218: Targeting Your Intuition with Laura Day

This is The Intentional Advantage podcast with your host, Tanya Dalton,
entrepreneur best-selling author, nationally recognized productivity expert, and
mom of two. This season, Tanya is continuing to open up more conscious
conversations to help you awaken to who you are and become the best version of
yourself. Welcome to Season 17: Awakening. Are you ready? Here’s your host, Tanya
Dalton.
Hello. Hello, everyone. Welcome to The Intentional Advantage podcast. I’m your host,
Tanya Dalton. This is Episode 218. This is going to be a fun show because we are
talking about something very different than anything we have talked about on the
show before. And I love it because I think it’s time for us to really bring to the
forefront some of these tactics and strategies that I’m seeing all over the place.
Things that we maybe don’t want to talk about because it seems too different or it
doesn’t play by the old rules. And I think that’s, what’s most exciting is that the old
rules of business don’t really apply anymore. We’re in a whole new paradigm. There’s
been a big shift in everything happening in the business world. And let’s be honest
in the world in general.
And with that comes all kinds of new rules, well, or not really new rules, new ideas,
we can create our own rules. And so that’s what I want to talk about today. It’s really
deciding how you want to run your business, trusting your gut instinct, or listening
to that little voice in your head. Does that really have a place in business?
It doesn’t in traditional business. I don’t think in the way that we think about
business, but it actually does, especially with the way that the world is working now,
especially with the modern woman tapping into your intuition. It doesn’t have to
look like a psychic, wearing a turban and reading from a crystal ball. It’s all about
paying attention to what’s going on in our heads.
What we know just because we know and applying that into our lives and into our
business. So today I have a guest on the show who’s going to be talking about just
that I have Laura Day on the show. She is a New York Times bestselling author, and
she has spent four decades helping individuals, organizations, and companies
harness and develop their innate intuitive abilities to create profound change.

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Now, I want you to go back here in the middle of this bio, and I want you to
recognize 40 years of working with companies and organizations. These are not tiny
little organizations and companies. These are giant companies that Laura goes into
and teaches them how to tap into their intuition and then apply it into the business
world. Her work has been demystifying intuition and bringing it into the mainstream
for the last four decades.
She has workshops and presentations and she demonstrates the very practical, very
verifiable, and sometimes astonishing uses of intuition in the fields of business
science, medicine, and personal growth. I think you’re going to love hearing from
Laura because it is a very different point of view. So let me introduce you to Laura,
Laura.
[Tanya:] I am so excited to have you on the show today. I know that you work with all
sorts of people in businesses, helping them tap into their intuition, which is a power
you say we all have. So I’d love to hear from you, for the people who are listening,
who might hear the word intuitive or intuition and feel like, is this a little woo or
maybe this doesn’t apply to me? Can you define intuition? Is it more than just
listening to your gut?
[Laura:] Oh yes. Because listening to your gut can be indigestion. Intuition is
non-local perception. So my whole career, which now spans over 40 years has been
about demystifying this very provable ability, this verifiable actionable ability, and
demystifying it so that it’s useful to us.
[Tanya:] I think that’s the key here is that we all have this ability. You don’t have to be
a Yogi master or a Zen monk. It’s a big misconception. You don’t have to wear
turbans and like flowy gowns. We all have this ability.
[Laura:] Not only do we all have this ability but we actually, a lot of our problems are
having too much of this ability. So there’s a certain merging of experience and
perception that happens all the time and learning both to direct intuition and to
filter out intuition, or become less intuitive, so to speak, is really important to not only
functioning–but to health, but to pleasure. You could be producing someone else’s
cortisol, but the idea is the more you are fully present in your boundaries, in you, the
more that you can filter data and apply it. And we don’t tend to do that adequately.
[Tanya:] Mm. I think that’s so true. It’s consciously using it because we’re actually
using it all the time, as you say; it’s just almost subconsciously we’re allowing it to
influence our thoughts and our decisions and our beliefs, but we’re actually receiving
this type of information all the time. We’re just not actively acknowledging it or
realizing it.

