Should we trust our intuition or our thinking?
Posted: Wed Feb 12, 2025 10:40 am
Hello, dear friends! Thank you for joining me for this new episode of the Français Authentique podcast. If you are a fan of this podcast, if you listen to my podcast regularly and you like it, you can do me a great favor by leaving 5 stars and sharing it with your friends on any podcast platform. It obviously helps Français Authentique to be discovered since there are few podcasts, in my opinion, that are focused on learning French and at the same time personal development. So I really invite you to share this podcast with your friends and I thank you for it.
Today, I'm going to try to get you thinking, a bit like we did last week in our episode about... you may have heard it... about the fact that there is no single cause for an event. So I invite you, if you haven't listened to it, to listen to this episode from last week because it will help you better analyze your problems and act more effectively.
But today, we're going to ask a question that doesn't have an exact answer. So I already did it in the title of the episode, eh, the question we're asking ourselves is: "Should we trust our sweden whatsapp number data intuition or our thinking?" That is to say, "is it better to trust our brain, our thoughts, our thinking, or rather our intuition, what we think, what we feel, ultimately?"
Intuition comes from the unconscious. It's unconscious, intuition, of course. And reflection comes from the conscious. And basically, our brain works like that. We have a conscious part, an unconscious part. All that is conscious is the things we think about, the things we are conscious of; the unconscious, well we don't think about it and we don't even realize that our unconscious is working.
But our unconscious mind is super powerful, right? It's what makes our body work. Our unconscious mind is what makes our body beat at the rhythm it beats, it's what sends blood into the body at the right pressure, it's what makes us breathe, it's what makes us digest, it's what cleans our cells. The unconscious mind does a titanic job, an extraordinary job that our conscious mind, the conscious part of our brain, would never be able to do in fact.
So the conscious, or the conscious part, is much more limited, but it is the only part that we access directly. We do not access the unconscious, by definition, or not directly in any case. On the other hand, we access the conscious part of the brain. We can easily think about and influence the things that we are conscious of. So we use, as an individual, both: the conscious part and the unconscious part.
Of course, depending on our personalities, we will have preferences. Some prefer to use the unconscious, that is to say intuition; others prefer to use reflection, the conscious. We are more comfortable with one or more comfortable with the other.
Personally, I am much more comfortable with the second one, with the conscious part, because I really like it when I can explain things, when things make sense. My wife Céline, she tends to be more intuitive, to follow her intuition. There is no one who is better than the other, both are very good. That's how it is. We can't really choose how we are, but some people are more intuitive than others.
And each of the modes, in fact, has advantages and disadvantages. For example, reflection has the big disadvantage that it is slow. Moreover, I made a podcast, you can listen to it, which is "I am a slow thinker" where I explain to you that I think but slowly because I really need time to think carefully, to analyze situations well. And last week's episode in which I talk to you about the fact that there are often several causes for a problem comes back to this subject. Reflection is slow because it consumes a lot of energy. So it's slow, it consumes a lot of energy and it is limited in quantity. These are the disadvantages of reflection.
The positive side is that we often get more complete and explainable answers than when we rely solely on intuition. And intuition is the opposite. Its disadvantage is that when we rely solely on intuition, we don't get really clear answers, we can't explain. From a communication point of view, it's complicated. On the other hand, intuition is fast, so we can very quickly analyze a situation with intuition and it consumes almost no energy and there is no limit, as we have seen. So there you have it, both modes have advantages and disadvantages and we can ask ourselves the question: When to listen to your intuition? When to listen to your reflection?
And again, there is no absolute answer. We can't say: you have to be intuitive or you have to be rational, you have to listen to your reason, but we can try to find the compromise, because of course it will depend on our tendency, but we can't say: "I use one or the other all the time". If I use intuition all the time, I'm going to have problems. There comes a time when my intuition is going to cause me to have really big problems. And if I always use my reflection, it won't work because I'm going to exhaust myself and I won't move forward fast enough.
Today, I'm going to try to get you thinking, a bit like we did last week in our episode about... you may have heard it... about the fact that there is no single cause for an event. So I invite you, if you haven't listened to it, to listen to this episode from last week because it will help you better analyze your problems and act more effectively.
But today, we're going to ask a question that doesn't have an exact answer. So I already did it in the title of the episode, eh, the question we're asking ourselves is: "Should we trust our sweden whatsapp number data intuition or our thinking?" That is to say, "is it better to trust our brain, our thoughts, our thinking, or rather our intuition, what we think, what we feel, ultimately?"
Intuition comes from the unconscious. It's unconscious, intuition, of course. And reflection comes from the conscious. And basically, our brain works like that. We have a conscious part, an unconscious part. All that is conscious is the things we think about, the things we are conscious of; the unconscious, well we don't think about it and we don't even realize that our unconscious is working.
But our unconscious mind is super powerful, right? It's what makes our body work. Our unconscious mind is what makes our body beat at the rhythm it beats, it's what sends blood into the body at the right pressure, it's what makes us breathe, it's what makes us digest, it's what cleans our cells. The unconscious mind does a titanic job, an extraordinary job that our conscious mind, the conscious part of our brain, would never be able to do in fact.
So the conscious, or the conscious part, is much more limited, but it is the only part that we access directly. We do not access the unconscious, by definition, or not directly in any case. On the other hand, we access the conscious part of the brain. We can easily think about and influence the things that we are conscious of. So we use, as an individual, both: the conscious part and the unconscious part.
Of course, depending on our personalities, we will have preferences. Some prefer to use the unconscious, that is to say intuition; others prefer to use reflection, the conscious. We are more comfortable with one or more comfortable with the other.
Personally, I am much more comfortable with the second one, with the conscious part, because I really like it when I can explain things, when things make sense. My wife Céline, she tends to be more intuitive, to follow her intuition. There is no one who is better than the other, both are very good. That's how it is. We can't really choose how we are, but some people are more intuitive than others.
And each of the modes, in fact, has advantages and disadvantages. For example, reflection has the big disadvantage that it is slow. Moreover, I made a podcast, you can listen to it, which is "I am a slow thinker" where I explain to you that I think but slowly because I really need time to think carefully, to analyze situations well. And last week's episode in which I talk to you about the fact that there are often several causes for a problem comes back to this subject. Reflection is slow because it consumes a lot of energy. So it's slow, it consumes a lot of energy and it is limited in quantity. These are the disadvantages of reflection.
The positive side is that we often get more complete and explainable answers than when we rely solely on intuition. And intuition is the opposite. Its disadvantage is that when we rely solely on intuition, we don't get really clear answers, we can't explain. From a communication point of view, it's complicated. On the other hand, intuition is fast, so we can very quickly analyze a situation with intuition and it consumes almost no energy and there is no limit, as we have seen. So there you have it, both modes have advantages and disadvantages and we can ask ourselves the question: When to listen to your intuition? When to listen to your reflection?
And again, there is no absolute answer. We can't say: you have to be intuitive or you have to be rational, you have to listen to your reason, but we can try to find the compromise, because of course it will depend on our tendency, but we can't say: "I use one or the other all the time". If I use intuition all the time, I'm going to have problems. There comes a time when my intuition is going to cause me to have really big problems. And if I always use my reflection, it won't work because I'm going to exhaust myself and I won't move forward fast enough.