Sunil Godse helps businesses build a trusted brand by implementing a process he developed called Intuitive Branding, which allows them to use intuition to make decisions that earn the trust of their employees and customers in under 14 seconds. When that happens, highly talented employees only want to work for them, and devoted customers only want to buy from them, ultimately eliminating the competition. Sunil has used this system to generate more than $20 million in revenue as an entrepreneur before he decided to move on to help a significant number of businesses collectively earn millions in revenue, including major brands such as Citibank, SAP, Rogers Wireless, and Western Digital.
Sunil has written two books, “Gut – What it is. How to Trust It. How to use it.” and “Fail Fast, Succeed Faster.”, and he’s the host of “The Intuitionology Podcast Series”.
The Four Types of Intuition
Sunil felt that intuition was real, but he needed proof because of his engineering and computer science background. When asking for advice from a neurologist friend of his, he discovered over 65,000 articles about intuition in the academic database, including scientific studies with MRI scans. That was the beginning of the path that led him to create his process, Intuitive Branding, which leverages the power of intuition to develop trusting relationships within the workplace.
Throughout his experience, Sunil Godse has identified four types of Intuition. To learn how to truly leverage your intuition, you must master each of the four types:
- Experiential Intuition
Every single experience you go through, every single decision you make, is a data point that goes into the subconscious area of your brain. Experiential Intuition access this “database” to help you make a better decision. - Relational Intuition
It filters the people through to only allow those who really care about your success and makes you cautious about those that don’t care about it. - Situational Intuition
This part of your intuition scans the environment around you to ensure that it is safe. If it finds clues that seem out of place, you’ll get several warning signals. - Creative Intuition
It’s the risk that you can tolerate, which will help you and your business move forward.
If you’re curious to discover how strong your Business Intuition is, you can take the Business Intuitive Strength Quiz on Sunil’s website.
And now here’s Sunil Godse.
Full transcript below
Video on Why Your Intuition is Never Wrong
TEDx Brampton Speech on Intuition
Visit SunilGodse.com to Learn More About Intuitive Branding
Get Sunil Godse’s Books, “FAIL FAST. SUCCEED FASTER” and “GUT!”
Listen to The Intuitionology Podcast
Connect with Sunil Godse on LinkedIn
Follow Sunil Godse on Instagram
Get Motivation, Inspiration, and Ideas to Level Up Your Life.
Subscribe to the How’d It Happen Podcast
Want to be the first to know when new episodes are released? Click here to subscribe
Thank you for being a How’d it Happen listener. Please enter your email address below to subscribe, or subscribe on Apple Podcast, Stitcher, or wherever you like to listen.
Subscribe to My Newsletter
Write a Podcast Review
Also, podcast reviews are important to iTunes, and the more reviews we receive, the more likely we’ll be able to get this podcast and message in front of more people (something about iTunes algorithms?). I’d be extremely grateful if you took less than 30 seconds and 5 clicks to rate the podcast and leave a quick review. Here’s how to do it in less than 30 seconds:
Click on This Link – https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/howd-it-happen-podcast/id1441722417
Click on the “Listen on Apple Podcast” Box
Click on “Open iTunes” – You will go directly to the iTunes page for the Podcast
Click on “Ratings and Reviews”
Click on the 5thStar (or whatever one makes the most sense to you 🙂
Podcast with Sunil Godse. Why Your Intuition is Never Wrong.
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
intuition, people, signals, sunil, decision, bernie madoff, happiness, started, called, snails, intuitive, trust, book, talk, data, dad, money, podcast, business, story
SPEAKERS
Sunil Godse, Mike Malatesta
Mike Malatesta 00:04
Hey, everybody, welcome back to the How’d it Happen Podcast. So happy to have you here today. I’ve got an amazing success story for you. But before I get to that, I just want to encourage you, ask you, I invite you to, if you haven’t already, subscribe to the podcast or follow it wherever you listen to podcasts. And if you like this, if you like what you’re hearing, leave a review. The podcast gets noticed when reviews are posted. So whether it’s on — I mean, most people post on Apple — but wherever, if you feel like you’re getting some value out of this podcast, please consider leaving a review and rating the podcast so that (1) I can thank you and (2) you can help me grow the impact of the show. So now that that’s out of the way, let’s talk about the success story I have to share with you today. I’ve got Sunil Godsey on the show. Sunil, thank you so much for joining me today.
