The Evolving Leader
The Evolving Leader Podcast is a show set in the context of the world’s ‘great transition’ – technological, environmental and societal upheaval – that requires deeper, more committed leadership to confront the world’s biggest challenges. Hosts, Jean Gomes (a New York Times best selling author) and Scott Allender (an award winning leadership development specialist working in the creative industries) approach complex topics with an urgency that matches the speed of change. This show will give insights about how today’s leaders can grow their capacity for leading tomorrow’s rapidly evolving world. With accomplished guests from business, neuroscience, psychology, and more, the Evolving Leader Podcast is a call to action for deep personal reflection, and conscious evolution. The world is evolving, are you?
A little more about the hosts:
New York Times best selling author, Jean Gomes, has more than 30 years experience working with leaders and their teams to help them face their organisation’s most challenging issues. His clients span industries and include Google, BMW, Toyota, eBay, Coca-Cola, Microsoft, Warner Music, Sony Electronics, Alexander McQueen, Stella McCartney, the UK Olympic system and many others.
Award winning leadership development specialist, Scott Allender has over 20 years experience working with leaders across various businesses, including his current role heading up global leadership development at Warner Music. An expert practitioner in emotional intelligence and psychometric tools, Scott has worked to help teams around the world develop radical self-awareness and build high performing cultures.
The Evolving Leader podcast is produced by Phil Kerby at Outside © 2024
The Evolving Leader music is a Ron Robinson composition, © 2022
The Evolving Leader
‘The Power of Intuition’ with Hrund Gunnsteinsdottir
In this episode of The Evolving Leader, co-hosts Scott Allender and Emma Sinclair sit down with Icelandic author, sustainability leader and entrepreneur Hrund Gunnsteinsdottir to explore how intuition can guide leaders through times of uncertainty and noise. Drawing from her book INSÆI: Icelandic Wisdom for Turbulent Times and her acclaimed documentary InnSæi: The Power of Intuition, Hrund shares how reconnecting with our inner compass helps us balance rational analysis with intuitive insight, creativity and emotional intelligence. From her own experience of burnout to lessons on presence, journaling, and attention, she reveals how leaders can cultivate deeper self-awareness and resilience.
This conversation goes beyond abstract theory, showing how intuition plays a vital role in decision-making, relationships, and leadership culture. Hrund explains how being present allows us to listen more fully, connect with others, and sense opportunities we might otherwise miss. If you are navigating complexity, seeking clarity in uncertainty, or wanting to integrate wisdom and creativity into your leadership practice, this episode offers practical tools and profound inspiration.
Further references
“Listen to Your Intuition — It Can Help You Navigate the Future”
“How to tap into your intuition: a live meditation with Hrund Gunnsteinsdóttir”
Other reading from Jean Gomes and Scott Allender:
Leading In A Non-Linear World (J Gomes, 2023)
The Enneagram of Emotional Intelligence (S Allender, 2023)
Social:
Instagram @evolvingleader
LinkedIn The Evolving Leader Podcast
Twitter @Evolving_Leader
Bluesky @evolvingleader.bsky.social
YouTube @evolvingleader
The Evolving Leader is researched, written and presented by Jean Gomes and
That we live in interesting times is a huge understatement of the overwhelm that many of us are feeling today as leaders, we face a set of unprecedented challenges that don't just require extraordinary levels of work and innovation, but also that we should be digging deep within ourselves to gain moral clarity. How do we respond in the best ways for ourselves, those we love and those we lead? Typically, these questions of self, when pursued with resolve, open up a vast unexplored inner territory of resources and opportunities to be more fulfilled and capable as a leader, and many of us choose the path of least resistance, instead relying on intelligence to figure things out and putting in relentless hard work to justify our worth that we're living on the surface and failing to search inside ourselves to find answers, isn't new, but It takes on a new meaning for every generation across the ages. The consistent advice of philosophers to self help gurus is that we need to live a life true to ourselves, to know who you are and what you truly want, and then have the courage to act on that knowledge. Every person has to figure this out for themselves. Self knowledge cannot be imbibed or enlightenment cannot be received. It's craft work that our leaders urgently need to do if they are to assume full accountability for their privileged positions, but also to lead fulfilling and meaningful lives. In this show, we talk to run guns, teens, daughter, an Icelandic sustainability leader and thinker who brings together ideas and people across sectors and disciplines to inspire creative mindsets and constructive solutions. In her new book in Sara she explores how to harness the best in humanity by broadening our sense of intelligence, finding a balance between the intuitive, rational, creative and analytical. Tune in to an important conversation on the evolving leader.