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[Laura:] Well, the mind’s a messy place.
[Tanya:] That’s an understatement.
[Laura:] It’s like my shoe closet, and trying to find a complete pair. The first thing with
intuition is to know what your questions are. So you get intuitive data about
questions that you may or may not be consciously asking, that gets mixed up with
your emotions, your experience, your history, your intellectual data, the supposed
data that we all agree on, which by the way, it changes every 10 seconds.
[Tanya:] It’s so true. The facts; supposed facts.
[Laura:] So it’s a mess. And what I really train people to do in workshops is know what
they need to know about, and then have a sorting system for that kind of data,
which you begin with giving it a kind of structure. Without structure, nothing
functions. You know, energy without structure won’t turn on your light; it won’t
make your car run. It won’t be metabolized by your body. Everything has a structure.
And that is also true of applying your intuition appropriately.
[Tany:] I love that idea, that idea of without structure, everything is just nothing,
right? You just have to apply a little bit of structure. Cause I know that you say the
function of intuition is to lead us to answers and that the mind and the heart is
formulating the questions. And it’s the little questions that make up the meaning of
life, right? How is it that we figure out the right questions to ask, how do we get
better questions to get clearer answers?
[Laura:] IIntuition responds to a target to a question. And the way that you train
intuition is by asking a question. So really bringing that question outside of your
messy mind, putting it down, and then noticing what comes in from left field.
And what’s really interesting is if you document, once you put that together, if you
document that information and document your conclusions based on it, what you
will have is a verifiable process. Now, suppose intuition could tell you to jump off a
bridge; the thing is, that’s not intuition, that means better psych meds. To have a
process where you take it out of the woo-woo mystical, but also out of the messy,
emotional feeling–that intuition is data. That’s all it is. It’s very dry. It has none of the
beautiful decorations that we give it.
[Tanya:] I love that. It’s really asking the question to create this target and then
paying attention and being open to receiving the patterns and the signs, the things
that are entering your life in unexpected ways, and then making the connection. So
to me, it’s almost like allowing that space to see the connections instead of rushing
through it.

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[Laura:] You simply document, that’s really important about intuition. It isn’t about
getting to an intuitive state, because there isn’t one. What’s really important is the
documentation. You get intuitive data the same way you get all data: through those
five senses, intellect, and your ability to translate those five senses into something
cohesive. But if you report it and you document it, you will see how incredibly
insightful you are.
[Tanya:] I think what’s so interesting is that we have this funny thing about us, that
we seem to believe what we can see even though seeing is our worst sense of all of
our senses. And I think that’s part of why we’ve been taught to distrust our intuition
at a young age, that it’s kind of silly. Why do you think that is that we don’t trust it,
even though we all have it, it’s innate in most animals–you can see it with how birds
know to fly together; that coral knows how to spawn at certain times of the year. We
all have this intuition within us. Why do we distrust it so much?
[Laura:] Well, I think really that’s such an incredible, complex question. First of all, we
shouldn’t trust our intuition. Part of the reason we don’t trust our intuition is that
intuition isn’t about trust, and it’s not about belief. It’s about engaging an innate
mechanism and then verifying it the minute you start believing in intuition, you kind
of cross that line between feeling what you need to do.
And this is one of my favorite quotes, Suspend disbelief and run the experiment
anyway. So try writing down a target, which will automatically make you more aware
of new things that come through that apply to that target, and then make
predictions about it and then prove or disprove them. And listen, no one’s a hundred
percent. Anyone who says they are, you should run away from in the opposite
direction; that’s a scary person. The other thing I see is people actually discounting
what’s right in front of them. How many friends do you know who are in disastrous
relationships? The facts are there and clear to everybody else. How many traders do
you know who have a position they love?
They are ignoring every bit of intuition, evidence, advice because they feel it’s right.
All the evidence is right there and yet they make the wrong move. So I think the
difficult part of intuition, and one reason why I really respect my students is that
when you allow yourself to either work with evidence-based intuitives or bring that
awareness into yourself to the degree that you can, we’re all, including myself,
limited in reading ourselves.
It presents to you a lot of facts that you chose to overlook. And that’s really hard. I
mean, we repress things for a reason. And intuition takes an enormous amount of
courage. So it’s having the courage to allow those things, to come forth and to allow
that ability to access some of those things that are a little bit harder.