Sunil Godse 01:09
Thank you very much. I’m looking forward to sharing my opinions and helping people really tap into this subconscious phenomenon that they have called intuition that helps you make the right decision every single time,
Mike Malatesta 01:22
every time. Okay, I’m a student here. So this is going to be fun. Let me tell you a little bit about Sunil first. So Sunil Godse, he helps businesses eliminate their competition by unleashing the power of intuition to earn the trust of those responsible for their success in under 14 seconds through a process he developed called intuitive branding. As an entrepreneur, he’s used his system to generate more than $20 million in revenues. Before he decided to move on to help a significant number of businesses collectively earn millions in revenue, including major brands such as Citibank, SAP, Rogers Wireless and Western Digital. His advice simply works. Sunil has written two books. The first is “Gut – What it is. How to Trust It. How to use it.” I love the subtitle, what it is, how to trust it, how to use it. And the second is “Fail Fast, Succeed Faster.” I love that title, too. He hosts the Intuitive Branding Podcast. And you can connect with Sunil at his website, http://www.sunilgodse.com. You can also find him on LinkedIn easily and his email is sunil@sunilgodse.com. And before we end today, you will want to make sure that you give him a call before your competition does. So happy to have you here. I start every show with the same question for the guests. And that is, how did it happen for you?
Sunil Godse 03:05
The pinnacle moment that got me to take a real deep dive into understanding what intuition is, was reflecting on the times when I trusted my intuition and ignored my intuition. And the one event that really got me to take a deep dive into the science of intuition was when I had a good friend of mine reach out to me who needed some help. And she was being stalked at the time. And I was doing some personal coaching. While I was doing some schooling and engineering. And there was something that was urging me to tell her to take her on to meet with her that afternoon. I didn’t have anything planned. Yet, when I was approached by a couple of my friends to go for beers that afternoon. I said yes. And even though something stronger was urging me to say no, you need to go talk to her. And I said, Well, I ignored my tuition. And I said, Well, do you mind if we meet a couple of days later? And she said yes, like a good friend. And the very next day, the stalker walked up to her at a bus shelter and put a bullet through her forehead. And that got me to take a deep dive into really understanding intuition. And it really piqued my interest. A few moments before that, because when I wrote my first book, fail fast, succeed faster. The premise of that book was that if you read the stories of failure from others, then conceptually at least or theoretically, you should be able to succeed you succeed faster because somebody else has already failed for me. And when I used to go on stages after my book launch, the one question I used to get from entrepreneurs was Sunil, give me the one formula that’s going to make me successful, and you know entrepreneur. Now no, like, come on, like, I didn’t come here with a PDF sheet or, you know, a JPEG file. This is a 400-page book. But when I went back to the audio podcast, so the audio recordings of my interviewees. What I failed to understand what I didn’t pick up on terms of a pattern is that those that failed, had said that they ignored something like they ignored their intuition. They ignored their gut; they knew what the right decision was. But they failed to take that decision. And those that went on to succeed or overcome that hurdle, were the ones that finally took a step back and said, I need to earn the trust of others. So they had other brought on better team members, they started to think about the people that they that they managed. And when they changed how they did that. That’s when they succeeded. And so when I put all that together, and started to think about when I trusted my intuition, and particularly when I ignored my intuition, it was thinking about my friend dying, that got me to say, Whoa, I really need to investigate this, because this should never happen to anybody else again.
Mike Malatesta 06:13
Okay, wow. So I want to make sure I’ve got that straight. So this friend of yours, when you were still in college, right? Yep. She had been having this stalker, someone that she knew. Alright, that was, but was he in a relationship with the person or not in relationship with
Sunil Godse 06:34
no. So what had happened with her is that she ended up so her and I were friends. And she ended up in, she had some problems, she ended up in a psychiatric work, and I remember going to visit her. And I distinctly remember after signing in, that, as she’s talking to me, I got these vibes from this guy that this guy is, and he was a male nurse at the time, so he was hanging around, and he, he was really infatuated with my friend, and I got these vibes and I just pulled her I said, Something wrong with that guy, like, you got to really gotta stay away from this guy. Because he kept looking at our place. And I just, you know, you just get that now I know it’s intuition. And so she was getting out. And when she got out, and this guy kept bugging her. And so she needed a way. Like, she went to the police, and they didn’t do anything. And, you know, what I found out later on, is he ended up getting a hold of a gun illegally. And, you know, she reached out to me because she’s okay, how do I keep safe? How do we do this? And I said, okay, yeah, let’s, that’s when I said, let’s meet a couple of days later. I didn’t realize how severe it was because I didn’t know the backstory until the news reports came out. And I got a call the very next day from one of my friends and he said, he, you know, his brother was working at a Chinese restaurant. And he said, Did you hear the news? And I didn’t, because I hadn’t picked up the paper until the very next day, and he said, Oh, yeah, somebody got shot outside the restaurant that he was waiting tables on. And I go, Oh, my God, that’s so unfortunate. And is he okay, so I had no clue who this person was. And because yeah, I think he’s okay. It was just outside. And then, you know, next thing, you know, I was actually waiting for her. So she like