Hypnosis for developing your Intuition
You come out of a meeting and something is off. You could not say what. You tell yourself it is silly, you have no argument, and you sign. Three months later, the problem was exactly where you had felt it.
Or the opposite. You had an idea, a real one, the kind that arrives in the shower. By the time you got home you had taken it apart point by point, and nothing was left.
Or you have been in front of a blank page for three weeks, knowing perfectly well that it is not jamming for want of ideas but from an excess of control.
What these three situations have in common is not a lack of intuition. It is the volume of the noise on top of it.
What is Intuition?
Let us start with what it is not, because the word is cluttered.
Intuition is not a sixth sense, nor a message sent by some outside agency, nor a form of prediction. It is not clairvoyance either, and this page has nothing to do with divinatory practices.
The soundest definition is also the simplest. The Nobel laureate in economics Herbert Simon summed it up this way: intuition is nothing more, and nothing less, than recognition. Your brain has met thousands of situations. It has extracted regularities from them that you could not put into words. When a new situation reactivates one of them, you feel an impression before you have reasoned.
That is why an experienced nurse knows a patient is about to deteriorate before the numbers move. Why the firefighter walks out of a building without knowing why. Why the musician feels that a chord is wrong. None of them has any special power. They have a library, and it answers quickly.
Your Intuition is not reliable everywhere
In 2009 two researchers who had been at odds on this subject for decades, Daniel Kahneman and Gary Klein, published a joint paper to settle the question. Their conclusion is clear and useful. An intuition deserves your confidence when two conditions are met:
1. The domain is regular enough for reliable cues to exist. 2. You have practised in it for a long time, with rapid and unambiguous feedback on your decisions.
In chess, both conditions are met. In emergency response, usually too. For picking stocks or predicting politics five years out, neither is: intuition there is confident and wrong.
And the most uncomfortable finding in their paper: the feeling of certainty says nothing about accuracy. A sound intuition and a biased one feel exactly the same from the inside.
Two reservations worth keeping in mind, and we prefer to put them in writing. Prejudice disguises itself as intuition. An immediate distrust of someone you have never met may reflect a fine reading of non-verbal signals. It may just as well reflect a learned stereotype, about an accent, an origin, a look. From the inside, the two are indistinguishable. On judgements about people, intuition deserves to be questioned, not followed. Intuition replaces no professional advice. Nothing presented here should be used to steer a medical, legal or financial decision, or a major life choice, in place of a doctor, a lawyer, a notary or a qualified adviser. Our practitioners engage in no form of divination, clairvoyance or spiritual guidance, and claim access to no information outside you.
What it costs to stop hearing yourself
In creative work. The block rarely comes from a lack of ideas. It comes from the filter that eliminates them before they exist, so fast that you never even see them go by. Many artists describe a precise moment when they stopped producing anything that looked like them, generally soon after they began anticipating judgement. What is missing, then, is not talent but permission to make something imperfect — the ground covered by our page on stage fright and artistic performance.
In decisions. You gather information indefinitely, you build comparison tables, and you stay stuck. It is not a problem of missing information: it is that no quantity of data will settle a choice that involves values.
In professional expertise. This is perhaps the most frequent waste. People with twenty years in the trade and an exceptional library of situations say nothing in meetings because they cannot justify what they perceive. Their intuition meets both conditions for reliability. They do not allow themselves to use it, which often has more to do with self-confidence than with intuition itself.
In your relationship with yourself. By dint of not listening to yourself, you end up not knowing what you want, and that is often what brings people in.
What exists outside Hypnosis
- Deliberate practice in your field. If intuition is recognition, it is built through experience and feedback. There is no shortcut, and a session will never replace ten years in the trade.
- A decision journal. Note the decision, the impression at the time, the reasoning, then reread it a year later. It is the most effective way to calibrate your intuition: you discover which subjects it gets right and which it gets wrong.
- Mindfulness, which trains you to notice an impression without clinging to it.
- Timed creative practices, fast writing, timed sketching, improvisation, which short-circuit the inner editor.
- Sleep, whose role in consolidating and reorganising learning is well established. Sleeping on a decision is not just a saying.
- Movement and walking, where many people find what they were looking for while sitting down.
Hypnosis adds itself to that list.
Hypnosis for Intuition: aims and benefits
Let us be clear about the mechanism, without mystifying it. Hypnosis connects you to nothing. It does not make information appear that you did not have. What it changes is the balance of power between the part of you that perceives and the part that censors. The principle is set out on the page what is therapeutic hypnosis.
It does not put you to sleep, does not make you lose control, and you stay conscious from start to finish. It guarantees no result, and it will never tell you what to do.
What an accompaniment aims at
- Turning down the volume of the commentary. The hypnotic state reduces the constant activity of control and self-evaluation. What was present but covered becomes audible.
- Putting back into words what you perceive. Many sessions consist of turning a shapeless "something feels wrong" into identifiable elements. That is what then lets you defend it in a meeting, or see that it does not hold up.
- Exploring options without committing. You can live a decision in imagination before taking it, and observe what it does to you. That is not an answer, it is one more piece of information.
- Unblocking creative work, by getting round the inner editor for the length of a session.
- Regaining faster access to that state, through self-hypnosis, without depending on an appointment.
- Allowing yourself to take account of what you perceive, which is often the real issue with very analytical people. When the obstacle is rather a sensitivity that overflows, managing emotions applies, and attention and focus when concentration is what is missing.
On the two-paths exercise
It is the most requested technique, and the one that calls for the most care.
The principle: in a relaxed state, you picture two options as two paths, and you observe what each one produces in you. What the exercise reveals is real and useful: it makes visible an attachment, an apprehension or a relief that analysis was flattening.
