Body Intelligence and Decision Making
Posted on August 30, 2019 by Dorit Noble, One of Thousands of Team Coaches on Noomii.
How can you lean into your body as a trusted source of guidance?
Can intuition be developed and increased?
read on to find out more..
body intelligence and decision makingIn his best seller ‘Blink’, Malcolm Gladwell calls the unconscious mind ‘the brain behind locked doors’.
But what if you could unlock those doors? What if there’s a way to access that greater potential in you? It is possible.
The key is your body intelligence.
What is body intelligence?
Body Intelligence is the ability to understand and consciously respond to the voice of your body. This takes different forms: physical sensations, intuition, gut feeling, non-verbal communication, body language, posture, walk, voice.
Body Intelligence can be developed and increased just like emotional intelligence can be developed and increased. I have trained countless facilitators, leaders, consultants, trainers and coaches who exponentially increase their body intelligence through the somatic week-long intensive that I run for my incredible faculty. (testimonials:www.bodyiqcoaching.com)
Your body is constantly communicating to you through multiple channels.
And why is this communication valuable for you?
Many reasons, here are two of them.
1.The unconscious mind is 8 times faster at making accurate snap decisions than the conscious executive brain (pre-frontal cortex)
This is pointed to in the IOWA gambling experiment proposed in his book Descartes’ Error by renowned neuroscientist Antonio Damasio. In this real-life decision-making experiment, card players whose hands were wired to electrodes and sweat detectors to track their stress response, were given two card decks. One random but favourable, the other random but unfavourable.
It took approximately 80 cards for the players to consciously figure out what was going on with the decks of cards, however already at 10 cards they started ‘intuitively’ steering away from the unfavourable deck and picking cards from the favourable deck of cards.
What was really interesting was that every time the card players reached for the unfavourable, ‘incorrect’ deck of cards; they showed a stress response: sweaty palms. elevated heart rate.
The unconscious was clearly communicating to them via the body.80 cards for the rational brain to figure it out, only 10 cards for the unconscious to get it.
2.The unconscious mind controls most of our life
Imagine it as the invisible driver at the wheel of your car.
You say: I’m going left – it turns right
You say: I’m going to take my partner out to dinner tonight – and that evening you’re having a huge fight
Like David Rock says in his book ‘How Your Brain Works: by comparison with the logical part of our brain which can hold a cubic foot of information at one time – the unconscious mind is able to hold the milky way of information.
David Rock’s words: ‘use the Milky Way and not the Cubic Foot.’
And why is the body important?
The body is how your unconscious communicates with you – it is the bridge between your conscious and unconscious mind.
Increase your body intelligence and you increase your ability to get tools to decode the vital information available to you from your unconscious.
It’s a win-win investment.
Investing in a week-long somatic training means that your body can support you in feeling more alive, healthy and joyful in your life as well as in guiding you to make more effective, satisfying decisions by providing a key to your unconscious mind.