Scott Allender:Hi folks. Welcome to the evolving leader, the show born from the belief that we need deeper, more accountable and more human leadership to confront the world's biggest challenges. I'm Scott Allender and I'm Aaron Sinclair, and today we have an incredible show. We're joined by Hurd gundader hrund is an Icelandic thought leader, author, an award winning serial entrepreneur advisor and public speaker. And she is the author of an incredible book inside e Icelandic wisdom for turbulent times, and co director and script writer of the companion film insai, the power of intuition. Rund brings a unique perspective of how we lead, live, innovate and make better choices in times of uncertainty, transition and noise and Lord knows, we have a lot of noise in the world today. Rund, welcome to the evolving leader.
Hrund Gunnsteinsdottir:Thank you so much. It's a great pleasure to be with you both.
Scott Allender:Well, it's our pleasure. We're delighted to talk to you, and if we can, I just want to dive right in and talk about intuition. Can we start with your definition of intuition?
Hrund Gunnsteinsdottir:Yes. Intuition. So when I started to dive into what intuition is, I realised that there are several ways that we define intuition and have to find intuition. So reading the literature, depending on disciplines and schools of thoughts and also cultures. So everything from Intuition being an irrational impulse that we shouldn't rely on to being something vuvu That hasn't been backed by science. And then in between all of these, I would also find, like rigorous research and, you know, practice based stories of what intuition is and how it shows up in in different lives, from sports to arts, you know, business, all these in science and all these different things. And so what I choose to do now, when we when we talk about this, is to, I want to share with you a definition by neuroscientist Joel Pearson, which recently published a book on intuition, and he's been doing some well recent research on intuition. And the way I like his definition, so it's intuition is the productive use of unconscious information to make better decisions and actions. So that, I think is a very useful definition. But after I had kind of collected all these different definitions from around the world, and just really, you know, I've been practising, researching and working aligned with intuition for over 20 years, I kind of just went back to my Icelandic root. About to visit the language around intuition from there, which is insight, which is the title of my new book. And it just like, I really, it's like seeing the word for the first time. And so, just to give a little bit of context, because this is important, and the listeners will also be familiar with other languages than maybe English, so maybe there is also some interesting stuff coming from there, but in Icelandic. So there's very few of us living in Iceland, so we're less than 400,000 let's just put that out there. And so we are very protective of our language. There is so much in our story written in our language. And every time there is a new development and we adjust our language to it, there's something new invention or whatever, we don't just take the English word and put an Icelandic accent to it, in a way. So it's Icelandic is very transparent. So we think about like, what does this thing mean? How does it function? What does it do? And then we find the Icelandic word that can describe it. So it Icelandic is relatively transparent as a language. So the man who translated intuition into Icelandic last century chose created the word in say, which literally means to see within, or the sea within. So the way that I've, I've worked with this word, and we particularly did it through the documentary film in say, was to open it up with a three fold meaning, which has throughout the years, this become this kind of lens and a framework to help us understand what intuition is, how to hone it and how to lead from within or be from within. So in say is composed of two words in and say in means inside or into. Say means the sea or to see. So the three fold definition is intuition in, say is the sea within, and that refers to our ever flowing, constantly moving, unconscious mind, which works super fast and much faster than our conscious mind. It's a world within that's ever flowing. It's a world that makes connections, surprising connecting dots. It's the world of imagination. It's a world beyond words, and it's from there that our hits come to the surface, our intuitive hits come to the surface. And then secondly, inside means to see within, and that refers to knowing yourself well enough to be able to put yourself in other people's shoes, to be able to hone and harness your intuition. Because we all have intuition, but it's up to us to hone it. And so with that comes this incredibly important part of this whole world of intuition, knowing how to discern intuition from biases, fears, wishful thinking, which also teaches us when we can rely on it and when not. And then, thirdly, insane means to see from the inside out, and that refers to our ability to navigate the ocean of life, but also uncertainty that we are leading in in the world today with a strong inner compass, and that this we can, we can go into that a little bit more later, but, but that has also to do with for the leaders listening, you know, a strong inner compass professionally has to do with accumulated experience, knowledge and expertise, which also gives us domain, strong intuition in a certain domain. Do you know now why I gave you the other definition in the beginning? Because, like, the Icelandic word is such a long narrative around it. It's very poetic. So that's why I also share Joel Pearson's definition, because it's more succinct.
Emma Sinclair:I think it's, I think it's great. And I've, I've had the pleasure of actually spending some time immersed in in your book, actually. And this, this idea of this, perhaps capturing in a slightly different way, this, this kind of world within that you can unlock when you consciously choose to unlock. It is how I kind of started to interpret that and thinking about that. How do you go about doing that and and why is that important? And I think what I loved, and I wonder if you could perhaps bring this to life for the listeners, is you know why, and when did that become important for you in your experience, and how that might enable others to recognise why that might become important for them to recognise that's something within them too.
