We’ve all been told to “trust our gut.” But how do you know when intuition is steering you right — or leading you astray? In this episode, host Brett Hendrie explores the science and strategy behind gut feelings with Laura Huang, professor of management and organizational development at Northeastern University. She explains why our gut is always right, how we can train ourselves to listen to what it’s telling us, and how to turn that intuiting process into a real decision-making tool — not just a hunch.
We’ve all been told to “trust our gut.” But how do you know when intuition is steering you right — or leading you astray? In this episode, host Brett Hendrie explores the science and strategy behind gut feelings with Laura Huang, professor of management and organizational development at Northeastern University. She explains why our gut is always right, how we can train ourselves to listen to what it’s telling us, and how to turn that intuiting process into a real decision-making tool — not just a hunch.
Show notes:
[0:00] Brett Hendrie reflects on what it means to really listen to your gut.
[1:19] Meet Laura Huang, professor of management and organizational development at Northeastern University, and author of You Already Know: The Science of Mastering Your Intuition.
[2:15] What is our gut instinct and how does it differ from intuition?
[5:03] Why is it important to disentangle our intuition from our emotions? (Hint: give yourself time.)
[6:59] There are four types of decisions we need to make — simple, complicated, complex and chaotic — and we should really only use our gut for the latter two.
[9:24] Your gut never lies. It’s 100% accurate. Why? Because it’s more like a compass than a right/wrong switch.
[11:34] Our gut and intuiting process — like most things in life — aren’t linear. They pull data points from across our lives.
[13:12] The three types of gut reactions: Eureka, Aha and Uh-Ohs.
[15:55] To train yourself to trust your gut, start by identifying what type of reaction you’re having. (What is your body actually telling you?)
[16:19] Training tip: Consider the rule of three (meet someone in three different settings) to test your gut.
[19:09] Become an “expert novice.” Think brushing your teeth with your non-dominant hand. Try that, but with a job task.
[21:39] What’s collective intuition?
[22:02] Your gut is like a whisper trying to break through the noise around you. “And so we kind of shove that aside, and the more we shove that aside, the more the whispers are buried in this sea of screams, and so I would say, listen to what whispers and not what screams. And the more we do that, the more we'll be able to master our intuition.”
If you enjoyed this episode, why not give some of our back catalogue a listen? To stay on theme, check out our conversations with Richard Davis on mastering your ability to judge people, or Nuala Walsh on tuning out the wrong type of information when making decisions.
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To explore more leadership tips and tricks from the Rotman School of Management, check out our Rotman Executive Summary podcast, featuring the latest research and thought-leadership from our esteemed faculty. Check it out onApple,Spotifyor wherever you get your podcasts. And be sure tosubscribeto theRotman Insights Hubbi-weekly newsletter for even more insights shaping business and society.
Brett Hendrie: How many times have you been faced with a decision and thought, “My gut feeling is telling me something”? Maybe your gut was telling you to take that job, or turn down that date. Maybe it was saying, don’t trust this person with a secret.
Sometimes it feels like your gut instinct was right — other times not so much. But what does it mean to have a gut reaction? How is that different from your intuition? And can you make yourself better at listening to what it’s telling you?
Intuition might seem like an unquantifiable quality, but it’s an area guest Laura Huang has spent years studying.
In our conversation, we talk about the difference between intuition and gut feel — and why they’re not the same thing. You’ll hear how gut feeling can show up as a spidey sense, a eureka moment, or even a jolt that shifts your perspective. Laura shares practical ways to train your intuiting process, avoid mistakes, and use it to make better decisions — especially when the stakes are high and the data is incomplete.
Welcome to Visiting Experts, a Rotman School podcast for lifelong learners, exploring transformative ideas about business and society with the influential scholars, thinkers, and leaders featured in our acclaimed Speaker Series. I’m your host, Brett Hendrie, and I’m joined today by Laura, a professor of management and organizational development at Northeastern University. Her research focuses on the role of intuition and interpersonal signalling in entrepreneurship, workplace interactions, and decision-making.
Her terrific new book is You Already Know: The Science of Mastering Your Intuition, which unpacks what a gut feeling really is, reveals what’s happening in our minds when intuition kicks in, and shows us how to harness all of this to make clearer, more confident decisions.
Laura, welcome to the Rotman School and to the Visiting Experts podcast.
Laura Huang: Thanks — pleasure to be with you here today.
BH: Laura, let’s begin with this. So many of us rely on what we interchangeably refer to as gut feeling and intuition in our daily lives — whether it’s deciding who to hire, what project to take on, or what path we think will be most successful. In your book, you distinguish between the ideas of gut feeling and intuition. What’s the difference between the two in your perception, and why is it important for us to understand that?
