Trusting your instincts

During a safety presentation one day, someone asked me if they should trust their gut instinct when making a decision that could either have negative or positive consequences to their personal safety.

I initially wanted to say “yes,” but then I began to think more about the question and things became less clear as I to analyze the question. In fact, that became the basis of what we spoke about for the remainder of the presentation.

When faced with having to make a decision that could impact your personal safety or potentially see you being the victim of a crime, do you trust your initial gut instinct, intuition, inclination or initial thoughts and if so, how can you train yourself to truly believe that following your gut instinct is the way to go?

To begin with, let’s try our best to describe what our “gut instinct” really is, so that we can be on the same page here.
Popular Canadian author Malcolm Gladwell wrote about the concept of trusting your initial thoughts or impressions in his book entitled Blink in which he studied how people who trusted their first initial thoughts on a matter actually often made better decisions that those people who deliberated at length over the choices before them.

What Gladwell examined was our ability to assess a situation very quickly and within seconds come up with the right choice without requiring further information or time to think things through. What Gladwell was able to conclude was that we pretty much all have the power of “rapid cognition,” or “thin slicing” and that we all could make “snap judgments” if we allowed ourselves to tap into our sub conscious thoughts instead of always waiting for our conscious thoughts to dominate our decision making.
So what does this have to do with being able to feel safe in your community or protect yourself from becoming the victim of a crime such as a fraud or the scam of the day?

Well, I believe that Gladwell is on to something and I endorse his view that people can train themselves to be able to come to very quick conclusions when faced with having to make a decision that will either put them in harm’s way or get them out of harm’s way. Ironically, our bodies are already equipped to respond very quickly to things are harmful in our environment.

The best way to train yourself to trust in your gut instinct is to always remember the following: You have spent your entire lifetime accumulating real life experiences that are stored in the sub conscious part of your brain and your initial response always taps into this deep rooted information bank. Because you have lived these experiences first hand, you know them to be true, as opposed to information that requires conscious analysis to interpret it.

I have tested this theory many times during my community crime prevention presentations with telling results. When someone describes at length a potentially harmful situation in which they we unsure what to do,  I have asked them what their “little voice” or “gut” or “intuition” or “instincts” told them to do and they usually come up with the right answer.

Over and over I hear people who have been a victim of a scam or a fraud say “If only I had trusted my gut instinct” and then they add “but they were so convincing.” So, as Gladwell points out, people’s first impressions often steer them in the right direction, but as they receive more information they are susceptible to being influenced to see things differently and make different choices.

When we are talking about being a victim of a fraud or a scam, then the consequences of not following our gut instincts are usually just the loss of money and the embarrassment of being duped. But when you become a victim of a violent crime that could have been avoided had you paid attention to your first reaction to a situation, then the merits of acting or responding on “gut instinct” becomes more apparent.

I have heard many victims of assaults, muggings and rapes say that had they trusted their initial thoughts and had taken decisive action accordingly, they probably would not have been victimized in the first place.

I hear them say things such as “I knew I should have crossed the street earlier” or “I could sense that someone was watching me” or “I thought someone was following me” or “I sensed they were trouble” or “I felt that things were getting out of hand” or “I wanted to leave earlier for some reason, but I didn’t” or “I could sense that something was very wrong.” When people say such things, it is because they ignored their gut instincts and then regretted doing so.

In order to trust your gut instincts you have to be ready to act on your first impression and hope that this is the right thing to do even if you do not see immediate results. If you hang up the phone on a person because what they are telling you seems “too good to be true” or “not normal,” then trust that you are doing the right thing. If you cross the street late at night because the person approaching you appears “a little off,” then trust it was the right thing to do.

If a person is trying to convince you of something that appears to make sense, but you have an “uncomfortable” feeling, then trust in what you believed before they spoke to you. I could go on, but I think you get my point. Trusting in your gut instinct is a leap of faith because when you do so, you avoid putting yourself in harm’s way and the only way to measure this is when you realize that nothing really bad happened to you after the fact.