she’s never missed, you know, a time when we want to go for coffee or what have you. And I just didn’t realize until you know, I got a call and heard, did you hear the news? That’s what she was, yeah. She was killed. And it was just, I froze, and shut the phone. And just huge amount of regret, huge amount of regret. And I didn’t understand at the time, what these things called signals were; I just knew the urgency just now that reflect back. And when you use hindsight, as Steve Jobs says, with intuition, you connect the dots looking backwards. And that’s what I was doing after realizing that when it comes to entrepreneurs, and the reason for my success was trusting this thing called intuition. And when I ignored it, you know, I had things like I got into, engineering when I wanted to be an entrepreneur, and it’s because I’m a South Asian male. So what do South Asian males have as career doors, four doors, doctor, lawyer, engineer or failure. And according to my South Asian roots, I wanted to be the failure because I want to talk to ownership. And my dad was hammering me saying, engineer, engineer, doctor, lawyer engineer, and my dad was an engineer. So I took door number three and hated it, you know, and it was just really and so when I when I looked at that and the signals that we’re getting like me, you shouldn’t have done that. Yet, when I trusted my intuition after being an engineering, I remember I was a, an investor, part time investor in a Mexican restaurant chain that came up to Canada. And I loved it, you know, back in the limelight of being that entrepreneur, even while doing engineering on full time. And pretty soon, I was making five times more in dividends as an investor than I was an engineering and quit engineering. Never spoke to my dad for a number of years after that. But that started my entrepreneurial career. And then that’s when I got into retail clothing, I got into wholesale clothing, I got into pop up events, an entertainment company, and, you know, $20 million later, you know, doing a lot of these things and attracting the right people around me, you know, more businesses started coming to me to say, Hey, listen, can you help us? And that’s when I started the consulting career. And then that led me to kind of what I’m doing now. But it’s really taking stock of those times when I, you know, trusted my intuition. And really, you know, what did that feel like? And then ignoring my intuition, like I did with my friend, you know, there were signs, there were signals, and why did I ignore them? So I had these burning questions that I needed to answer for myself. And it just happened to be that wow, you know, that’s really funny. Because my whole success, my professional career, and my personal career, my personal life was in trusting my intuition. And when I didn’t, boy, boy, things went south.
Mike Malatesta 11:42
So when, if you don’t mind me asking, after this happened to her? How did you deal with it? How? How did you get over it? I suppose. Because you mentioned regret. And I feel like there may have been more going on than just regret it, you know, when it’s like, oh, I chose to go have some beers with my buddies instead of meeting with you. And then
Sunil Godse 12:15
yeah, I mean, it was, it was a huge amount of guilt. And I just ended up really sweeping that under the rug for a number of years. And I got so busy. And, you know, while I was doing engineering, and then running a couple of businesses while in engineering, and I just kept super busy doing things and student politics, and that seems to be a bit of my nature. But the can of worms really didn’t come out until I had a really good talk with one of my clients, who when we went through the intuitive branding process, we tripled her sales. And we got into deep philosophical discussion, and I didn’t have much about my story out. And she says, you’re helping everybody else. But you know, she kind of asked, like, why are you doing this? Like, what’s your backstory, and at that time, I had a simple website, and, and I hadn’t really told my story. And then, you know, I started telling, we got into this two-and-a-half-hour discussion and start telling her these things and goes, Oh, my God, you know, like, you kind of talk about this. Because, you know, people are really going to get attached to the purpose of what you’re doing. And, you know, obviously, when it comes down to branding, from my perspective, it’s all about that purpose, your story, what you stand for your values, why you’re doing it. And when people engage with that in a believable way, and you’re being genuine, then from my perspective, that’s really kind of what branding is. Now, of course, you don’t want to, you’re not going to coach it in sort of business terms. But for me, sharing that story and why I wanted to do it was so critical in other people saying, Oh, my God, you know, and then them just getting deep into the story and understanding, you know, why I’m doing what I’m doing. And it wasn’t until I started talking more about this on podcasts, such as lists, and finally putting it on my website. It was a quite cathartic moment. And if you look at some of the earlier very early discussions I had, I was on a radio show in Toronto Caribbean radio show and it was kind of one of the first times I talked about it, and the emotion started coming out. And, and I was, I think over the last, it’s been a number of years, but that then the emotion starts coming out and I was able to deal with it in my way and then more importantly, use it as a tool for others to learn from because I don’t want people to go through something that egregious and and what’s really interesting is you and I were talking about before about the preamble is the type of people I start to talk to now are those who just released you know, stuff plus Josias but guess where she was kidnapped for over a week and Ashley Michelle, who has walked into an apartment where boyfriend was just about to murder her as victim number two, and people have been homeless and people gotten, you know, lost everything and turned it around. And that, for some reason, I love those kind of stories, because perhaps this is a mimic of sort of what I’ve gone through in terms of realizing what intuition really is. And then turning that into, okay. Let me figure this thing out, so that other people can really enhance or enrich their lives based on what I’m going to tell them?
