 I was recently reflecting on a lot of the best and the worst decisions in my life, specifically when I turned 30 last year. And it was around the time when I turned 30, I was 29 or 30, when I wrote my second book, Milk the Pigeon, a field guide for anyone lost in their 20s. And one of the things that came up a lot was why a certain chunk of my life were my own lost years. And for me, that was really from 24 to 29. So the five years after I'd moved back from China and after I'd hated my life and things were going well, I had no idea what I wanted to do and I really was not enjoying the process. So it was really shit city for me. But in this video, I want to share a little bit about the few insights I've learned on when to actually follow your intuition. What's up guys? Alex Hine, author of the book, Master of the Day. Now if you're trying to follow your intuition more to reach your goals, check out the journaling course I've included in the description there below. It's a free email course. You're going to get one email per day for a little while and that's going to introduce you to some of these key principles that I use still to this day when I do a weekly journaling exercise. So that's the first link in the box there below. For me, the big thing with intuition is that it knows things that your logic can't possibly know right now. So it's this idea of you're in the alleyway. You feel something about someone. There's no logical reason. You can't point to any one thing, but you feel something is wrong. Right. And in the modern era we live, we really poo poo feelings and we champion intellect. But for me anyway, like everyone has known the experience of going on a date with someone where they meet all the criteria or they're super sexy and yet you don't feel anything. And that is the intuition loud and clear, but the mind will often overpower that. You know, and for me, this kind of the intuition knows things that your logic can't. My intuition knew when I was a kid, playing outside, playing with herbs, studying these medical books and these mystical books, that the work that I love the most was to be some kind of counselor or advisor to other people. And it also knew even what niche and domain that would be in something where medicine intersects with spirituality or mysticism, whatever you want to call it. Any medical profession that involved counseling and dealing with every level of a human being. So it's not surprising now at 31, the field that I'm in, but it took me 10 years to find that because I was ignoring really my intuition about all the very clear things that I felt the most excited about. Now another reason for intuition or another example of my own life is I was dating a girl in LA who externally was a lot of the things that most men want and even presented herself as really nice, really sweet and really up front. But my intuition the whole time was like there's something weird here. That's it. That's all it gave me. There's something weird or off here. And it took me several other months to realize what that actually was. But my intuition was picking up the red flags from the start and my mind was like, let's just see what happens. You know what I mean? Like, I don't know what, what is this something off even mean? But it was far worse than I would have thought. But my intuition spotted it from day one. The second thing about intuition is that intuition is nonlinear. So the thing is, you know, I knew what I wanted to do as a kid. And now only at, it was at 29 where I went back to do what I loved. I didn't know that moving to China when I was 23 or 22 on a one way ticket would ever serve me later in life. But I did it because it was exciting. And it was the thing that really interested me that I was passionate about. So my intuition was pushing me there. And now only now seven or 10 years later can I see why that helped. The fact that I speed, read and write Chinese. The fact that I've all this worldly experience traveling abroad and living abroad for a long time. The fact that it's helped me doing a doctorate in Chinese medicine. And the fact that the very book that I left China with that I took and started translating for fun just so happened to be the most important book in all of Chinese medicine. So when you look at it like that retrospectively, it's very obvious that these things helped me dramatically in the future. But if I thought how is this going to help me or serve me, I may never have even moved to China. But you see how it all lines up in the end. Now the last thing about knowing when to follow your intuition. First of all, the answer is obvious all the time. But also at the same time is when you begin to follow intuition, your heart and your mind are you a lot. It could be the same thing whether it's going to the gym. And it's like, I know I have to do this. This is what's going to get me fit. This is how I should eat. But you're like, I really don't want to do this. It could be dating where you're like this person's so hot. They're so whatever, they're everything you want on paper. And yet you don't feel anything. How do you reconcile that? Do you choose all this stuff you think you want or what you're feeling? It could be the same thing with careers. You're becoming the doctor instead of the artist. Because once again, the mind is overpowering your intuition which comes more like the whisper. And so the trick is that you have to understand that there's always going to be this schism between the heart and the mind. And that's where people really get in trouble. And that's definitely where I got in trouble. So when it comes to intuition, my answer is always follow it. In my opinion, blindly. But there's like a more gray area way to do it where if it's something regarding your career, don't just magically quit your job and become an artist. Take the career that allows you the stability. Feed yourself, pay your rent, be stable, remove the stress, and then in your free hours begin building out that thing that really excites you. So those are a little bit about my two cents on when to follow intuition, how it shows up, and how it'll help you in a nonlinear way. Like you can't always predict where it'll go. So along with following intuition, there has to be some aspect of surrendering and trusting. And that is very hard for a lot of people like myself. So again, don't forget, there's a journaling course to help you develop your intuition specifically for goal setting. You can check it out in the description box there below. It's a free email course. Click that link, sign up. You'll also be the first to get notified when my Master of the Day journal comes out. And again, you can check out my last two videos right here and right here.