I have dual US and Portuguese citizenship. There’s a lot of good things and a bit of baggage that comes with that. For example, making sure to use the right passport when traveling, working across multiple timezones, reaching for the right word in whichever language I use that day… and my favorite, taxes.
I recently interviewed tax professionals to help with the complexities of being a tax payer in two countries with different and often conflicting rules.
As I spoke with each person, I noticed a lot of activity happening across different channels, simultaneously. I was analyzing their expertise and if they had the chops to handle my situation, while paying attention to the feelings that came up during the conversation and also keeping track of the sensations in my belly.
In the past, I may have focused solely on analysis in order to make sure I made a rational decision. Throughout my education and professional life in the business world, I was trained to prioritize scientific knowledge, the written word, analysis and data as the only trustworthy vehicles to get to the right answer.
No wonder most professional adults like myself don’t trust our hearts or bodies to make good decisions. We simply never had the chance to develop that intelligence. Many of us even put an extra effort in ignoring our hearts and bodies.
It was my “extra-curricular hobby” as a dancer from a young age that saved me. There I developed the confidence to move first and think later, or to use my senses and my body to communicate and achieve my goals. And when I started my coaching training in 2007, that’s when I really began learning about how my feelings, my heart’s desires, and how to express them more consciously.
When I integrate not only my mind, but also the heart and belly into my decision-making, I get better results on average. I also noticed that the leaders I looked up to the most were the ones who drew from this kind of integrated intelligence. They didn't just use logic or data – they were deeply values-centered and trusted their intuition. Not in a compartmentalized or sequential way (“first I’ll look at the facts, then the feelings”), but in a seamlessly blended way. Those three centers contribute important elements:
The Heart explores: What matters most here? How does this stand up to our values? What would it be like to be on the receiving end of this decision? How will this impact relationships, community?
The Belly signals: What feels right or off? What subtle patterns are we noticing, even if we don’t have words for them? What intuitive knowing is present? What’s the energy level on this, and is it flowing or stuck?
The Head asks: What would it take to make this a reality? What do we know about what’s feasible or risky? What do the observable data tell us? What have we learned from past experiences?
But… what about cognitive biases? Isn’t it true that feelings and intuition lead to bad decisions?
Like many, I was fascinated by the work of Daniel Kahneman in Thinking Fast and Slow on the dangers of cognitive biases, and the mind’s tendency to jump too fast to conclusions, to seek data that confirms our worldview, etc. For complex decisions, the Kahneman’s recommendation was to mistrust and resist “system 1” thinking described as fast, intuitive, subconscious (which feels effortless) and go with “system 2” thinking instead, described as deliberate, slower, conscious - and more laborious.
Bottom line, we need to police ourselves and slow down. Pretty much in line with everything I had learned.
Except that self-monitoring is so hard! Learning about all the different types of biases, and the specific techniques to de-bias our thinking is so time-consuming. Most of us in leadership positions need to make complex decisions in fast-moving environments. Slowing down is not practical and can cost us dearly.
In her book “The Extended Mind”, Annie Murphy Paul rounds up a body of knowledge that reveals how human beings think better by using their bodies and trusting their intuition in exactly those types of dynamic, uncertain situations. This is where our gut feelings are often more rational than the brain. For example:
A study at Virginia Tech found that people who meditate were more likely to make rational decisions during negotiations than non-meditators. They paid attention to their body cues and were unfazed by their counterpart’s unfair behaviors.
A couple of studies with traders and investors found that those who were more interoceptively aware - ie, noticed their bodies' subtle cues - earned more money than those who weren't.
Another study, this one by Antonio Damasio, revealed that the body was faster at accessing and processing complex information than the conscious mind. Study participants played a card game with rewards and penalties for drawing certain cards. Unbeknownst to them, the game was rigged, with some decks having more bad cards. While playing the game, their skin was monitored. After playing the game for some time, study participants would start sweating lightly (a natural human reaction to perceived threats) whenever they reached for cards in the bad decks, and started avoiding those decks, way before they became conscious that that there was something wrong with the game. Later studies found that players who were more interoceptively aware were better at playing the game.
In short, we make better decisions when we use our full intelligence, not just our intellect. If we only use our minds, that’s when we get into trouble.
Building Your Way Through
Ideally, all three centers would align and point in the same direction. But like any good team, conflicts arise. Apart from speaking different languages, these centers can operate at different speeds too.
Here’s a practical example. After I left the US and returned to Europe, I was car-less for 4 years. At first, it made sense across the board: I lived in dense cities. Ridesharing was affordable, and I wasn’t sure whether I would stay for long. Until I bought a home in a smaller town. It was a bit more inconvenient, but financially, it still made no sense to own a car. It was also aligned with my minimalist way of life and desire to lighten my footprint on the planet. But it became harder to move around: the public transit system was unreliable and inefficient, rideshare drivers were often inattentive, and visiting friends or family outside of town was difficult. Plus I was getting back pain from carrying all my stuff around.