Mike Malatesta 15:38
Well, it’s a horrible story that, you know, resulted in a pivotal, it sounds like, change in you, and your trajectory in your direction and your humanity. That, you know, so many of us have, not the same story as yours with Terilyn. But something similar, right, and it just like rocks you so much that you’re thinking, do I really want to give into what my dad wants for me, for example, and your case? Or do? Or is this? Is this, you know, the sign that I should go a different direction? Yeah,
Sunil Godse 16:27
you know, and it’s those deep conversations that are so important. So pivotable. And, you know, we’ll talk about this pandemic, and the Great Recession, or the transition or the opportunity, or however you want to couch it, but you’re so many more people and businesses are having that conversation about what do I really want in life, you know, what truly makes me happy. And we’ve been so mired in extrinsic rewards, and our lattes. And where the intention is, is not necessarily inside or intrinsic, the intention is extrinsic. And it all comes down to everybody knowing why they do things, which is where intuition kind of sits. And so, you know, there’s been a big shift in me helping other people because the pandemic has gotten businesses and people to have those conversations, and to have some deep and meaningful conversations, because they really want to figure out what life means for them, or what’s their purpose in a business. And it comes down to trusting your intuition, because your intuition as complex as it is, and we could dive into, you know, the how complex it is later on. But it is never wrong. Every single time ever wrong, never wrong every single time I pressed it. And the close to 1500 people that I’ve interviewed, including yourself for my podcast, every single time they press their intuition, they’ve moved their life ahead in some way, shape, or form. And every single time they’ve ignored it, they regretted it. And so I’m trying to shift that balance to give you people a template to say, this is how you will never ignore it again. And I can give you the tool, it’s now up to you to take the tool to put into action.
Mike Malatesta 18:18
When you’re talking through that I the you know, the great resignation, you know, this whole thing that we’re sort of going through and people are leaving the workforce and stuff it reminded me of in the in the US Declaration of Independence. It says the pursuit of happiness, right. That’s what the US is promising people that pursuit of happiness. And I think that especially having gone through the pandemic, what so many people are saying is, and this is just me, I want to get your sense on this. That, you know, it’s this whole Pursuit of Happiness thing, that’s a loser’s game. Because if you’re pursuing happiness, you’re always comparing your happiness to someone else’s. And I think they’re ditching the this notion of pursuing happiness, and they’re just saying, happiness. It’s like, I’m not pursuing happiness anymore. Because that’s the track that everyone’s on, I’m just deciding, or choosing happiness for me. And that’s what I’m going with sort of like you with your intuition thing to do. Does that resonate with you at all?
Sunil Godse 19:30
Yeah, and I think if we, cuz I often use happiness, as, you know, something I talked about, like when you trust your intuition, you know, you start to end you start living a life fulfilled with, you know, it’s truly fulfilling and happy. But there’s, I think, an important part of that, especially when it comes to intuition. And first of all, first of all, Happiness has to be intrinsic, it has to be inward. You cannot compare yourself looking to others and say, that’s happy, that’s happy, that’s happy or they’re happy. I’m going to try and be like that. That’s when you get into the extrinsic reward of motivation. And if you don’t own that, that’s rented land by somebody else. And so when you’re renting somebody else’s emotions or renting somebody else’s values, they’re not yours, you’re living through their values, you’re living through their happiness, and it hasn’t absolutely nothing to do with you. So the first thing is your intention should be internal, internal happiness. And the other thing that I would actually, this is probably the, this is the only first this is the first time I’m actually diving a little bit deeper into it. One of the common things that I specifically tell others is, when you take care of the inputs, the outputs take care of themselves. And if we deliver happiness, on top of that, the output is happiness. The input is you taking the steps to get to happiness and taking the steps, it from my perspective, is you trusting your intuition, which looks at your past behavior, but part of it is looking at your past look at patterns, looking at the situation in hand, looking at the people in your in that around you, and then helping you make the decision that is right for you. In that situation, given all that information, then you take the step to make a decision. And it’s one step at a time in the direction you want to go. It’s great to have goals. Nothing wrong with having goals. But what sometimes often happens is, again, we look to the goals a bit too much, where we should be looking at the steps to getting to those goals. And it’s really getting into the present moment. And when you do that one step at a time, then you continue to reach happiness. And when I reflected back on my high school picture, which I recently took out in about three weeks ago, one of the things I said in there in my high school photo of Success is a journey, not a destination, and you can easily put happiness on top of that, because I believe it’s a journey, you know, and it’s a continuing effort. And when you’re continually getting to a state of happiness in your personal life or your professional life. I have no clue how else to live your life.