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[Tanya:] It does take courage, you’re right. What are some things that we could do
though, to really increase our attention or our consciousness of our intuition?
[Laura:] The very first thing is to know your questions and write them down. And it
shouldn’t be 50 things. That’s messy. I recommend starting with one to three. Know
your questions or goals and write them down so that you know where to apply the
information that’s coming in.
Also, notice where your attention goes that doesn’t have much to do with your life.
So for example, I respond to people’s pain and need. I know when my attention goes
somewhere that usually, that person needs something. And that often interferes
with my functioning. Some people tend to find anger in situations, sometimes to
people; we’re all patterned to find it. But notice what’s taking up space in your
attention and then assume that it’s really happening.
Assume the argument you’re having in your head is happening in real-time. Assume
the sense of depression may not be yours; if it weren’t, whose would it be? So asking
those hypotheticals are interesting. And then, really repossess yourself. Because
when you don’t have a million different telepathic dialogues and a million different
people’s experiences or judgments in you, you can more effectively experience and
apply your own.
The reason to use intuition isn’t to hear what you want to hear from yourself or from
anyone else. It’s to have empowered, realistic thinking; to know what is going on,
make choices and know your goal and put one foot in front of the other until you get
there.
[Tanya:] I love that.
[Laura:] The other exercise that is really helpful for people and it’s shockingly effective
is creating a group. So, we use the circle. And the circle’s written in kind of soft
language, but it’s something that I’ve used with companies, with healing groups,
with cancer survivor groups, with the Toronto school system. You know it’s very
effective for engaging intuition without having to be so consciously aware of it. I
think one of the most powerful things in it is creating an intentional community.
So have three friends, you’re all working on different things. And without the person
understanding the question, because of course, the mind wants to reason, right? So
use your friends as intuitives. And your friends don’t need to have any intuitive
training. You’re all trained intuitives, it’s just being directed in a messy way. So here is
the process and I’m going to do kind of a quick version.

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The process is okay, the person’s question’s written down. Why written down?
Because it’s gotta be out of your messy consciousness. So, okay, I have my target.
You don’t have to know where it is or what it is. It exists. And now you say to yourself,
Okay, anything I experience in any way, including my back hurting right now, is
information about this question. And then what you do is you follow your
experiences.
So the first experience I have with this question is I go right to my solar plexus and I
want to take a deep breath. And I’m a little disappointed. I’m a little disappointed
because things aren’t going exactly the way I want them to go. And even if I move it
forward in time, it’s not going exactly the way I want it to go. But what is happening
for me? And what do I look at?
So all of a sudden, my noticing the baskets on my wall and what I’m noticing is what
you want is going to happen, but with different constellations. And so I here January,
and for those of you who are doing this, when you hear something like January,
January means a lot of things. And this is what I mean by allowing your information
to come through. Is it close and cuddly January? Or is it a far, far away January?
You’re not looking for information when you’re reading, you are simply noticing the
information that comes to your awareness.
And what do I mean awareness? I don’t mean angels and songs. What are you
smelling, tasting, seeing, feeling, hearing, remembering, noticing in the room? What
interference is coming through? And don’t be afraid to say it in weird, vague baby
language. The gift of intuition, a truly great intuitive, admits to not always being on
target, which is usually the information is right, but you miss your specific target.
Because the first step in intuition, especially in reading for someone else is finding,
what is that? What is the target? people ask, Is this business good? What does that
mean? I say, What do you want? You want to know if stock prices going to go up.
And so, what’s our timeframe?
Really delineate that target. And when you do a reading for someone, you want to
finish off with something that makes it useful to them. Because reading is
empowering. So for example, let’s pretend I’ve done this whole reading. I’ve told you
either what I’ve been remembering in myself, and I say, you know what? This is
going to be better than you think will happen,
But it will happen very differently than you think. And I think a part of what’s going in
the way is you’re clinging to a certain structure of how this is going to happen. You
will get a yes that you’re hoping for, but that yes that you’re hoping for actually then
may not come to the fruition you want it to. So I wouldn’t stop the process because

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you can get this done very quickly or this could be kind of more long and drawn out.
And I think it’s important for you to have this done quickly.
So that’s a reading. Am I right? Am I wrong? I don’t know. Guess what? If you get
yourself accustomed to having to have feedback, you can’t be intuitive because
pre-cognition won’t give you feedback until the event happens. You simply have to
report what you experienced and leave it at that.
Also the information you’re reporting is for the other person and you shouldn’t ever
repeat it. Not that you’ll remember it most of the time if you’re actually doing a
reading because it’s someone else’s private information. You know, when I do
Instagram lives, I read often, like I just read the group because it’s, for me, I don’t get
to read civilians that I’m very careful to do it in a way that if their partner is watching
and understand that,
that only there and they’ll understand, but you just report and yes, a lot of it’ll feel like
you’re making it up. It will be your memory that you have to interpret because of
course, we use the senses we have. And that’s why those dream books, you know,
that say things like the cat means sexuality [bother me]. To someone who is allergic
to cats, the cat might mean not being able to breathe.
When you allow yourself to interpret what something means to you, because
sometimes we actually experience life in metaphor–
[Tanya:] It’s true
[Laura:] –It’s a kind of kinesthesia. And that is how we experience life because really
our base is laid down before we’re verbal and before we can reason. So a lot of it is a
really kinesthetic experience. But also those of you who get readings, don’t swallow
things whole. Document.
Just like most of your anxieties are not intuitive, that most of your anxieties are
simply neurosis or anxieties related to your need of more sleep or less sugar in your
diet, it’s really important to realize because something is intuitive, it doesn’t mean it’s
right. It means that it’s giving you some data. The data may be to the wrong
question, but you don’t know til you know.
Don’t ever suspend judgment, but don’t ever give up your ability to discern, and
don’t ever give power away to someone else; whether you’re going to your doctor,
your business manager, your priest. One thing that I love about the woman who
does my investments is when I say sell, even if she thinks I’m crazy, she swallows her
opinion, and she sells.