LH: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think that kind of speaks to the fact that we all have a lay definition of what we think gut feel is. And one of the reasons we misunderstand what gut feel is, is because we use those two terms interchangeably. We think intuition and gut feel are the same thing, and that creates all sorts of issues.
Some people might think of gut feel as this mystical, magical quality — like you can look at a Van Gogh painting and immediately know whether it’s real or fake. Whereas others think gut feel is biased, based on heuristics and shortcuts — and that we have to be careful not to let our gut feel bias us. They say we need to collect more data to make sure we’re checking what that intuition might be.
One of the ways we can be more precise in understanding what gut feel is — and thereby make it a factor that becomes a real superpower — is by first understanding there’s a distinction. There’s what’s called an intuiting process, and at the end of that process, there’s a discrete gut feel outcome.
During that intuiting process, what I find in my research is that all sorts of things are happening. We’re taking in data. We’re taking our personal experiences, our expertise, our background, our culture, even the trauma we might have experienced — and all of that gets aggregated during this intuiting process. Then, at the very end, it culminates almost like an executive summary — that flash of clarity I talk about — which is our gut.
But one step in mastering gut feel is disentangling the two, so we can understand all of the components in that process, as well as what the outcome looks like. How does it manifest? What are those flashes of clarity, and what do they look like?
BH: How should people distinguish that process of intuiting — and the outcome of gut feel — from our emotions or our biases? Or from that feeling of, “I don’t want to do this because I don’t like X, Y, Z,” or “I’m interested in this, so I’m going that way”? What’s the difference?
LH: Gut feel is one of those things where it’s super easy to define quickly, but very difficult to really understand. One of the things you’re alluding to is emotions. One of the mistakes we make is we sometimes think emotions are our gut feel.
We might feel a sense of urgency and think, “Ah, I’ve got to act on this.” Or we might feel really excited about something and think that’s the direction we want to go. Or we might feel nervous and think, “Oh no, I don’t want to touch that.”
But emotions are not gut feel. Emotions are part of gut feel — they’re one of the factors embedded in that intuiting process — but they’re not the same thing.
Think about emotions like children. You don’t let your children drive the car, because they’d crash it. But you also don’t shove them in the trunk, because they’d die. You want your children — and your emotions — in the back seat, where they can be seen and heard, but not in control.
Something I do myself, and have executives I coach do, is this: next time you’re feeling any strong emotion — that sense of urgency, nervousness, excitement — just pause for a second and ask yourself, Would I be making this same decision if I wasn’t feeling this emotion?
You can wait two hours, or a day. If you still feel the same way and want to make the same decision, it’s probably your gut feel. If not, it’s probably your emotions trying to take the front seat.
Your gut feel never lies. It’s 100% correct — and here’s the big if: as long as you’re using it for the right type of decisions.
Broadly, there are four types of decisions: simple, complicated, complex, and chaotic.
Simple decisions are those where there’s a clear answer — a yes/no, right/wrong, probabilistic answer. Think flipping a coin — heads or tails. You should never use your gut feel for simple decisions, because at best, it’ll be redundant.
Complicated decisions are just a series of simple decisions stacked on top of each other. You still shouldn’t use your gut for these — but often we do because gathering the data takes time, or requires expertise or resources.
Then there are complex and chaotic decisions. These involve so many interdependencies and nuances that you’ll never have all the information. At best, you might get 70 to 80 per cent of the data. Those are the decisions where we have to rely on gut feel.
BH: You said that your gut feeling never lies — and you write that in the book. That really stood out to me. What allows you to be so definitive in saying it never lies?
LH: It’s about the action you take. I might have a completely different gut feel about the same problem as you. The problem might be, “Should I quit my job and move to Denver?” Your gut might say, “No way,” and mine might say, “Yes, do it.” And we’d both be right, because we’re different people, drawing on different experiences and mental models.
Your gut feel is what allows you to take action. Even if that action turns out “wrong” — like I shouldn’t have moved to Denver — I’m still iterating and learning. Gut feel isn’t about finding the perfect point B; it’s about directionality. It points you toward the right quadrant, so you can continue to adjust as you move forward.
BH: One of the most interesting ideas in your book, to me, is that gut feel can be circular — even self-fulfilling — and that people go through a process that makes it the right decision for them. How did you come to that perspective?
LH: We do so many things in life linearly — reading books page by page, giving presentations slide by slide — but the way we live and make decisions isn’t linear. You might read one line in an article that reminds you of something from childhood, which connects to something you learned in university.
