Deciding with mind or body

I am picking up my son from kinder. He is playing with four different wooden trucks. I walk up to him and lay down beside him.

He asks me of the four trucks, 'Which one is your favourite, Dad?'

I look at each of the trucks in turn. When I look at one of them it seems to leave me with a nicer feeling than the others. I struggle to understand why this is the case. There is nothing too different about it. I grasp for reasons. But all I am left with is an intuition that for whatever reason, this one is my favourite.

I have coffee with a friend I used to work with at a big 4 consulting firm. I am sounding him out about work opportunities. He starts describing the areas he is now working in, and most of it is around decision making and how to provide the right data for managers to make decisions, and how to understand how customers are making decisions. So much of what he talked about was about making decisions using rationality: sifting through data, weighing up pros and cons, looking at numbers.

As he talks I remember the four trucks, and  wonder if it could ever be taught in corporate circles to listen to your body when making decision.

It seems that over the past 18 months one of the big changes for me is in understanding the different ways I can make decisions. How my whole body seems to be some kind of brain, able to interpret and process information, and provide me with an answer that I don't often have words to justify.

There are times when it is best to use our rational minds for making decisions, and times when it is best to use our whole bodies, our feelings or our intuition. Trusting my body, having faith in what it is telling me even when it doesn't seem to make rational sense, is leading me in an exciting direction.