What this exercise is not: an answer. It does not designate the right choice, it does not indicate a true direction, and it must never serve as a decision test. An impression felt in session is a piece of data to examine afterwards, coolly, alongside the rest. On important decisions, and particularly on medical, legal or financial ones, it comes in addition to qualified advice, never in its place.
A practitioner who presented this exercise to you as a compass pointing to the right direction would be stepping outside their role.
An example of accompaniment
*An illustrative example, built from situations frequently encountered. It is not the testimony of a real person.*
Vincent, 52, has run a workshop for twenty years. In meetings he saw problems coming weeks before anyone else, and said nothing almost every time, unable to justify what he perceived. He spoke of it as a flaw: "I go on feeling, it is not serious." Around the table, nobody knew he had seen anything at all, and the decisions were taken without him. When the problem arrived a few weeks later, he did not even have the consolation of having warned anyone.
The work was not about strengthening his intuition, which was already excellent and rested on twenty years of immediate feedback on his decisions. It was about making it expressible: in session, going back over a specific situation and letting what he had actually perceived come up, a detail in a quote, a hesitation in a supplier. What he called a feeling turned out to be compressed reasoning, which he was able to unfold once his attention was placed on it.
This example describes one possible accompaniment. It predicts nobody's. Pace and results vary from one person to another, and no accompaniment can guarantee a result.
How a Hypnosis session on this subject unfolds
The conversation. What exactly you are looking for, because the word "intuition" covers very different requests: unblocking a creative work, settling a decision, daring to rely on your professional experience, or knowing yourself better. The practitioner will also check that you are not expecting an answer they cannot give.
A concrete aim is set. Not "develop my intuition", but: pick the manuscript back up, manage to say in a meeting what I perceive, get out of three months of hesitating over a choice.
The induction, then the work itself: lowering control, exploring in imagination, putting into words what comes up, anchoring a state that lends itself to it. The general shape of a session is described on the page what to expect in a hypnosis session.
The debrief, and this step counts here more than elsewhere. What emerged in session is reread coolly. A strong impression is not an instruction, and the practitioner's role is to help you examine it, not to validate it.
Carrying it home. A self-hypnosis exercise, and often the decision journal, which is the most useful tool over time. If your request is mainly professional, hypno-coaching is sometimes the better frame.
How many sessions? That is discussed at the first conversation. Nobody can know in advance.
Book an appointment
Wherever you are in the world, video consultation suits this subject particularly well. Almost all our practitioners trained in creative work offer it, and it asks for nothing more than a quiet room and a connection: we see people this way from Europe, North America, Africa and well beyond. Nothing is lost by video on work that is first of all a conversation, and many people even find it easier to let control drop at home, in a room they know. Here is how it works.
In person, the practitioners who cover creative work and artistic performance in English see clients in Quebec, in Montreal, Laval, Gatineau, Beloeil and Sherbrooke, and in France in Paris.
Tell us what you are looking for. Ask us your question: if your request has more to do with professional coaching, with support for writing, or with specialist advice, we will say so.
Where would you like to consult?
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Annie Mayrand
Gatineau - Cumberland (ON)
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La Prairie
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Frequently asked questions about Hypnosis for developing your Intuition
No. It makes more accessible what you already perceive and what mental noise covers over. No information comes from outside, and a practitioner who told you otherwise would be stepping outside their role.
No. Our practitioners engage in no form of divination or guidance, and claim access to no information about you that you do not have yourself.
As one piece of information, yes. As an answer, no. On medical, legal or financial questions, the opinion of a qualified professional cannot be replaced by anything.
What develops above all is access to what you have already built, and the confidence to use it. The raw material comes from your experience in a given field: it is built through practice and feedback, not in a session.
Yes, and this profile is common in practice. The hypnotic state requires no belief, and nothing on this page asks you to adopt one.
The great majority of people can, to varying degrees. The question that matters more is what you are coming for.
That depends on what you are asking for and is discussed at the first conversation.
No. You stay conscious throughout, you hear what is said, and you decide what you share.
Sources and references
On the nature of Intuition
- Kahneman, D., & Klein, G. (2009). Conditions for Intuitive Expertise: A Failure to Disagree. American Psychologist, 64(6), 515-526. pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19739881
- Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, Fast and Slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
- Klein, G. (1998). Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions. MIT Press. The field studies on firefighters, nurses and the military behind the recognition-primed decision model.
The study cited on Hypnosis
- Valentine, K. E., Milling, L. S., Clark, L. J., & Moriarty, C. L. (2019). The Efficacy of Hypnosis as a Treatment for Anxiety: A Meta-Analysis. International Journal of Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis, 67(3), 336-363. doi.org/10.1080/00207144.2019.1613863 — it covers anxiety, cited here for the effect of hypnosis on mental noise.
Hypnosis as practised by the members of Solutions Hypnose is a complementary support approach. It is neither a medical act, nor a diagnosis, nor psychotherapy in the regulatory sense, and it in no way replaces a consultation, follow-up or treatment prescribed by a health professional.
Our practitioners do not assess and do not treat mental disorders or illnesses. They never ask for an ongoing treatment to be stopped or changed: that decision rests exclusively with your doctor.
No result can be guaranteed. The testimonials and examples presented on this page describe individual experiences and do not predict what you will experience.
In case of significant distress, unexplained physical symptoms or suicidal thoughts, contact a doctor, emergency services or a helpline without delay.
Page written by Sandra Djina Ravalia
hypnotherapist and art therapist
partner at Solutions Hypnose.
English version reviewed by David Veilleux