Mike Malatesta 22:08
But it’s a personal journey, rather than a comparison journey, which is I would just want to make that distinction, right? Because,
Sunil Godse 22:14
yeah, absolutely. I mean, you can use comparisons in some ways, you know, obviously, if you’re looking at from a business perspective, where you can get some clues as to what happiness is for others. But these are clues. And in the end, what is right for you is where your intuition really helps, you know, because when it’s right for you and your life and your outdoors of opportunity, it’s going to put you in the spotlight, even though you’re comparing yourself with others, and your intuition is going to do that as well. And it’s going to take a look at okay, are you comparing yourself with others, because you look up to them in a very authentic way you like their values, because they resonate with yours. So there’s a whole bunch of complex components and mechanisms that go into what your intuition takes a look at. But the way that I characterize intuition is it’s like driving a car, you know, you need to just start the engine, as long as the engine where the noise is, is, is you know, his sounds okay, which are what I call intuitive signals, then you drive you don’t need to know, you know, you don’t need to open up the hood to be the mechanic to figure out what are the complex components of intuition. You know, that’s where I come in, where I’m, you know, I put on my mechanics, mechanics, clothing, and I look under the hood of intuition. And I tried to figure out what, how it actually operates. So that it gives you those signals, but you don’t need them. Like, you just need to listen to those signals. And then if you know what the inventory of signals are that you take the time to do that. And this is one of the questions we had in my podcast interview is what are your positive signals and negative signals? When you and I were hopped on a podcast interview mice podcast series, but when you can recognize those now you have the guideposts to make every single decision, the right one for you, no matter if other people balk at them. They go against other people’s opinions, it doesn’t look good. It doesn’t really matter. Because when you start again, getting to that comparison game, and you hesitate, even though your intuition saying this is for you, this is decisions for you, then you’re delaying, you know, the happiness that you could have, by taking that step
Mike Malatesta 24:23
when you when you chose to go away from the engineering path and toward the entrepreneur path. And you said that you your dad, and you didn’t speak for a long time after that. Sunil was that your decision, his decision, mutual decision? That was
Sunil Godse 24:42
his decision? Yeah. And as a South Asian male, you know, I I can kind of understand what that culture is all about, you know, the East Indian culture. And again, I’m going to generalize you know, not everybody’s like this, but it’s about it. You know, the talking points like my son’s a doctor, and there’s a sense of security. And, and when you talk about things like entrepreneurship, where there’s, you know, high risk, you know, even though my dad was running his own company at the time, he’s an engineer, he’s not a businessperson. And you know, and I’ll give you a very good example of the difference. You know, my dad’s very good at what he does. And I remember at the time, this a software that called AutoCAD that came out, and it was doing well and was taking over designs, and I said, Well, Dad, you’re charging, you know, $250 an hour, and you spending two hours doing this design. And it’s the same sort of column structure that you’re looking at, or, you know, rebar, rebar structure, you can do that in AutoCAD, and simply change some of the dimensions and really kind of in 10 minutes, if you’re satisfied with the thickness, he does all the engineering calculations, in about 10 minutes, you can output the same thing that you’re putting in the $250 an hour, and still charge the same, and you can do more. And then guess what you can also outsource some of the drawing, because there’s some people cheaper than you to do that. And so the basics of business is what I was trying to implant on my dad, and he didn’t want to do that. And so, you know, when it coming back to the original question, when he saw me straying away from what he thought was best for me, he never bothered to ask, son, what do you want to do? And it was what was interesting in high school as I was actually doing some coding at the time, with logo lists, Fortran COBOL. And I was actually separated from the class. It I had a computer 30 class where most people were learning how to turn on the computer and learn about bits and bytes. And I was separated from that class, in a totally separate, I was actually on the computers, you know, programming and you know, programming a car, there was I just remember, you know, a car game. And if the car crashed, I would have it spin and have the walls and I’d have to go back. And, and so, so the basics of engine, I love coding. So there was that was that opportunity, you know, and then when I asked to my dad, I said, you know, I love coding that I’d love. Maybe computer science is where I want to go, as well, once you get into medicine, you can maybe go into robotics later on. But the focus was always on medicine, let me tell the people that my son is a doctor. Yeah. Okay. And, and when he didn’t understand, and that was a, that was it for a number of years, until he actually came to a conference of mine, after my first book, and there was a pinnacle moment at that conference. And if you’re keen me sharing that story, yeah, I’d love to hear it. So when I launched my first book, I kind of did marketing backwards where I had well backwards according to whatever norms are, where when you launch a book, you have a big sort of Soiree and a book launch. And what I did is I launched a major conference on failure, here in London, Ontario, Canada. And tickets were pretty expensive. They were 125 bucks a ticket. And, and he was all about overcoming failure. And it was a chance to bring my book and the thoughts around that book, too, the local marketplace, and it’s sold out very quickly. And a number of sponsors we actually made money on, on the conference where most conferences don’t without heavy, heavy sponsors, and invited my dad, he begrudgingly came and we’re just in the process of patching up our, our, our relationship. And he couldn’t when he came, you know, picked him up from the airport, he came, and he couldn’t read. He didn’t realize, you know, oh, you know, snails at this conference. And he, my dad sponsor was a sponsor. And you’ll see, that’s good snails. He saw me practicing, you know, my lines. And so it comes to the conference. And he doesn’t notice, but my branding for Mike was everywhere. And he didn’t notice that. And then he kept thinking internally, he was thinking, you know, I’m at the head table. And so Neil’s introducing everybody. So, Neil’s speaking everywhere, and he’s introducing the guests. And it just didn’t hit him. He thought I was just a speaker. And it was after I think one of the afternoon sessions was one of the breaks. And he was speaking to a good friend of mine, who was talking to my dad and saying, oh, yeah, you know, snails, this boat, blah, blah, whatever the case was, and it was my dad just stopped in his tracks. And he just looked around. And he said, Oh, my God. This is my son’s conference. Oh my god. This is my son’s book. This is his event. Oh my god, and then he just breaks free. And he goes to all these mini groups, and he starts shaking their hands. I’m Neil’s father, I’m still his father. And it just struck him at that moment about why I was doing things and all these people coming to hear me talk about failure. And I think he just got it, that that was what I wanted to do. And he just needs to see the output from the inputs, if we’re talking about my earlier thing, and that really dramatically improved our relationship. And since then, we become so close. So close. In fact, he listens to my podcast, and he starts talking about oh, Sunil, you know, when you’re, when you’re on LinkedIn, you know, you better change your lighting. Because you know, the side your face is not working and stuff like that. So he’s taking an active, he’s now an active participant in my content. And, you know, he’s one of the first ones to text me when it goes, you know, I put out a piece of content that was really good sale. I liked your voice and stuff like that. But what a change. Yeah, what a change.
