Free I Shouldn't Be Telling You This: Success Secrets Every Gutsy Girl Should Know by Kate White Page A

turned out to be right on. One day as my managing editor and I were strategizing, she narrowed her eyes and asked, “How do you know all this stuff?”
    At that moment I realized that for the past few weeks I’d been paying heed to my intuition on an almost primal level. And it was helping save my ass, big-time. It was as if I were in a survival-training camp and I had no choice but to use my instincts. Later, after I was ensconced at my new job and had caught my breath, I analyzed what I’d been doing so I could always have those skills to fall back on. Since then I’ve relied on them through thick and thin.
    It’s never too soon to begin developing your gut. Here are the tricks that have served me best.
    Know how your gut likes to talk to you. Vowing to trust your gut won’t do you any good if you can’t tell when it’s sending you a message. You have to learn to tune in. For many people, me included, a gut reaction is just that—a rumbling feeling in my stomach. A gut reaction, however, may not actually occur in your gut. I’ve heard some people say that they’ve learned to pay attention when their pulse pounds or they feel a tingle all over. (A Vanity Fair writer once remarked that when Tina Brown was the editor, she knew an article was right if her nipples got hard when she read it!) You might not even have a physical reaction: perhaps you just have a niggling sense in your mind that something’s really good or really off. Doesn’t matter how it occurs. What’s key is to begin to note when you feel different in some way and ask yourself why.
    If you’re not sure if certain sensations really mean anything, keep track of them and see if you can validate them later. Let’s say that when you leave dinner with a friend one night, you end up with a nervous feeling in your stomach on the drive home. When you arrive at your place, write down your impressions. What could have happened during the night that made you feel that way? Was there something subtle about your friend’s behavior that suggested she was troubled though not admitting to it? Did she arrive seeming that way, or did her behavior shift during the meal? Later, if she confesses to a personal problem or admits that you pulled a move that upset her, you’ll have an idea that your tummy was definitely talking to you that night.
    Just shut up. Even when you learn to trust your gut, you may sometimes not hear when it’s signaling you. The secret is to listen. One of the smartest, most intuitive women I’ve come to know from writing mysteries (and I love the fact that she is now a great friend) is Barbara Butcher, the chief of staff and director of Forensic Sciences Training Program at the New York City Office of Chief Medical Examiner. Barbara spent years working crime scenes as a medical death investigator, investigating 5,500 death scenes and 680 homicides. It was at those death scenes, she says, that she learned to develop a golden gut.
    “Everything we need to know is around us for the taking as long as we are truly taking it in,” she says. “As a death investigator I learned to open my senses to what was around me and abandon preconceived notions of what I was going to find. I learned early on that if I was told that I was going to investigate a homicide, then that is what I would find, but if I reminded myself that I was going to investigate the cause of death, then I would find the truth.”
    Her advice for honing your gut instincts? “Take your hands off your ears and put them over your mouth,” Butcher says. “Learn to listen, see, smell, and absorb everything around you without speaking your thoughts first. If you practice these skills, you will get all the signals you need to be able to trust your instincts.”
    Trust your gut but teach it first. Your gut is directing you based on what it knows, so be sure it’s well informed about what matters. Experts who swear they make gut decisions often have years of training, and their