Hrund Gunnsteinsdottir:Yeah, thank you for that question. So for me, it all started with, you know, I was, I was in a very demanding job. I was leading one of the UN agencies after the war in Kosovo. I. Um, it was very intense in the beginning of the century. I was in my late 20s, and I just came to Kosovo. I wanted to give the work all I had. I looked at the destruction around me and and, you know, the pain and sadness and people that I was working with, and I was in my in the agency that I worked for, we worked with local people all the time, so I was always immersed in that, in that context, and just wanted to give it all I had. And I was too young to know how to set my own boundaries. So I would say, because we mentioned domain specific specificity earlier, like my intuition was pretty good at work, but personally, it was horrible. So I just thought it was a machine I could work forever and I didn't have to attend to anything that had to do with sleep, food, my own health. I also went on to work for the UN in Geneva. I got a permanent position with the UN. This had been my dream job right after Kosovo, I really wanted to work for the UN for the rest of my life. I came to the palette de Nacion in Geneva, and I just felt like walking into this heavy bureaucracy hierarchy. And just I felt my agency and fuel was just being suffocated by by the system around system around system around system. And I've had felt very disconnected from people on the planet, and I became increasingly disconnected from myself. And within a period of four years, I also went through some really difficult times personally, which has to do with your emotional landscape, and I just hit a wall. I I didn't know the word burnout at the time. So this is like, 23 years ago, 22 or three years ago, and I just hit a wall, I crashed. And I like, you know, I would look in the mirror and and to think like there is no sparkling my eye anymore, like, how do I get it back? You know, the stuff like that. I was diagnosed with three slipped discs, and the doctor said to me, I don't think you have to prepare that you might not ever be able to work full time again. And I was devastated. I was heartbroken. I was I couldn't tie my own shoelaces because of my my back and just losing hope, and I had to go like through that process of healing, and my only way out of this was to turn within. So this is when I, when I start to think about intuition seriously, and it, it came to me both through kind of these whispers that we get, but also there was a person who kind of came into my life, and this was wiser and older and started to talk to me about intuition taught me how to sleep again, and being the nerd I am, I dived into Everything I could read and learn and watch and practice around intuition. And this is kind of what brought me back to me, but also in a different way, sort of shifted the centre of gravity within me, because I was a typical person who was very ambitious. I was thinking about the career ladder for a while. I was very concerned that there was a gap in my CV because of all this, like that was a major concern of mine, which really doesn't matter today. And so, but, but so finding my way back meant that the way I look at career, how I show up in the world, how I navigate is has really been informed by that. And you asked, how do you align with your intuition was, was that also part of your question? So how do you become more conscious of it? So the first thing, both for me and what I what research shows and what I always advise people, is the first step is always to become more self aware. So to just be more aware of of yourself, how you navigate, how you think, how you feel, how you sense the environment, how you interpret things to become more connected with yourself, and the way that I did that at this time. And if we can pack like maybe a couple of years into the context here, then to sum it up, what I what I did. I spent a lot of time outside. I walked a lot. I was fortunate enough to to live by the sea, at this time in Iceland, during my main process of healing, I started to write a lot. So this is when I wrote a play. I started to develop entrepreneurial projects, I wrote poems and short stories. So creative activity was, is, is very healing. And I also learned to use journaling as a technique to become more aligned with my intuition. And you know, the thing is, with the. With the world that we live in today. It's so noisy, like we mentioned earlier, it's so loud. And I know I'm not saying anything new to people, but I just want to kind of bring it into into this conversation. There's there's billion dollar businesses, very ambitious and very happy to hijack our attention as much as they can. And so attention is our key to our intuition. And so one of the things that we need to really understand with intuition is that we pay attention with our whole body, not just the the eyes or ears or the and the brain is never divorced from the rest of the body. So chills down your spine, not in your stomach, goose bumps, all these things this is these are signals, like sensory data that we are picking up. And so our attention is a hugely scarce resource. And we have known this for decades, for example, in the field of economics. And today it's it's an even more scarce resource. So what I would always want to bring up is how important it is for us to become the stewards of our own attention, to come eccentric, to become eccentric about what it is that we take in with our whole body. And I do want to say that we can never be 100% aware, because we would lose our mind. There's like millions of data coming in every half an hour. But you know that we can do better, most of us, and and I can do better, even if I do this for a living. I can always do better every day, because I get height, my attention gets high, gets hijacked all the time.
