December 31, 2016

In his insightful book “The Signal and the Noise” author Nate Silver states, “the amount of information in our world is increasing much more rapidly than our understanding of what to do with it, or our ability to differentiate the useful information from the mistruths. The instinctual shortcut that we take when we have ‘too much’ information is to engage with it selectively, picking out the parts we like and ignoring the remainder, making allies with those who have made the same choices and demonizing the rest.”

We all have biases and we use them to fast-forward through the mountains of information in our everyday lives. Unfortunately, this often paints us into a corner where false or incomplete information leads us away from productive decisions.

Consulting an intuitive can give you access to information that you have ignored or discarded and help you to reassess your position. The counselor’s job is to view the noise and detect patterns that you have missed! It is good to remember that there is always a relatively constant amount of objective truth, no matter how much “noise”!

The intuitive’s job is to recognize that even though she can “see” and has a commitment to pursue objective truth for her clients, she will always perceive it imperfectly. The reason this happens is because a reader is human and lives with delusions that even they do not realize.

So what is the best way to share information with a client? I try to read the signal and not the noise, and recognize that “opinion” (even though I am human and love to have an opinion) has no place in prediction. I will often just tell people what I see and then using that information work with them to develop appropriate responses. If asked, I am always willing to tell a story from my past to illustrate a point but I never feel that there is just one answer. What there is, is something called the curve, with the best choice lying somewhere on that curve, with the choice depending on the client.

Many Blessings,

Amy