Our intuiting process works the same way — it’s not linear.
BH: You mentioned being able to master and understand gut feeling. And in your book, you differentiate different manifestations, which I want to talk about in a moment.
But first — if you’re enjoying this conversation, you might also like The Executive Summary, our other podcast where we unpack the latest research shaping leadership and business. Season four just launched, with fresh thinking from Rotman faculty and guests. You can find The Executive Summary wherever you get your podcasts.
OK, now let’s talk about manifestations. In your book you talk about eureka moments, spidey sense, and jolts of realization. What’s the benefit of distinguishing between those three for people trying to master their gut?
LH: What I find in my research is that universally, we all experience eureka moments — those “aha” moments. We all experience spidey sense moments — those “uh oh” moments. And we all experience jolts — those “whoa” moments, where we fundamentally shift how we see something.
These are universal, but we each experience them differently. Your eureka moment might feel like nervous energy; mine might feel like something in the pit of my stomach. When we start to recognize our unique cues — physical, emotional, cognitive — we can better spot when we’re experiencing a gut feel.
Eureka moments fit what we already believe — “Aha, that’s the solution!” Spidey sense signals incongruence — something doesn’t fit. Maybe a candidate looks great on paper but something feels off. A jolt is when our perspective shifts entirely — “Wow, I’ve been seeing this all wrong.”
BH: For people who want to master gut feel as a skill set, understanding how it manifests seems super helpful. I think people understand the physical signs — “I feel it in my stomach,” “I get tense.” What are other ways those manifestations can be experienced?
LH: I’ll give you an example. Let’s say you’re interviewing someone who looks great on paper, but something feels off. What does your spidey sense look like? How can you expand your awareness to act on it?
I talk in the book about something called the rule of three. I never hire anyone unless I’ve met them three times in three contexts — but that doesn’t have to be time-consuming. You can do it all in one 30-minute interview.
Start in your office — that’s context one. After 10 minutes, take them for a walk — context two — where you bump into colleagues and see how they interact. Then grab coffee downstairs — context three — where you observe how they treat others, like baristas.
You’re expanding your schemas and training your intuiting process by noticing cues across contexts.
BH: What’s your advice to professionals who feel they’ve listened to their gut and failed? How can they use those experiences to improve future decisions?
LH: Gut feel is about situational awareness as much as it is about avoiding situational arrogance. Situational arrogance happens when we rely on patterns from one domain in a new context.
You can train your intuition by maintaining expertise while adopting a novice mindset. For example, if you always brush your teeth with your right hand, try with your left — you’ll notice new things. The same goes for experts: stay open to new cues even in familiar territory.
BH: Great advice — and totally fascinating. As we wrap up, is there one piece of advice you’d give leaders on using intuition and gut feel to make better decisions?
LH: I’ll try to squeeze in two. First, we each have individual intuition, but also collective intuition — at the team or organizational level. As leaders, we need to master our own intuition while integrating those around us.
Second, our gut feel whispers. It’s not loud. But the world is loud — sirens, machines, algorithms, recommendations telling us what to do. Often, when making a decision, we call someone we trust and ask, “What would you do?” That’s fine — but it’s like inviting everyone to a dinner party and forgetting to save a seat for yourself.
Your perspective is the whisper. Don’t let it get buried by the noise. The more we listen to what whispers — not what screams — the more we’ll master our intuition.
BH: I love that — listening to what whispers. Make sure you have the space, time, and energy to hear your internal voice and not let it get drowned out.
Laura, thanks so much for being with us today at Rotman. Our guest has been Professor Laura Huang, and her new book is You Already Know: The Science of Mastering Your Intuition.
This has been Visiting Experts, a Rotman School podcast for lifelong learners, exploring transformative ideas about business and society with the influential scholars, thinkers, and leaders featured in our acclaimed Speaker Series.
To find out about upcoming speakers and events here at Canada’s leading business school, visit rotman.utoronto.ca/events.
If you enjoyed this episode, why not give some of our back catalogue a listen? To stay on theme, check out our conversations with Richard Davis on mastering your ability to judge people, or Nuala Walsh on tuning out the wrong type of information when making decisions.
Make sure you subscribe to this podcast on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts — and please consider giving the series a five-star rating.
This episode was produced by Megan Haynes, recorded by Dan Mazzotta, and edited by Damien Kearns. For more innovative thinking, head over to the Rotman Insights Hub and subscribe to our biweekly newsletter.
Thanks for tuning in.