Intuition isn’t magic—it’s a leadership skill. Here’s how to use it

There’s a kind of silence founders know all too well. It’s not the pause before applause or the quiet after shipping a product. It’s the stillness in your gut before a decision that can’t be walked back. The moment your head says one thing, your team wants another—and something deep inside you resists both. People call that intuition.

But when you’re building under pressure, juggling investor updates, and managing a half-broken team calendar, intuition doesn’t feel wise. It feels risky. Vague. Lonely. I used to think intuition was either a gift or a gamble. Turns out, it’s neither. It’s a muscle. And like any other leadership skill, it can be trained—or misused.

The first time I trusted my gut and it worked, it didn’t feel brave. It felt lucky. We were close to signing a partnership with a logistics platform in a new market. On paper, it looked perfect—solid user base, decent ops infra, a founder I respected. Our investors were nudging us toward it. But something in me didn’t sit right. I couldn’t explain it. I asked for 48 hours.

Spent that weekend calling customers, reviewing the backend integration plan, and just… thinking. Letting the discomfort speak. By Sunday, I realized it wasn’t a product issue. It was trust. The way the other founder dodged operational detail, the gaps in SLA definitions, the way their customer support avoided giving ticket counts—it all felt too polished. We pulled out.

Two months later, the partner was exposed in a minor scandal involving customer refunds and black-box fulfillment. If we had gone in, we would’ve lost cash, reputation, and months of recovery time. People called it foresight. But what I remember most is the unease. That feeling? That’s your intuition doing its job.

I wish I could say I’ve always listened well. But I haven’t. Early in my second year, we hired a head of marketing who looked great on paper. Agency background. Confident. Articulate. Knew the metrics. The team warmed to her fast. I wanted to believe she was the solution to our branding chaos. But in the first two weeks, something felt off. The briefs were vague. Execution ran late. Feedback loops got weirdly defensive. I chalked it up to onboarding. The truth? My gut already knew. But my pride got in the way. I had championed her hire. I wanted it to work. I ignored the signs.

Three months later, we had a mini-exodus from the creative team. Work stalled. Culture cracked. And I had to do the thing I dreaded most—let go of someone I had sold to my board. That wasn’t a failure of intuition. It was a refusal to listen to it.

We throw around the word “gut feel” like it’s some mystic founder power. But real intuition isn’t impulsive. It’s not fear masked as caution. It’s not ego craving control. And it’s not emotion dressed up as conviction. Real intuition is pattern recognition at the edge of language. It’s a hunch formed by thousands of moments—some lived, some watched, some felt deeply and forgotten.

It doesn’t demand action. It invites curiosity. And the more pressure you’re under, the harder it is to hear. Because pressure shouts. Intuition whispers. The question isn’t whether you have it. You do. The question is: have you built the kind of inner stillness that lets you hear it when it matters?

The most common mistake I see founders make is mistaking urgency for clarity. They’ll say, “I just knew we had to move,” or “Something didn’t feel right,” as justification for a rushed pivot or a last-minute hire. But when you unpack it, what’s underneath isn’t instinct. It’s anxiety. Or performance pressure. Or unresolved team tension they haven’t sat with.

Other times, it’s the opposite. They freeze. Say they need more time to “feel things out.” But what’s actually happening is avoidance. A fear of making the wrong call—and being blamed for it. Both are distortions of intuition. The first is noise mistaken for signal. The second is signal drowned in fear.

Real intuitive leadership doesn’t mean being fast or slow. It means knowing when you’re being reactive—and when you’re being real.

If you’re waiting for confidence to appear before you trust your gut, you’ll wait forever. Confidence comes after you’ve seen your instincts prove right a few times. But that only happens if you’ve created a repeatable way to interrogate your feelings.

Here’s what that looks like in my world:

1. Make space for silence.
No phone. No Slack. No one asking you to “just quickly review this.” At least once a week, I carve out 30 minutes to sit with major decisions—product bets, hiring, fundraising pacing. Not to decide, but to listen.

2. Ask: What am I trying not to feel?
That question reveals more than any framework. Fear of disappointing someone? Anger I haven’t named? A need to prove I’m still in control? Most “gut” calls go sideways because they’re emotionally loaded. If you can name the emotion, you can separate it from the instinct.

3. Post-mortem your own intuition.
Look back on the last five hard calls you made. What were the signs you noticed but didn’t name? What was the quiet discomfort you ignored? Over time, you’ll start seeing patterns. Your own internal data set.

4. Let other people’s insights teach your gut.
I’ve learned to watch how ops people describe risk. How engineers flag what feels brittle. How junior team members describe confusion. These aren’t just data—they’re emotional micro-signals. Good leaders listen not just to what’s said, but how it’s said.

If you were raised to get things right, make things perfect, and overdeliver at all costs—your intuition is probably buried under layers of compliance. Many of us, especially women or minority founders, were trained to “know the answer,” not “sit in the tension.” So when our body says, “Something’s wrong,” we override it with a deck. A timeline. A new KPI. But intuition isn’t always clean. Sometimes it’s messy. Vague. Inconvenient.

You need the discipline to pause. The courage to ask what else could be true. And the humility to say, “I don’t know why yet—but I need to understand this signal better.” That’s not weakness. That’s leadership.

So, when should you bet on your gut?

Here’s my own internal test. It’s not perfect. But it’s saved me from a lot of unnecessary drama:

• If the “gut feeling” is accompanied by tension in my body but calm in my breath—I listen. That’s usually insight, not panic.
• If the feeling grows stronger the more I reflect on it—it’s likely rooted in something real.
• If the feeling disappears the moment I get external validation—it was probably fear.
• If I can’t explain it yet, but I trust the pattern—I’ll pause, not decide.

The key isn’t to be decisive. It’s to be discerning.

This is the part most founders don’t want to admit. Sometimes, you’ll trust your gut—and still get it wrong.

You’ll back a hire that felt right and miss the ego underneath. You’ll hold off on a launch because of a bad feeling, only to see a competitor seize the window. You’ll protect your team from burnout, but miss the fact that they were actually craving intensity, not rest. That’s okay. Your job as a leader isn’t to be omniscient. It’s to build directional wisdom over time.

And that comes from practicing, failing, learning—and continuing to trust that inner compass even after it falters. Because the alternative is worse: leading by noise, trend, or fear.

It’s the CTO saying, “I know we scoped this, but something in the system feels brittle.” It’s the recruiter who flags a candidate who says all the right things, but triggers subtle defensiveness in the interviewers. It’s the founder who stops the fundraising process—not because the valuation is wrong, but because the investor doesn’t feel aligned at a gut level. In all those cases, it would be easy to ignore the whisper. To push forward. To perform decisiveness.

But in every high-functioning team I’ve seen, intuition is respected—even when it can’t be justified in a slide. It doesn’t mean every hunch wins. But it means every signal gets heard.

If I could go back to my early founder years, I’d stop trying to be so correct. I’d let myself feel what I actually felt—not what I thought a “good founder” should feel. I’d build more reflection time into my week, even during peak chaos. Not as a luxury, but as a leadership tool. And I’d teach my team what intuition looks like when it’s real—not reactive. So they’d trust their own, too.

Because the truth is, the best decisions I’ve made weren’t the ones with the most data. They were the ones where my gut said yes, and my brain had the clarity to follow. Not every moment needs a hunch. But the ones that do? They’re the ones that define you.