Suppose you were to take an ordinary piece of copy paper and fold it in half, then fold it in half again, and so forth fifty (50) times. How thick would the folded paper be when you were done (pretending for the moment that you actually could fold it that many times)?  Take your wildest guess and write it down, because if you are like most people, your sense of "intuition" is about to take a major drubbing!

Now chances are you guessed somewhere between 1/4 inch and several inches. The most audacious guessers might have said several feet high. Well, I hope you are sitting down for this because the correct answer (within the nearest 100,000 miles) is in excess of 71,000,000 (yes, that's million) miles! I know, I know, you are thinking "that's impossible!". For those who are more mathematically inclined, CLICK HERE to see the proof of this claim (and a more accurate answer down to the nearest 1/1000th of an inch).

What is interesting about this exercise is that the range of answers was the same no matter whom I asked or their professional background. This includes housewives, loan officers, a senior financial executive at a Fortune 100 firm, blue-collar workers, children, and several Stanford students. When Malcolm Gladwell pointed this phenomenon out in his national bestseller The Tipping Point - How Little Things Can Make A Big Difference, he said the correct answer was "non-intuitive" as an attempt to explain why most people can't even come close to getting it right. I contend however, that if people really listened to their intuition, many more of them would estimate correctly, no matter how absurd it seemed to their common sense.

Perhaps a more accurate depiction of why most people have trouble with the paper-folding puzzle is to say it is "non-commonsensical" (i.e. appearing not to follow common experience or logic), rather than non-intuitive. In fact, the term "non-intuitive" is very likely a contradiction in terms, a possibility I personally discovered just a few short weeks ago.

True intuition provides information, insight, ideas, and wisdom from sources we often cannot pinpoint or logically justify. For those of us who are both analytical and intuitive, we frequently find these two aspects of ourselves at war with each other. Western society tends to revere the former, and dismiss the latter, when perhaps the priority should be the other way around. The great intuitive (and analytical) thinker Albert Einstein said it best:

"The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift."

True intuition rarely has the cold, hard, steely edge of certainty that we can often feel with using our logical, problem solving mind. That doesn't make it is any less valuable, however. It just means we as human beings are less comfortable with the squishy feeling of uncertainty that typically accompanies an intuitive thought, especially if it flies in the face of "logic".

"Okay, so what does this all have to do with me?" you might ask. Well, possibly everything. As you are about to see, there are real-world business applications to using a finely-honed sense of intuition. And, there exist very practical ways for every person to achieve high levels of intuition (intuition is trainable, where I have my doubts about common sense). But first, let's start with a couple of examples of how real estate professionals have used their intuitive ability to greatly enhance their business.

Linda Almaraz is a long time successful sales associate in Oklahoma City who used her trained intuition to boost her business in several ways. First, she "programmed" it to attract substantially more business in a down market, (and this is the important part) without having a clue on how she was about to get it. Also, she learned to listen to it in situations that fairly screamed she was going in the "wrong" direction with a particular client (from a logical, rational perspective), she was able to guide her client in a way that would otherwise simply not happen. CLICK HERE to read in her own words the dramatic story of how intuition helped her achieve everything she set out to do and quite a bit more!

Mike Cassidy is another successful Realtor and co-owner of Coldwell Banker Advantage, also in Oklahoma City, OK. For years Mike has used a process called "intuitive programming" to match up his buyers with just the right property. Mike was honored as the top unit producer for the entire Coldwell Banker organization nationwide in 1997 and continues to close about 220 transaction sides each year. He specifically attributes his finely tuned sense of intuition as the primary reason for this success. To outsiders, he seems to have an uncanny sense of how do to this consistently. Yet to those who have gone through the same training as Linda, Mike, and myself, it is just a natural, yet powerful extension of our abilities as connected human beings.

The training I'm referring to is called the Silva Method, pioneered and developed by Jose Silva during the 1960s. Jose Silva (who passed away several years ago), without the benefit of any formal education, researched and developed extremely powerful, yet practical methods to develop the intuitive side of anyone who sincerely wanted to do so. This is the course I took a few weeks ago that frankly, "blew me away" in terms of what I was able to consistently accomplish within the intuitive realm.

There is not enough room here to do this incredible resource justice. CLICK HERE to read more about it from the two of the few Silva instructors that still teach the original full 32-hour course (most others now teach a truncated 2 day course which I wouldn't recommend). If you are looking for a proven, practical way to reap the benefits of boosting your "Intuition IQ", I know of no other more powerful and consistent method to do so. (And as always, neither I nor my company receive any compensation whatsoever for this recommendation.)

Unlike intellectual IQ which stays somewhat fixed throughout most of our lives (age-based neuronal loss notwithstanding), intuitive abilities can be strengthened considerably with regular practice. And with continual use, you are able to tap into resources that far exceed the boundaries and capabilities of our relatively meager rational mind. So much so that perhaps the next time someone asks you a question akin to the paper-folding problem, your answer won't be millions of miles off the mark!