Mike Malatesta 30:57
Yeah, it was almost like he was presented with with indisputable evidence that the path you’ve chosen is a path you’d be proud of, but didn’t realize. Yeah, absolutely.
Sunil Godse 31:10
And then he came to the book launch, which was a year later. And had one of my really good friends is a big, big time. Canadian CEO, Bruce Croxon. And I had a marketing guy come in, and my marketing guy was thinking that this could be like, you know, maybe 100 250 People coming. And he came in to sit down, there’s like, over, I can probably guess what, 800 people streaming through here. I’ve never seen a book launch event this big. I’ve never seen event this big. And so I had no clue cuz I was inside. And again, my dad was there. And he was able to see the fruits of my labor, just from putting my mind to write a book. I’ve never written a book before. But this is just, this was spoke to me intuitively that this book needed to come out. Because my whole career was helping other people through their failures. Why shouldn’t I share that with others? And that just really kind of took off between first book second book and what I’m doing now.
Mike Malatesta 32:11
And I want to thank you for that. That was, I’m glad we got into that. I appreciate you going down that road with me, that intuition is never wrong. I guess I want to get into sort of intuition, one on one if you don’t mind, because I feel like everybody listening has some awareness of intuition. They can even describe a little bit their own intuition. But like you had said before, the mechanics of Intuit intuition I don’t think many people have have an understanding of and I guess more than that, even, like, I don’t know that I would have agreed with your intuition is never wrong, because people. Yeah, maybe, maybe, maybe this is it. Maybe you don’t think your intuition is ever wrong. But you sure do you think other people’s intuition is wrong? So let’s get into it. Yeah, absolutely.
Sunil Godse 33:13
And so one of the things is, we have to really understand what intuition is and what intuition isn’t. And so what happens, I think, is that there’s this broad brushstroke, that a decision that’s made, they somehow think that it was intuitively LED. But intuition is really about a balance between your emotions and your logic and reality. In this is a 30,000-foot view. And so when some people make a very emotional decision, and they go down the rabbit hole, then they look back, somehow, we’re talking about intuition in the media, or they see intuition. This Oh, yeah, intuition led me down the wrong path. And a really good story about this. I remember having a podcast interview with Mark MeTree (sic.). And this guy was in high school and kept lying in high school so much that he saw that he lost himself, and he wanted to take his own life. And so when we start talking about intuition on my podcast, he said, Yeah, my intuition, intuition is not always right. In this case, it it caught me in a lie and almost killed myself. But then I learned from my intuition, it’s a dud. And I stopped Mark and I said, Mark, if you were ever if you were to replay that story that you told me, and if you were to slow it down, when you started telling me about you lying in, in high school, you said, I knew I shouldn’t have lied, but and since then, of course, my team’s gone back, we captured that. That was the moment even in the story that he’s telling me that his intuition saying no, you’re not supposed to do that. But you did it anyways. So when we look at intuition, one of the first things I wanted to do is at that time that I started looking at intuition. It was all about, you know, manifestation. and voices from God and coming from the cosmos, I had an HL coach that told me intuition came from the cosmos. And if you define what intuition is like that no problem, but because of my engineering, and my computer science background, kind of wanted to have some data. And so I went to a neurologist friend of mine to say, Hey, listen, you know, does intuition actually exist? And I wasn’t expecting much from him. And so I turned on the cameras. And he says, Yes, Neil, intuition absolutely exists, we all have a sixth sense. I use it with my patients. And there’s more and more neuroscience research coming out that showing that intuition is happening much faster in helping our decisions than ever before. And my eyes just lit up. And I said, Oh, my God, okay, where’s this research? And so I go to the academic database, I type into the word intuition, I had no clue how many articles that I was looking for. And once I hit enter 65,000 articles, it’s 1990s. With some actually having MRIs and brain scans, close to 40,000 articles and intuition and business. One of the things I consistently said was that intuition, you’re born with intuition. And so there was a research paper that showed that infants as young as two months old have shown to have intuitive tendencies. When it comes to how intuition functions, to papers show that intuition actually happens, on average, seven to 10 seconds before you actually make a decision or take action. And so now I’ve got some data, and MRIs. And when it comes to trust, which is so important in our personal life, and professional lives, trust is actually starts to develop in 33 milliseconds. And by the time someone else decides to exchange, time, effort, or money with you in any way, shape, or form, that takes up to 14 seconds, on average, 10 to 14 seconds. And so when I talk about into the branding, and eliminating competition under 14 seconds, my premise is if you can win the trust of your employees, if you can win the trust of your customers, your employees want to work for you, your customer is going to want to buy from you, that happens at an intuitive level, with your purpose, going back to in my statement about Terilyn, and why I’m doing what