Topix Questions 9 "Intuition or 'Following Your Gut'" & 10 "How Do You Best Learn" of 424

Question 9/424:  What do you think about intuition, or “following your gut”?

I think having and following your intuition or your “gut” is a valuable skillset.  It takes a certain amount of confidence and self-esteem to trust yourself enough to follow your own intuition or gut feeling.  I also think it’s valuable to recognize when and in which situations you actually have enough experience to have an intuition worth following.  I think sometimes people’s egos can be a bit inflated and maybe they follow their gut and it leads them in the wrong direction because they actually don’t have any experience in the situation they were letting intuition lead them through.  I also feel like sometimes gut feelings are not, and should not be treated as, the end all be all, but are instead warning signs from your subconscious to just pay attention and take note on anything that seems off or uncomfortable.

I think at a certain point in everyone’s life – whether it be a certain age or after a certain amount of life experience regardless of age – if your gut, your intuition, or your subconscious is trying to lead you towards or away from something, you owe it to yourself to listen to it.  Ultimately, even if your gut feeling winds up being wrong, or if facts come out later that you didn’t anticipate, you’ll still feel better having done the thing that felt right to you versus if you do something based on external pressure and it winds up not going well you’re more likely to feel resentful towards the people that pushed you into it in the first place.  If you’re following your own intuition, then you get to give yourself the credit if it works out.  If things don’t work out, you’re only able to be mad at yourself or at the situation, not other people.  I guess I just put a lot of weight on that type of thinking.

A lot of people allow their friends and family to essentially run their lives even if it’s from an outside point of view.  Some people let those around them convince them of the job they should or shouldn’t take, whether their relationship is worthwhile or not, whether they should move or stay, et cetera.  I’ve been that person, so rest assured this is not coming from a place of judgement, but instead from a place of trying to grow as a person myself and to make decisions based on my own knowledge, experience, and overall gut feeling(s) instead of relying on the opinion of others. 

I think the sooner you start having faith in yourself and in your ability to make decisions and make the best out of a situation, the better off you’re going to be.  Friends and family are great support systems, and of course it can be helpful to bounce ideas off of those closest to you, who hopefully understand you, but your life is yours.  Whether things turn out good or bad, it’s going to be you figuring out how to navigate things going forward.  If you can’t trust your own intuition, or at least consider it seriously, then how are you ever going to find confidence in other aspects of life?

 

Question 10/424:  How do you best learn?  Watching, hearing, doing, reading?

I have spent a lot of time trying to figure out how I best learn whether it be visual, auditory, kinesthetic or a combo.  I do know that if I am just listening to a lecture without visual aids, I am most likely not going to retain any of the information – this is also why audiobooks are difficult for me to get into because I really have to listen to the same thing multiple times for it to sink into my brain.  Generally I think any type of repetition is the best bet for me.  In high school, I would often take notes during a lecture (usually the teacher would have a projection of the lecture they were giving which was extremely helpful for me) but those notes would be messy.  So later on, in a study hall or at home, I would re-write the notes in a neater fashion.  Sometimes, even after that initial rewrite I would decide to copy them again to either clean them up further or organize them.  So typically, I would be rewriting notes at least two or three times and that really seemed to help me to memorize it.  I also was very active in choir and drama which also requires a certain level of repetition which would lead to memorization.  I will say, despite my best efforts, I was not necessarily a strong test taker, so while my homework and understanding of the material may be decent, my test scores didn’t necessarily reflect that.

When it comes to learning a new skill for my job, I think repetition is still my biggest tool and also just doing it, and knowing that I am allowed a certain amount of room for error.  Most of my career has been a learning experience.  I started out doing a few data entry type tasks that was pretty easy to catch onto since the program basically tells you what it expects you to enter.  But over the 12 years I’ve worked with my current boss he and I have learned so much more together, and it has certainly not been a seamless process.  There have been lots of little and silly mistakes being made because for the most part, we’re guessing our way through it and waiting for the higher ups to tell us what they do and don’t like.  Honestly, I think that’s one of the biggest misconceptions that come from moving out of an educational environment and into a working environment. 

In school, for the most part teachers expect the same out of you, and because of that they expect you to just know exactly what to do.  If you don’t know what to do, or if you’re adjusting to a new system, there’s a lot of shame that comes with that, often in the form of a negative grade.  In the working world, most people recognize that every company, every manager, every job is going to come with it’s own expectations, and there is a certain room for error for you to figure it out or catch up.  I work for a bankruptcy attorney, but how he expects me to prepare forms is entirely different from how another attorney would expect those same forms to be filled out.  Then, regardless of which attorney you’re working for, the Trustees and the Judges are really the ones who make the rules, so even if you feel confident that you’re doing exactly what your boss (the attorney) wants you to do, there’s still a chance that a Trustee or a Judge is going to swoop in and say “Nope, you’re doing it all wrong, so you need to do it this way instead.”  Trustees and Judges come and go every handful of years so those rules and expectations can change almost daily depending on the situation.  Even after working for the same attorney, and within the same 3 counties that we’ve always worked in, for twelve years I still slip up when I’m filing something in Bay City or Detroit the way that I would file it in Flint and the Bay City or Detroit Trustee has to email me and say “I know things are done differently in Flint, but do it this way instead and we’ll accept it.”  I don’t get an F for forgetting that or reprimanded for not paying close enough attention.  It’s just human error – which I think a lot of times is missing from the educational system which results in a lot of kids just giving up on learning because they feel like they’re always going to be doing it wrong.

That was a bit of a tangent, but I guess my point is I think my learning style is:  repetition.  Moreso towards the kinesthetic, or “doing”, and doing it over and over and over again.  I do still sometimes take notes and keep “cheat sheets” around for things that just don’t seem to click in my brain so I an always refer to them (see also things that schools don’t tend to allow resulting in kids feeling like failures).  Sometimes certain things just don’t make sense to certain people and so maybe those people will always need a cheat sheet, and that’s okay.  At the end of the day, we are all human, and we all should be allowed certain room for error because we can’t possibly retain all the information we’ve been taught over the year, nor can we be expected to change how we’ve been doing something for years overnight and not slip up now and again.