Scott Allender:I love this word in SAE, by the way, and every way that you've defined it, and I love everything that you're saying. And I have just so many questions. I guess we'll hone in on this one, because you talked about connecting to your intuition by healing. So my question is, do you think that we are naturally very intuitive and more in contact with it as younger people, and then it actually get noise, the all the noise and all the distractions and all the attention hijacking, we then lose it. And part of the journey back toward it is paying attention to what you pay attention to, but also figuring out places that you kind of need to heal. That's what I'm hearing from you.
Hrund Gunnsteinsdottir:Yeah, I think this is a, this is a really nice way of approaching it. So, yes, I think we are, you know, so when we think about intuition, so I'd like to bring in here this thing that this thing, which I found radical at some point, like intuition, is fundamental to our intelligence. It's not just one piece of it. So it's fundamental. So the same intuition that can keep us sane and aligned and in harmony, like in flow, is the is the same intuition that that our greatest minds, Nobel laureates, used to come up with the greatest discoveries, you know? So it's the it comes from the from the same source. When we shut out our intuition, that's when we we are super stressed, and we are always doing the output. We're always like, delivering, showing up there. We leave no space for the unexpected. We leave no space for being as opposed to doing, we leave no space for receiving as the boat, as opposed to planning and being deliberate. So it's that so in my book, I write about the two rhythms. So it's like honing and harnessing learning to train these two rhythms to be in balance is what brings up intuition working in all its different forms and ways that it can work, but, but we cut, it's like limping, you know, if you don't do the other rhythm, then you're just going to limp. So you can also be like somebody, if we imagine somebody who is who just doesn't plan anything, isn't deliberate about anything. So that's kind of whoo flowing around. But we want it to be in balance, right? So it's it's that. And when you mention, when we are younger and healing, this is like so closely related to to being aligned with your intuition. And when we say healing, it's like our bodies have an incredible power to heal, and so does our mind, you know, in collaboration with the body. And I think even for those of us here and those listening, you know, when we work really hard and we just need to let things sink or sit or take a pause, then it's it's great to go to meet friends and have a laugh or whatever we do just to have fun, and that's as important as it is for people in sports to rest before a game. You know, it's it needs to go together. Playfulness is super important, because there is something about lightness and ease that comes with things that we do with. Our intuition. Do you guys know that feeling? You know it's just like, it's it's ease, it's like, I, we, we, it doesn't always have to be so hard and labourers. It's some things come with ease. But then, having said this, I have to also say that there is so much that happens before the ease of knowing and doing, and that's what I want us to remember, that it's not just something intuition is not just something that comes out of nowhere. You know, it's something that we've been brewing and taking in with our sensory data and body and mind and and do we process it well or not, and stuff like that. So it's all an ecosystem of thinking and being
Emma Sinclair:you were talking there in a something that I really took away was this, this sense of enable, like, yeah, and how you enable intuition, and I think, and I can, I guess, I can only talk for myself. And I wonder if others have experienced the same is that you know when you're in a constant sense of always on like everything's happening, and it always feels like it's happening potentially to you. How? How do you help individuals who are possibly over indexing on that always on, to just and, you know, work harder just for that moment in time that enables them to create that flow state, to enable them to gain the benefit of intuition. It's a hard question, because, I guess you were saying at the that beginning point, you have to work hard to find intuition, and once you can gain it, and you can sort of build it, it starts to flow the other way for you, those two rhythms start to balance each other out. But I just wonder how you make that first starting point to recognise its benefits.
Hrund Gunnsteinsdottir:Yeah, so yes, it's a big question, but it's a very good question. And when you say work hard. I'm glad you brought that up, because I do think that let's imagine somebody who is really disconnected with their intuition, and they're listening and thinking like, how do we even start to listen? And I want to say it's not hard, it's not a lot of work, it's more give space, spaciousness in your mind and in your day to be with yourself, to start with that you know, don't be like, always, always doing and executing and like, you know, don't burn your candle from both ends. And then I like And then sometimes, when I work with people, you know, every individual is a universe in it, in their own so that's how I look at it. So it's very personalised. Then people have to find their own words about things and really own their intuition, because they we can only be the experts in our own intuition, right? But, but I I really so people can meditate, they can go for a walk, they can lie down. Some people just need to sleep for two weeks. It depends on the state of the person right, whenever they can for two weeks. Some people meditate, some people draw, some people do sports, different things. But what I always recommend people do, and the people that I work with is to start journaling. What happens when we start journaling? And there are different ways of journaling, but just to focus on the word journaling, you have a pencil or a pen in your hand that already activates your whole system differently than if you don't have a pencil or a pen in your hand, and then you write something on a piece of paper. So we have this expression in Icelandic, applying your hand to your hat. Doesn't make any sense in English, but it's