I’m doing. And when you have that purpose as a company, or even as a person who you are as values, people want to be around you. And that takes under 14 seconds for them to decide that. And if employees want to be working for you, there you’re stripping talent from your competitors. If your customers want to buy from you, and they will stick with you. Why do we people stick with brands, because there’s an intuitive emotional attachment to that brand. And they will often it’s more expensive in terms of switching costs to go somewhere else, then you’re taking that money away from the competitors. And if you’ve got employees and customers wanting to stick with you, in under 14 seconds, your competitors are finished. So one of the things I figured out is that we have these things called signals. And these signals, there’s two types, positive signals, and negative signals, your positive signals are the ones that are telling you to move ahead, move forward. And so oftentimes for me, for example, it’s a feeling of flow, the dots connecting, and I had one CEO that actually he’s run to multi million-dollar businesses now, because an omen shows up on his right shoulder, no color, no shape. He just knows that when that woman shows up, if he’s doing a brand deal, if he’s taking on some VC money, if he’s hiring someone and that Omen pops up, he just says yes, that’s it, end of story. And the negative signals are a little bit tricky in that they’re, they’re a little bit more like irritants. And so for me, the very first intuitive signal I get, and the way that intuitive signals work is that they start subtle in nature. And then they get louder and louder as you continue to ignore them. And so I’ve had one person who was in a relationship, and she finally heard the words get out. Another fellow was running a nine-figure company in the mortgage area, always ignored his intuition that was saying, quit, quit, quit, quit, quit, and he was in the back of an Uber. And he just blurts out the words I quit, just came up, no control. And then he goes to his board and says, I’m done here. Nine figure company, the top of its game, and he quit. And so my negative signals are I lose my peripheral vision very quickly. And I get hyper-focused and it doesn’t matter if something’s in front of me, it might be a decision I’m thinking about doing but I lose my focus. And then I’ve other got other things like an irritation of the gut feeling the hairs in the back of my neck standing up. Now, I was actually interviewing another entrepreneur. And I mean, nobody asks you, you know, hey, let’s go for coffee. Hey, Mike, you know, what are your negative intuitive signals like that’s kind of bizarre. But for him, he says, nobody’s ever asked me what signals are from intuition, but every single time he started to explain about At a time, he ignored his intuition and got into a business for the wrong reasons like ego, fame or money. He kept grabbing his ear lobe, as he kept talking about the stories. And 10 minutes in, he just realized Sunil oh my god, I just realized my negative intuitive signal is my left ear lobe, starting to burn with heat. And as he recounts going back, I can now remember every single bad decision I’ve made, that my left ear lobe pulsates with heat. And so that’s how unique the signals are to each one of us. So we hear about, you know, gut feeling and hearing a voice and stuff like that, which is, which are common terms. And that’s great. But if you get that voice, how do you know that that’s not signal? Number three, or number one, right? So let’s say you and I do an exercise. And let’s say we both have that gut feeling. Let’s say, Mike, for you that gut feeling is Signal Number one, and let’s just say that I’m lazy. And I say, oh, yeah, I got, yeah, that’s my signal number one. But for me, if that signal is actually Signal Number three, the next time I make a bad decision, and that gut feeling comes in? Well, that’s signal number three, which means that I’ve missed Signal Number one, and number two. And missing those two signals means that I’ve made two bad decisions. Now those two bad decisions could mean just could be me stubbing my toe on a door, or it could be my business headed towards bankruptcy, you know, I don’t know. And so part of what we need to do is to figure out what our inventory are positive, and negative signals are. And so that’s very, very easy to do. And, you know, for those listening, or those watching, very, very easy, you get a piece of paper and you write down your decisions, and what were the good decisions? And how did it feel like in the moment? And what were the bad decisions? And what did it feel like, in those moments, those feelings are your intuitive signals coming through. And what you need to do is take the time to get your inventory of signals, each one has a separate set of inventory signals anywhere from three to five on each tub, so to speak. And so once you have your inventory of signals, the next time you make a decision, it will be either a positive or negative signal coming up. And because you’ve taken the steps to figure out what those signals are, you already know what the right decision is. So the next question is, well, what fuels these signals. And if we go back to the car analogy I was talking about earlier, remember, you don’t need to be the mechanic, I just told you how to drive the car. So now let’s introduce Sunil Godsey, the mechanic, and I’m going to be opening up your hood to look at all these things. And what’s underneath these signals, what drives these signals are four types of intuition. And the best way I can demonstrate how these four types of intuition work, is through a case study. A really good friend of mine, John Ross child, was an investment banker. And he was one of my very first interviewees when it came to understanding intuition. And so this guy, where he’s