Business success requires flexibility and the ability to pivot when necessary, often at breakneck speed.

Also true: Business ownership requires tenacity, the ability to keep on trucking and push through the hard bits.

Success lies in an unmappable mix of the two. Making the right call at the right time, flipping the coin of apparently total opposites, and hoping it lands right side up today.

There’s no formula available to always make the right decision when it comes to this stuff. If you use one, it’s going to be wrong 50% of the time. Those times you dug in, but should have been nimble and pivoted. Those times you changed track right before success was about to strike.

Are you “putting all your eggs in one basket”, or are you “going all in”?

Are you being flexible and responsive to data and market trends, or are you getting out just as it’s about to get good?

These days my business benefits from my well-honed mix of flexibility and tenacity, but in my earlier days as a business owner I changed course far too often. An analogy that really helped me grasp this was James Wedmore’s talk about “are you building too many bridges?” – meaning are you starting too many different projects/strategies but never completing any of them, thus never reaching the destination (success island)?

I reheard the same advice elsewhere as digging multiple holes in the ground but never going deep enough with any single one to strike water. You’re just left with a mess and you’re exhausted.

Here’s my own analogy that works best for me (seeing as I’m not in construction):

When you’re on a long-haul flight, there’s a long period of time where you’ve departed the airport you left, and you know where you’re heading, but there’s this stretch of time between the two points where you can not see where you are, you don’t even know if you’re heading in the right direction really, you just have to relax and trust the coordinates and the pilot. If you’re not looking at the in-flight map or checking the time, you probably have no idea how long it will be until you land.

What if, a few hours after we’d pierced the clouds of our departure, we realized we couldn’t see shit from the window, had no idea where we were, freaked out, and ordered the pilot to turn that plane around and start the journey again from another runway, or another airport, or you decided “Planes don’t work, I’m going by boat!”

So, when I’m in the ‘messy’ (or sometimes just boring) middle of a project or a process, I try to remind myself that, as long as I set my coordinates correctly, I will reach where I’m going. I just have to trust the pilot.

How to know if the coordinates are correct, or if you can trust the pilot?

This is where something comes in that only YOU have the power to tap into: your intuition.

Get still, sit with yourself, focus on your decision, close your eyes, and wait. Listen. Observe your internal feedback. It’s different for everyone, but a ‘yes’ for me often comes through as a slight leaning forward, and a ‘no’ as a slight lean back. Another option that’s good if you are honing in on more than a yes/no decision (for example, pricing or marketing approaches) is to write all your options on small pieces of paper, fold them up, line them up on the floor or a table, and ask the pendulum. If you don’t have one, you can improvise (Google is your friend). This, in my experience, is just another way to access your inner guidance system. Whether that’s from Source, your subconscious, or your guardian angels, I don’t know and it really doesn’t matter. This shit works if you just quiet that monkey mind long enough and trust that the information you receive will come.

I swear, this has never failed me. The few times I’ve ignored the answer, overridden the advice of my intuition and sided with my “logical” brain instead, it’s not worked out. You don’t make that mistake more than a few times before you start paying attention and trusting your internal GPS. And once you do, you’ve cracked the code to making any decision the right one.

All the information you need is already within you (or it’s available to you if you ask and listen). So, get out of your own way, set your coordinates, and trust the pilot.

If you want to learn more about tapping into your intuition in business, I’m holding a free workshop tomorrow (Wed March 22nd) that will help.