almost like if you imagine you put the circulation system of your soul and mind and brain into motion, you start writing, and you start writing in a stream of consciousness, so that you can see on a piece of paper all the thoughts and things that are swirling around in your head, 1000s of thoughts per hour or, you know, or day. I can't remember exactly in this very moment, the research that I referred to in my book, 6000 something words. We can't possibly grasp all of these, but they are swirling around in our head. They're taking up a lot of space. So when we journal them and we put them on a piece of paper, and we look at the pages, we start to realise, like, Wow, do I really spend so much time thinking about this. And then you read the text, and you see a sentence, there is a judgement, there is something there. And you wonder, this isn't even my voice. Whose voice is it? And then you realise it may be something from way back that's always coming at you, stopping you in your steps, or undermining your your agency, like you want to do something. And then there's this voice in your head that says, No, probably somebody else has definitely done it, or you. You have other things to do, or you can't give yourself, you know, all these different things. And then you also notice that you have these recurring thoughts, ideas that are very constructive for you. So maybe you want to focus more on them, on them and letting other things go. What happens also is that you start to notice that you start to notice that sometimes your intuition comes through in the text. Sometimes you think something is intuition, and it's actually not so. For example, you're writing about something that basically sheds light on the fact that you were very grumpy and tired on that day, and your judgement was It was cute because of that, or you were very stressed and anxious, or you were totally falling in love, and just everything was so Roy rosy that you couldn't see clearly. And so you begin to see these rhythms that we have, and just to really understand when you can rely on your intuition and when not. And so it is this really important to know that your fears are different from other people's fears, and they show up in a in a certain context. And so slowly but surely, you start to recognise when it is that your intuition has been strong about something, you start to recognise the thoughts that are affect like thoughts that are come from fear and are stopping you and you may not even need them anymore. You know all these different things, and it's, it's, it's, it's a lot of it is a lot of self reflection. It's like a metacognition. You are observing your own thought processes. You are becoming more self aware. You during this process, a lot of people and including myself, you start to realise that actually there are certain people around me that I love very much, but I need to take a break from being around them for a while. While I clear my head about something, or there are certain circumstances that don't work well for me when I need to take a good decision,
Emma Sinclair:is it possible just to help someone who's perhaps never started journaling before? Just you know you're, you know, great pointers to start well, because it's not necessarily easy just to pick up a like pen and and begin to journal. What's the what's a good guide for a starting point for somebody?
Hrund Gunnsteinsdottir:So keep a journal at hand, if you can. So have a journal with you, which means for some people not not to buy a big one, or not to have a big one. So just keep a journal tent and scribble. You know, that's that's a nice thing to do to scribble, but the but the practice is the following. And I take this from Julia Cameron, the queen of journaling. Every morning when you wake up, if you can take a site, even if it's just two to five minutes and you start journaling in a stream of consciousness, if you don't know what to write, you just write. I don't know what to write. I don't know what to write. I have no idea why I'm doing this. Why am I doing this? Who told me to do whatever comes out? Do this for a few days. You may resist. You may not like it, but then slowly and gradually. And this happens, trust me, you will start to write thoughts. I dreamt this. I love the coffee. Yesterday, she said this to me. It doesn't have to make any sense. It's not yours to judge. Just allow it to come down on the piece of paper. The first thing that happens is that your mind gets lighter. You're just creating more space in your mind. And I think for a lot of people, that's really valuable, right? And then just trust that this is just your journal. Nobody's gonna read it, you know? It's just for you. And then I always say, if, if you can't do it in the morning, then just do it in the evening. If you can't do it in the evening, do it for five minutes at two o'clock. If you can do it whenever, like every day, if you possibly can, if you skip a day, then just continue the day after, you will reach a point where you really feel why this is good. And the reason why you will remember that it's good for you is because you're journaling about
Scott Allender:it from a leadership perspective, I'm want to stay with this idea of being able to reflect and understand when to trust intuition and maybe when not. And you even touched on at the very opening some of your opening remarks about becoming conscious of things that might be bias in us and these kinds of things. So, you know, because I've, I've met leaders that I think you could almost argue, almost rely over, rely on a sort of intuitive approach to things, and then almost look for data to validate this sort of intuition, and in fall into the. Trap of confirmation bias, right? And that's not what we're saying. And then, of course, you've got other groups of people who probably are way too rational and don't want to rely on intuition or emotion or paying attention to their physical well being or any of those kinds of things. So you've got, obviously, in a bunch of people in between. So I'd love to get your sort of thoughts, because the journaling is a super helpful strategy. But are there other things that our leaders should be thinking about in terms of honing intuition and being able to pull apart where they might be biassed or making assumptions and they need to sort of then test and validate intuition?
