I was born into a family that highly valued knowledge, education and intellect. I do not remember a single day I saw my dad without a book in his hand. He would never ever skip the evening news, and never give up on his two daily newspapers. His friendship circle was mostly made up of writers, poets and thinkers of the times back in Istanbul. There was nothing that he did not know. He was like a walking library. My mother loved books also and every few days she would bring me a book to read on her way from work. One day she gifted me a set of world classics, such as the books of Dostoyevsky, Dickens and Steinbeck. Very nicely bound, hardcover books, which I have been keeping for almost 40 years now. My family was also a family of words. We highly valued the proper and beautiful use of language as well as the power of logical and consistent argumentation.

I grew up, went to school, went to university, did my PhD in computer science and went into the world of what we now call Artificial Intelligence. I started working and building a career in the corporate world. I accumulated more knowledge each day and sharpened my intellect as well as logical argumentation. I started making decisions that have increasingly significant consequences, such as deciding for a job, education or a place to live.

I trusted and depended on my logical decision-making as a foundation for finding the right direction. I weighed pros and cons, studied the possible outcomes as well as potential risks and then acted. All the while, a tiny voice in my belly would sometimes advise me a conflicting, hence confusing direction. “Pinar don’t do it”, “Pinar don’t go there”, “Pinar don’t accept”. It was a tiny yet very strong voice, which also caused me to feel as if I had a stone in my belly. The voice logically made no sense, I had the facts and the arguments, hence I chose to ignore it each time.

Until the day I went to one job interview. When I met the hiring manager and we were halfway through the interview, the tiny voice started screaming its loudest tone ever. “Pinar this doesn’t feel good, this is not for you, you will not like it, don’t do it”. I got the job offer and I accepted it. I had done my study, it was a reputable company, a good next step for my career, it was in the city I wanted to continue living at and it was well paid. What more?

Three years later I lost my job and I had a burn out. I needed one and a half years break from the work life to recover from that including intensive body pain. It has been by far the most difficult career experience of my life.

This is when I started to open my eyes and became more accepting of my tiny voice, my intuition. In me, I have always known. Almost ten years fast forward, I have now learned to train, listen and trust my intuition each day. Over and over I have observed that whenever I disregard my inner-knowing, I end up in wrong places, with wrong people, engaging in actions that I later regret. In me I always know what is good and what is not so good for me.

Today I can tell that by trusting my intuition I hired very smart and talented individuals for my team, who did not look like a match on their CVs. Talking to them during the interview though, I knew that they were the ones I was looking for. They keep proving me right each and every day.

We are all so conditioned by our upbringing, our society and the technology (mind you I am a computer scientist) that we always value mind over intuition, our inner-knowing, our tiny voice. Our mind often leads us to places we actually do not want to go. What the mind says is reasonable, it makes sense, yet is it always what we want, honestly? How about you also give your tiny voice a chance one day? Ignore your mind and let it lead you to places? You might surprisingly be grateful to yourself for that a few weeks, months or years later.