Your Most Underrated Data Source… Is You
We've been told to be more "data-driven" for a while now.
Build the model. Run the analysis. Let the data dictate what to do.
Your gut — that signal you were born with (the one we used to be told to trust) — was asked to stand down. Too subjective. Too feelings-based. Too… human.
AI has made this worse, not better. More data. More analysis. More synthesized insight than at any point in human history, which means the pressure to defer to the output, the model, or the recommendation the tool just generated, has never been higher.
Your Gut Isn't Guessing.
But here's what the research actually says: intuition is pattern recognition. Your brain is processing thousands of data points faster than your conscious mind can. What you call a ‘gut feeling’ is an integration of everything you've seen, survived, and learned. It's not the absence of information. It's the most sophisticated analysis you have access to.
The leaders I work with who struggle most with self-trust aren't struggling because they don't know enough. They're struggling because somewhere along the way, they learned that what they know doesn't count unless some model or someone else confirms it first.
I know this because I was that leader.
I held a corporate role that was no longer a fit for me or my health (hello palpitations and insomnia!), focusing on the data points that kept me stuck (title, rank, pay) and screening out the ones that didn't (my body, telling me to leave for months).
I kept waiting for new data to shift my thinking. What I was really waiting for was permission from an objective source to validate what my gut had already decided.
Eventually, I stopped waiting, left the job, and never looked back. I trusted myself, and it’s paid off.
Trusting your gut is about trusting yourself:
saying no to the client that aligns with your target, but something just doesn’t sit right with you
Entering your next chapter even when you haven’t fully figured out what that looks like
Leaving a situation that looks great on paper, but leaves you feeling drained
Leaders who bet on themselves aren't reckless. Nor are they anti-data. They just use every tool available to them, including their most powerful data source: themselves.
The Leadership Shift
1. Treat your intuition as a data source. Before you open the model, write down what you already know. What's working. What isn't. What you're sensing. Then run your analysis. Notice where your thinking aligns… and where it doesn't.
2. Ask yourself what you’re waiting for. Take inventory of decisions you've been sitting on. Ask yourself honestly: am I gathering more information, or am I waiting for someone or something to tell me it's okay?
3. Track your hits. Start a running list of times your instinct was right when the data was unclear, absent, or pointing somewhere else. You have more evidence of your own discernment than you think. Start treating it like the asset it is.
Bottom Line:
Real leaders bet on themselves not because they're certain. They do it because they've learned that waiting for certainty is its own kind of risk.
Your gut isn't a liability. It's your secret weapon to better.
To better, — Jess