Hrund Gunnsteinsdottir:Yeah, this is a, this is a great question. So there is, I wrote about this recently in my newsletter about management and intuition. I think that's a that's a nice place to start this, answering this question. So it's, I think it's important that we when we look at intuition, we have the science to some extent around intuition, but we all know that it's not like a long story of science or intimate of intuition. And I want to say like, I don't think that science can explain everything. I also want us to remember that consciousness, brain and intuition, we don't really know very much about any of these things, so let's just keep that humility, but research on management and intuition. So intuition becomes super important in uncertainty. So when we have known knowns, statistics and analysis work super well when we have uncertainty, intuition based on expertise, knowledge and experience becomes super important. The more that we are aware of our intuition in that context, the stronger our intuition becomes, and we can start to talk about mastery. So if you are a leader, a manager, and you have a team, and you want to start to cultivate intuition in decisions and actions in your team and yourself. Then the the advice that researchers and practitioners would give, including me, is to train yourself with your team to pick up signals the sensing part of intuition. This is something that a lot of management trained people are very reluctant to do, you know. So like sensing, what do we mean by that? So it's like sensing what's on the horizon, you know, what's happening in the area. So this could even be like you're working in one very specific area. Deliberately look outside that area to collect data about trends and changes in the environment around us. We all work with stakeholders. We all work with certain contexts, like market or environment, you know, explore that from different angles. You know, that's one of the ways to sense what's happening. What a lot of managers are doing today is also just to give space for mindfulness meditation asking questions that are like, give permission to ask questions in a way that you haven't quite formulated your question because, like we talked about earlier, when we get these intuitive hints, They often come to the surface, and we can't quite put it into words. This is something we feel in our fingertips. You know, it's like, I always think about the antenna. We all have an antenna, and it's quite it's trying to get the signals correct, but it's not there yet. So sometimes it takes days, weeks, years, to put intuition into words. So give space for that, because very often this is like, very pragmatic. Very often in the workplace, we sit in meetings and we are, like competing to say something before the meeting is over. It's not helping us speak from a place of intuition. We need to be super trained to be able to do that. And then we also have cases in researchers from for example, you have a board taking difficult decisions, there's a senior member on the board, senior meaning having lots of experience, having having tried different things, so experience, expertise and knowledge about certain situations. And that person says there's something here that really doesn't sit right with me. I think we need to reconsider this decision. And the Chair of the Board says we don't have any time to reconsider, you know, and this dismisses it, and let's, let's go on with the show. And often this turns out to be a mistake, you know. So there is, there is real value in in how we sense context and environment. So we are going to want to cultivate that element. And then there are also advices from researchers and and lots of good studies that have shown results to the benefit of intuitive judgement, which is doing exercises. You know, some offices have set up like places, spaces to to. Draw to do something with our hands, like craft creativity, just let the mind flow and rest the logical mind. Because when we reach a state of flow, which is often called the highest form of attention that humans can offer, I love that. I think it's Johan Hari who faced it that way. When we are in a state of flow is when we are doing something that we are super curious and interested in. We are being challenged in a healthy way. It's not overwhelming, but we are doing something that challenges us a little bit. But what also happens is that the part of our thinking which is this fault finding rational, logical mind, whatever we call it, steps aside and we are in a flow. We are in our zone. We forget time and space, and we become very productive and perform in ways that we may not have thought possible before.
Emma Sinclair:Can I take that a little further as well and think about this from the you talked about? The environments we create to enable that intuition, insight to to build and I was just wondering, from your experience and maybe any of the research, how you can use this to build better relationships, or think about building better relationships. How does intuition work together in partnerships?
Hrund Gunnsteinsdottir:Yeah, that's a great question. So you mean just relationship in the big in the big convening of
Emma Sinclair:relationships, or it could be in teams, or it could, it could be in culture, yeah.