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And so don’t give up your power because we all basically have enough regular
information to make those decisions. When we add intuition, we make them even
better, and then we give ourselves the gift of an idea.
[Tanya:] I love that. Laura, this has been amazing. And I feel like you’ve given us so
many ideas and tools for how we can use the gifts that we already have that maybe
some of my listeners didn’t even realize they have.
So, as you mentioned, the circle, I think is probably a great book for people to start
with your book. The circle, is that right?
[Laura:] The Circle is great. If you don’t want to hear your tuition, but you want to act
on it without having more stuff in your head, I’ve written six books for different
intuitive interests. And they’re all very evidence-based.
Although I do once again, use soft language or nobody would buy them; but
exercises will get the job done. And I do lots of free workshops and stuff at
lauraday.com. All the stuff I do is up there. And I love, I really love working with
communities. The nice thing for all you young people about getting older is if you’ve
worked hard, your life becomes about what it is you want to do, who it is you want to
spend time with. And I really enjoying teaching and creating communities.
[Tanya:] I love that. Well, Laura, thank you so much for coming to the show today.
[Laura:] Thank you so much!
[Tanya:] So I’m curious, did Laura open your eyes or open your mind to the
possibilities? I think the fact that she speaks about this idea and this concept that we
all have, this innate intuitive ability is fascinating, especially if this is not something
you have tapped into before. And it’s true.
I mean, she has worked with people in all different sizes of organizations and
companies and shown them how their intuition works. So I want to continue next
week to dive into all of this. I feel like Laura gave us a lot to think about, and I’m really
excited to share how we can apply what we’ve learned here. And I want to share
what I’ve learned personally as well, because I use my intuition a lot with my own
business, and most of the successful seven and eight-figure businesswomen that I
work alongside, do too.
I think it’s so important to trust yourself, to really understand the way that you’re
thinking and to allow that to guide you, especially when it comes to making
decisions and driving your business forward. And speaking of driving your business
forward, I want to make sure, you know, the doors to The Intentional CEO
Mentorship program are only open for a couple more days. This is not a program
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that I keep the doors open all year round, and I’m constantly filling. It is only open a
couple of times through the year and only for a short window of time. I’m very
intentional about curating the right type of women for this program.
The type of women who want to scale and grow their business, the type of women
who want to be serious about business, but know there’s more to life than business;
who want to be able to scale and grow so that they can unplug from their business.
That’s the type of women I love working with, who want to make an impact and who
want to make a difference. So I fill the program with women like you. So head on
over to Tanyadalton.com/ceo, I would love for you to hop on a call with one of my
coaches, see if it’s the right fit for you. As I mentioned, we’re really intentional about
filling this program with the right type of women.
So we are there to answer your questions, to help you with the decision to tell you if
it’s right, or if it’s not right for you. And we will be totally honest, there’s no obligation
for the call. It’s just a chance for you to get on the phone with one of my coaches and
see if this is the right opportunity for you.
And I can tell you right now if you feel like this is the year that you want to start
doing business differently; if you think this is the time for you to grow your business
so you can stop feeling like it’s a job, and instead, feel like it’s a business that allows
you to form you the life that you want, then head on over Tanyadalton.com/ceo.
I would love for my coaches to chat with you and let’s decide if this is the right time
for you. This truly is part of my purpose to work alongside women, to help them
understand a, to see how they can be in charge of their own destinies. And that’s
really what excites me about The Intentional CEO Mentorship program… but also
excites me about what we’ve talked about today.
The understanding that you hold the power, that you decide your future. It is
completely within you. When you begin to understand that you have the ability to
choose how you want to live your life and how you want your business to run, well,
that is when you know you’ve got the intentional advantage.