we lead with intuition inside organizations and systems that don’t value it (yet).
Intuition at Home: Mothering, partnership, and the quiet knowing that guides our personal lives, plus a deeper dive into the fear of getting it wrong.
Intuition in the Community: Collective knowing, cultural wisdom, and how intuition connects to integrity, leadership, and social change.
If you’ve got stories, practices, or questions about intuition you want me to explore, hit reply or drop them in the comments. Let’s reclaim this wild, quiet, ancestral skill together.