Hrund Gunnsteinsdottir:So one way to approach this is to say that when we are disconnected, we're absent in ourselves. It's very hard for us to make connections with other people in the world around us. So that's like the starting point. When people who are aligned with their intuition, they tend to be present, more present. We can't always be 100% present, but they tend to be present like they are present in front of you, speaking to you, and you feel that they are listening to you. You feel seen. That's an example when people are aligned with their intuition, because when we are present, we become more aligned with our intuition. We become better listeners. And presence gives us this, this ability to have a broader view of things. So we are not so tunnel viewed. We are not just waiting to speak as opposed to listening. So we become better listeners. We become more able to engage. We also become more able to read the whole being in front of us, you know, it's not just the word they say. It's how they say it, you know, it's not just the brilliance of something that they've just said in a sentence. It's also just like, where are they coming from? You know, you just read the signals of the whole being in front of you in a different way. And that's very much intuition. So it's both reading the physical language, the energy, you know, we co regulate as a species. So from a perspective of neuroscience, we co regulate, you know, like we are in the same room, and I can be totally absent, very stressed. You will feel it if we spent hours together. Our heart starts to our hearts can start to be to the same rhythm. Our breathing can also start to be more shallow. If our breathing becomes more shallow, then we we start to think differently, because we have less oxygen and we produce more cortisol, which is the stress hormone, and all these things. So we are co regulating in this way. So it's important that when people are aligned and they are present, then they are more able to bring out a better version of the other persons as well. So it really matters, if we are disconnected from ourselves, it's hard to build relationships, and we all know this from so in my coaching, I just Just this week, I've had a few sessions where people are explaining they are at work. And this is going to be very common, also for the listeners and the and the leaders, people are sharing stories of they are trying to they want to be seen at work. Their boss isn't listening. They are standing there but but they can tell that their eyes are moving. They're looking at something else. They're just always waiting to go somewhere else. That's an example of someone who is not aligned with their intuition and and is becomes a worse listener in the process. And also, you know, because you say relationships. So this also comes up a lot parents, they will say, I have a I have a very good intuition about my my children, but I don't know if I have good intuition about anything else. So domain specific intuition at work, you can build that up. And sometimes it's about turning on the switch and. Really seeing how you're navigating with intuition. But the reason why we have good intuition about our children is because we observe them. So observe you're speaking to people. You're observing a context and environment. This also enables you to build up a stronger intuition about something. You start to notice when something's off. You start to notice when things could be done better. You start to ask really, like, good questions, like, and that's another thing about intuition and relationships. You know, building a culture around intuition and more intuitive sensing is also about asking good questions. We don't always have to have the answers, right?
Sara Deschamps:Welcome back to the evolving leader podcast. As always, if you enjoy what you hear, then please share the podcast across your network and also leave us a rating and a review. Now let's get back to the conversation.
Emma Sinclair:I took a took a sentence, if you don't mind your book, and it led to a question, because you have a wonderful phrase in here that says, our brains wire to the world around us, and it matters if we experience it remotely, and whether it's abstract and disconnected ways, or if we immerse ourselves in the world and live within it. And it just got me questioning on the back of what you've just said there, like, how do we how do we experience really great intuition, or build that really great intuition with the world that is getting slowly, fast, very quickly, more and more digital, the AI and the and the changes that are happening there too. How? How can we? How can we become that sort of, that human anchor in a world that's becoming so, so technical,
Hrund Gunnsteinsdottir:yeah, yeah. No, that's, that's a really great question. So there's something about being connected with the real world, with a living world. That's one thing, you know, the the anxious generation, Jonathan Haidt in the States, and then smartphone free childhood in the UK. I think it's called, you know, all the conversation around that is about, you know, we are being overprotective over our kids when it comes to the real world, you know, the fresh air and the natural world and the pavement and the neighbourhood, but we are too little protective over them in the virtual world. So it's that distinction so being mindful of just being part of the living world and the information that we take in and consume. If we think about if we go back to the attention, and we pay attention with our whole body, when we consume information like virtual, digital information all the time, and they are fragmented, we start to experience things as being we forget the context of things. And I think that the biggest mentor always is nature. And it's not just because I'm from Iceland, you know, we have because it's a very like rich natural land, you know. But, but it's also research shows just how nature opens up our energies and and and can reduce anxiety and stress. Can fuel our ability to connect with others and have conversations and like walking, taking a meeting, walking and talking with somebody. It's, it's great, like people are doing it more and more, I hear that around me. So there's, there's this thing about being connected with the world. And can I take, take a story of some of a leader, just to give this more kind of a professional context, holistic professional context. So in my book, I interview many, a few great people. One of them is Andrei Sallah. He is an ocean explorer with the National Geographic and David Attenborough, just pre premiered their documentary ocean, which is very much about enrik Salas work in the world. So Enric Sala grew up in Spain. He was very passionate about the ocean. He was very inspired by ocean explorers like Jacques Cousteau, and he wanted this to dedicate his life and work to the ocean. So he goes on to study, and then he goes to university, and then he becomes a university professor in marine biology. He's a university professor in Spain for seven years, until he wakes up one day thinking, listen, I'm just writing the obituary of the ocean. I'm so disconnected from it, and the ocean is withering away, and it feels like I'm doing nothing about it. So he decides to leave his position as a professor at the University, and he decides that he wants to spend most of his time immersed in the ocean. And. Deepen his intuition about what's wrong with it and how to bring it back. So that is literally what enrik Sara has been doing. So he in the last years, he's been sailing and around the world's oceans, diving in the oceans with scientists, filmmakers and analysts to document the state of the ocean to share footage from it, and they have created these, I think, 27 protective areas in the ocean that equal the size that is twice of twice the size of India, in order to bring the ocean back. And what Enric says when he's explaining this, he's like, I'm a scientist, but I need to immerse myself in the ocean with this whole body and being in order to build this intuition about what's wrong with it. And so what that implies is, are so many things, so picking up information, really sensing, but also rationally understanding what's happening, and being like a living part of the context that you are dealing with. The more that we are locked away from the real world around us, the less I think we are able to really understand how everything is interconnected. So my background is largely in sustainability and and peace building and stuff like that. And it's, it's like, it is very scary to think about that we need to really do a lot of research and spend a lot of money to prove that if we, as we have today, crossed six out of nine planetary boundaries, which means the earth is losing its ability to renew its energy. If we need to have like 1000s of conferences and write lots of research to say why that's serious, I think it's an indication that we have lost this innate ability to understand that. That the natural world is an interconnected web of ecosystem, and so are we as humans, because we co regulate as a species. We can die from loneliness. You know, I can also co regulate anxiety.
