[MUSIC] You're now better at listening and observing, and can trust your senses to give you useful information when you interact with someone. With this module, you're going to experience the value of quality relationships. Pushing even further your capacity to trust your sensations. This is yet another definition of the word sense. The first one we explored was sense as sensibility. The second was the five primary senses and now we're going to better understand the role of sensations that drive your intuition which is so important in making decisions. Let me tell you a true story. One that I lived awhile ago, precisely in 2001. I went on this key expedition in the French Alps with a senior guide who was born and raised in the region and whose father and grandfather were mountain guides. The weather predictions of snow were good, with a solid six feet from previous weeks of snowfall. It was favory at the heart of the ski season. The wind was blowing at about 40 miles an hour, which is common for the area. And although the temperatures were slightly higher than usual, it was nothing significant. As we were making our way up the mountain with our climbing skins attached to our skis, moving slowly across heavy snow, I was thinking ahead at the moment that I would enjoy the downhill. My motivation for this expedition. After three hours of climbing, Reggie suddenly stopped us and urged us to move sideways to a place where rocks had formed a natural shelter. We immediately did as we were told. The order was clear and we trusted our guide's decision. A few seconds later, an avalanche took off way above our position and headed in our direction at incredible speed. The guide's sensible, subjective experience of the situation saved us. He had heard the growling sound early enough and felt the vibrations under his skis. His body had told him that the avalanche was coming even though nothing in the weather forecast, the snow conditions, or the topology of the area could have enabled him to predict it on a purely rational basis. Like an animal that senses the storm coming and starts shaking way before human ears can hear it, the guide's vigilance and his extensive experience of the mountains accumulated over many years was the source of the instant decision to move everyone sideways and away from the avalanche before it even started and in time to save us all. Many of you, I'm sure, have encountered similar moments when a primary sense drives your decision both in life and in business. The primary sense that my guide experience is often called intuition. I believe it is too often cast aside. Why do we fear or discount what our senses tell us when they can save our lives? It is part because sensibility and sensitivity are somehow confused with sentimentalism. Which is used disparagingly to refer to people who are victims of their feelings. When hard facts, data, and rationalization rule in business, no one wants to be perceived as soft, weak, or sentimental. Subjectivity is also feared, because it is confused with being partial, or biased, being emotional is often confused with being emotive. But what if we were to reexamine these assumptions? What if we were to consider sensory input as data? Let's pause for a minute here. Next, you're going to reflect and share your experience on the forum. Tell us a story that you have lived where your intuition drove your decision or your action. Tell us what happened and how it happened. Be precise and give details about the moment, the place, the people involved, as if you were reliving the scene. You can write that story in one paragraph. This will help you reflect on your own experience. Of course you can keep the story in your SR Journal. And try to be more attentive on such experiences that you will live in the future. So sense relates to sensation, which is closely related to intuition. As with the sense of smell and the ability to smell a rat, as the expression goes, intuition is a key relational skill that is often misused or misinterpreted. Let's now see how intuition can facilitate learning and adaptation and what it takes to grow intuition as a leadership skill. Here is another of my skiing stories, after enjoying many years of downhill sky racing in my youth, my life and career had kept me away from the slopes. And encouraged by my children to compete again, I decided at the age of 41 that I would try to win a national level ski championship. I had stopped racing at the age of 20 and the technique had changed radically in the meantime. In the 80s, slalom poles were made of stiff wood and the goal was to tries the fastest possible route between the poles without hitting any of them. Today, slalom is made of poles that are made of flexible carbon which means that they bounce when the skier hits them with the fists or legs. The skier's feets may be wide apart and move in parallel. I had a lot to learn if I was going to be competitive again. Learning for me required agility and again adaptation. I had to get rid of automatic behaviors that were inscribed in my subconscious and my muscles and consciously learn new sensations to develop new reactions that fitted with a new situation. Letting go of old habits and starting over is a way to rediscover yourself and research this who inside of you that is constantly moving and changing. As we will continue to see, self-reflection and introspection are instrumental in relationship leadership and developing savoir-relier. Relearning to ski challenged my capacity to respond with agility by listening to the signals my body were sending me. Paying conscious attention to those signals enabled me to develop new skills, adapt to a new context, and perform in a new environment. This kind of work on your inner self is a great opportunity to build sense by reaching a balance between the subjective sensible self and the objective rational world. This is what you started doing with your self-portrait, and we're now progressing toward the use of introspection to engage interpersonal relationships moving toward the second pillar of our savoir-relier protocol, the conversation. But before we move from this individual perspectives on sense, let's stop a minute to take a quiz and see if you have understood this notion of intuition. According to what you have learnt so far, which of the following sentences are correct? Intuition is an inner-quality and can not be learnt. The more experience you have the more you can rely on intuition. The more experience you have the less you can use your intuition. Intuition is linked to sense and sensations. Intuition is the product of common sense. You are right. Propositions two and four were right. While others were wrong. So, you see the value of intuition as a resourceful tool to make decisions because it relies on your experience built over time with conscience and rational use of sensory data. Sensations and vigilance over the signals that your primary senses send you about the world around you.
