3 Reasons to Go With Your Gut

Most people make decisions based on gut feelings or instincts, yet doing so is often dismissed as irrational. However, recent neuroscience research has found that gut feelings may be more rational than thought. For anyone in a leadership role, these findings are significant.

The Brain-Gut Connection

Emeran A. Mayer, Director of the G. Oppenheimer Center for Neurobiology of Stress and Resilience at UCLA, has found that decisions based on gut feelings have a neurobiological basis rooted in “brain-gut interactions” and their associated memories. Using neuroimaging, he has found that some areas of the brain (specifically the fronto-insular cortical regions and subregions of the anterior insula) are activated during intuitive (i.e., gut) decision-making processes.

The brain-gut connection, technically known as the enteric nervous system (ENS), is so powerful that some researchers describe it as a “second brain.” As Jay Pasricha at Johns Hopkins Medicine explains, “The enteric nervous system doesn’t seem capable of thought as we know it, but it communicates back and forth with our big brain—with profound results.”

In a nutshell, knowing something in your gut may be just as valid as knowing something in your head. As a result, in some cases, ignoring gut feelings may be a deficit rather than an advantage. But what does this mean for leaders?

Integrating the Head, Heart, and Body Into Leadership

Over the past twenty years, there has been a growing focus on the need for leaders to develop their EQ (emotional intelligence). As a business psychologist, I couldn’t agree more. Leaders without EQ are at a considerable deficit. That said, I also think that leaders need PQ (physical intelligence).

On the one hand, PQ is about being aware of and attentive to your physical presence (e.g., how you show up and hold the room). PQ is also about paying attention to what your body is telling you in different workplace situations.

In a March 2022 Harvard Business Review article, Melodie Wilding outlines some of the benefits of listening to your body on the job. “If you’re a manager,” she writes, “getting a ‘read’ on your direct reports allows you to sense when they’re demotivated and to take steps to re-engage them. Similarly, doing a ‘gut check’ on a product design can steer your creative process in the right direction.”

Up a level from management, leaders also have a lot to gain from paying more attention to their bodies on the job. As leaders, one is generally encouraged and rewarded for making decisions based on deliberation versus intuition or gut reactions. However, a 2011 study in Emotion, based on four experiments, found that focusing on feelings versus simply focusing on details can actually lead to “superior objective and subjective decision quality for complex decisions.” As a result, the study concludes that “affective decision strategies may be more effective relative to deliberative strategies for certain complex decisions.” This leads me to another question: When should managers and leaders follow their guts?

Integrated Leadership and VUCA

In the face of increased volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and adversity (VUCA), leaders have a lot to gain from embracing a more integrated approach to leadership, which includes paying attention to their heads, hearts, and bodies. Among other things, listening to our heads, hearts, and bodies enables us to:

• Access more information and make better decisions: When we’re listening to all available channels through which we process information, including our guts, we can tap into information that may otherwise remain obscured. In some cases, listening to our gut may also help us realize something more quickly. This is why we often feel fear before we realize the threat we’re facing.
• Put ourselves into our stakeholders’ shoes: As a leader, reflection is essential, and the best way to reflect, especially in complex situations, is to stand in another person’s shoes. Doing this, and literally feeling what others feel from their position, can help us make decisions and act more ethically and responsibly, even when facing complex situations.
• Manage our energy and mitigate burnout: When we’re just listening to our heads, it can be easy not to manage our energy and even burn out. After all, especially when it comes to work, our heads are often telling us to keep going long after we’ve depleted our energy banks. Listening to your body is vital to managing your energy to ensure you have the reserves needed to keep leading at your best over time.