Scott Allender:Do you think sometimes it's more than an inability to understand but an unwillingness to see because perhaps even, I think most, most of us, least I hope, would intuitively understand what's happening to the planet. But some choose to say that's too hard to look at, because that would be I'd have to confront a lot of things I wouldn't want to confront in myself and my own behaviour, and maybe my lack of action. And are, do you find it, even in other areas, perhaps, that there's a willful, like, distant dissonance between intuition and understanding meaning that, that I want to see the world a certain way I have, like, this ideological frame that I want to hold to, and so I almost actively put away access to my intuition. Would that be fair to say, have you seen that?
Hrund Gunnsteinsdottir:Yes, I think that's, that's very spot on. And I think that's the reality. And I think it's, I think it's both clear and unclear, you know, so I think it's something that so, so if you just look at the knowledge that we have, so we have the scientific knowledge, we have the expertise and we have the resources, but we're still not exactly going in the right direction, right so that tells us a lot about how you know, and many of our leading scientists, and people like David Attenborough, like, I'm such a fan of his, like, they would say, like, I thought that when we would publish the scientific Studies and Results and people would know, then everything would change. But that is not what happens. So it's so true what you're saying, and I think also just to so for my work, what I find like so incredibly important is to emphasise that we're talking about well honed and harnessed intuition, because we easily confuse intuition with biases or or just an opinion that we want to have because it's more comfortable for us. It's so important that we unlock what this means, because we and in the light of AI and and and everything that's changing so much in our our in the world that we live in, and how we accumulate knowledge, how we learn and how we how we work, I think it's just super important that we start to think about, how can we actually I think that we are biassed against our own intelligence sometimes. So how can we build confidence again, or build confidence in our own intelligence and judgement, and for me, a big key to that would be to really understand what we mean by being aligned with a well honed intuition. Because, you know, when I started to speak openly about intuition like it. Is only in the In very recent years where we're, you know, a scientist said this a while ago. She said there has been an ice age in the world of science when it comes to spiritualism and intuition, but now that ice is throwing and I love that expression. So it's it's a culture of ice. It's not like scientists don't follow their intuition or or are spiritual. In this case, as he was coming from. It's more that the the permission to talk about things, is changing a little bit. So for me, intuition is the way I approach it. And this is not what everybody would say, but the way I approach it is to say, like people, can we think about intuition and how we can align with it and hone it intellectually, emotionally and spiritually? Because I don't think that. Think that we are just scientific. I don't think that we are just, do you know what I mean? So I'm also just kind of taking it a step further, that just to bring that into the picture. I think we've been very afraid to talk along these lines for for too long, and I think it's just to the detriment of our ability to thrive as humans and and in thriving ecosystems,
Scott Allender:what's perhaps a final call to action or challenge you would leave our listeners with today?
Hrund Gunnsteinsdottir:Oh, that's great. So maybe, maybe just for those who are not used to trying to trying to hone their intuition, I would leave people with two questions. And if you feel like it's buy a journal or take out your old journal that you have, I won't give up on that point. Write down the following two questions and answer them, maybe just once, maybe once a week, depending on how you feel. When was the last time you didn't listen to your intuition? Where did you feel it and what happened as a result? I'm quite sure everybody has their own story of that, and that will already expose lots of things. The second question is, when was the last time you did listen to your intuition? Where did you feel it? How did you feel it, and what happened as a result?
Scott Allender:That's great. I'm going to be answering those questions. Good. Good. Arjun, thank you so much for sharing some of your wisdom with us. I feel inspired by this conversation, and I've got a lot of takeaways, and so I it's the conversation I needed to have today. So thank you for joining us.
Hrund Gunnsteinsdottir:Thank you for having me. I'm honoured. It's been great speaking with both of you,
Scott Allender:alright, folks, until next time, remember the world is evolving. Are you? You?