Eventually, my belly was done contorting to satisfy my idealism and financial logic. I bought a car, and I admit life is much simpler now.
When it comes to Here are some tips on how to navigate small and big decisions using all three centers:
Start with the bigger picture. check for direction and desired outcomes before you get into any thinking of pros and cons.
Discriminate. the mind is best to figure out the "how" – what steps, what data, and what resources we need. It can also be helpful to dissect any fears with a more dispassionate approach. Also, if your belly has some painful history, your mind can help set up comfort zones or boundaries for support.
Check alignment and explore. Athletes and dancers think with their bodies, by making a move first and adjusting as they do. We can use our belly center to test out options for action. Pay attention to body sensations as you do. These signals can help understand the level of excitement, resistance or concern.
Let it be. If there's no clear decision right away, I give it time. It’s important to respect your own speed. I am guilty of forgetting this, especially if I’m overstimulated by my smartphone or have committed myself to too many things. Beware of pushing yourself to make a fast decision. Whenever we feel ambiguous or torn, it’s usually because we’re not ready to make a call, or something important is missing or needs attention.
Trust the synthesis. When an answer arrives in your consciousness, it can be in a flash of insight that energizes you or brings tears to your eyes, or it can be just a quiet conviction that suddenly stops the storm of thoughts in your head. That's when you’re ready to move forward.
Developing this integrated approach takes practice but there are simple things you can do to start integrating more of your belly, heart and mind. None of these things are new to you, surely, but sometimes we forget to practice them.
Sit in silence, doing nothing, just looking out the window. Don’t read, or listen to podcasts. Just be.
Once a day, choose an ordinary situation – as I did with the tax consultants- to actively check in with all three centers as the situation unfolds.
Develop your interoceptive awareness, by doing regular body scans to build awareness of physical sensations
Journal often to track emotional responses and intuitive hits
Meditate to learn how to come back to yourself in the midst of the mind’s natural chatter
Ask for help or perspective from trusted people who can help you process from different angles. Heck, I’ve reached for AI as a sounding board, which is helpful if you approach it with wisdom. According to cognitive scientists Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber, we have a hard time critically evaluating our thoughts but are very good at doing that with other people’s. We are most rational when we think with others. In a nutshell:
All Leaders Are Intuitive
Here’s a frequent scenario in my coaching sessions: the client is struggling with a dilemma. Anguish weighs heavy in the air as they explain the situation in a lenghty monologue. After some time of this, I ask “What does your gut say?”. More often than not, after a brief pause, the gut comes out with a crisp and clear answer.
The problem with our overly intellectualized decision process is surprisingly simple to address. It’s a matter of focus. Shifting some of the focus from what we do most of the time (trying to get the right answer, finding the root cause, drawing a straight line from current to future state) to other ways of thinking- namely also thinking with our body and our heart.
The body and the heart have been victims of a “smear campaign” in the Western world (“Beware of your animal instincts! Remember, humans are better than animals!”). But we are better off thinking with our whole selves, even when we can’t consciously explain how that thinking works.
I love this Carl Sagan quote:
“Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.”
Until recently, we did not have devices that could see or detect subatomic particles. And yet, they were always there. We are only now beginning to understand with our minds how exactly the heart and body think. I for one am fascinated by the fields of embodied cognition and movement therapy, and I love applying these principles in my keynotes and my work with teams and leaders because they quickly awaken a new way of leading in the modern world.
We need to challenge the myth that only “data-driven” decisions work. That good leaders should only use Pareto analysis and the like to make decisions. That a strong leader always knows exactly what to do. (As anyone with real leadership experience knows – this is not the case!)
Sometimes leadership means holding the tension between different ways of knowing until genuine wisdom emerges. This place of ambiguity is a great opportunity to bring others in, especially for complex decisions where the puzzle pieces are scattered around. I am a big advocate for sitting in that awkwardness, as unpleasant as it may feel. There is gold at the end of that rainbow.
What might change in your decision-making if you integrated your three centers of intelligence? How might your leadership transform if you moved beyond conventional analysis to embrace the wisdom of heart and belly?
Try this: Next time you face a significant decision, consciously check in with all three centers. What matters to me here? What does my intuition tell me? What are the pros and cons? Check-in for alignment or conflicts. Create a coalition among the three. When you practice this often, you won’t only make good decisions. You’ll make fully intelligent ones.
After all, why use just one-third of your wisdom when you can access it all?
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