an investment banker with data, spreadsheets rule his world. And so he said, Come on, you know, intuition. Like, what’s wrong with you? Intuition doesn’t exist, what are you talking about? So he says, Listen, come on down, I’ll give you an hour. And we’ll talk about this thing called intuition and you know, for five minutes, and then we’ll just catch up, I haven’t seen in a while. So I cut my video equipment and driving down and going, Whoa, this can be a great interview, I have no clue how this is going. And I turn on the camera. And I’m telling him about these CEO that sees omens and a guy was left your luck getting on. And he’s just like, Sunil, you know, I omens this I, I’d really like to shake this guy’s hand. It listens to Neil. Okay, any decision you make in life is based on your learning and experience. So now I’m going to start getting into the four types of intuition. One of the first types of intuition is called experiential intuition. And so if we go back to the premise that you were born with intuition, with that research paper, when you’re born, you go through five to 6000 experiences per day when you’re older, 28 to 35,000 experiences per day, whichever research paper you look at. Every single experience that you go through every single decision that you make, is a data point that goes into the subconscious area of your brains. If you look at your brain like an iceberg 90% below water 10% above water. The subconscious area is the iceberg portion underwater. Every single data point ever since you’re born goes into your at your intuition as a data point so that when you make a decision today, you have billions and billions and billions of data points of experiences you’ve had in the past, of the learning you’ve gone through in the past to draw from. So when it sends you a positive signal from an expression intuition perspective. It’s saying, Mike, you’ve had a very similar experience before that went, Well, when you made those decisions. Here’s a positive signal to say, go ahead with that decision. And conversely, if it’s a negative signal saying, Mike, you’ve tried this decision like that before, and it really didn’t work out well. So what are you doing making that decision? Again, I’m gonna send you a subtle, negative signal. And if you ignore that one, I’m gonna send you a louder one. And so I was telling John, that sometimes your intuition has you go against the data. And he goes, Well, that’s funny that you mentioned that snail, he says, I have a, I have an actual story for you. And I said, Well, please tell it. And so John was in the business of running franchises. And so if you look at putting in a franchise, his team would look at a benchmarking system where they would look at a 10 out of 10, and anything that was nine or nine and a half, you’d put a franchise location and similar to Wendy’s and McDonald’s or Dunkin Donuts. And they would look at traffic patterns, demographics and development of the area as sort of inputs into that benchmarking system. So there was this one really crappy area of Toronto, Canada, where people were just drinking just to get drunk. And he wanted to put a location that was teaching Beer pairings. So his team comes up with a five and a half at a 10. And he goes into this place, now we’re getting into the second of the four called situational intuition. Situational intuition looks at the situation around you, and the business units that you have in a business to say, Do we have enough here to support a franchise location, and his situational intuition in that area is looking at a dilapidated area of Toronto. But he knows that there might be some development coming in the future. And as he’s looking, he says, No, I think I think I need to go against my team’s data, and put a location here. And he says, perhaps this is intuition, I’m not sure. And this is Wow, he’s actually saying the word. And he went against his team’s advice. And he put a franchise location, first one called the beer market. And the beer market ended up being one of the most profitable brands in his whole portfolio of brands ever. And because of his intuition, and now, he’s kind of getting it. And at one point, John’s purpose changes. Instead of being an investment banker, he now wants to run a business. And so the third of the four is called relational intuition. What relational intuition does, is it filters the people through to only allow those who really care about your success, and leave everybody behind, get you to be cautious about them. And so, in John’s case, when he’s making the decision to run a business, all the people who are concerned about money, fame, ego, high end restaurants, private jets, limousines, all the extrinsic motivations, they were so caught up in that. They all told him he was nuts. They didn’t want to listen to him. Except for one person. That was his wife. And his wife, says, John, are you sure. And we’re about 45 minutes into this interview. There. Now I’m paraphrasing of what he says on the video. This is like when he starts off the interview saying, intuition doesn’t exist to now he says, Sunil, you can all you can have all the data in the world. But you just have to trust your intuition. And he looked at his wife and said, This just feels right. That’s his intuitive signal. And the fourth of the four is called Creative intuition. Creative intuition is the type of risk that you make in a decision. And so I’m sure Mike, you’ve made some risky decisions in your life to others that might said, Mike, you’re What’s wrong with you, but to you, you know, it was the right decision. And that’s how creative intuition works. It’s the risk that you’re able to tolerate that’s right for you, that’s gonna move you or your business forward. And so you would think, from someone who has a 25 year career in the investment banking industry, that his creative intuition would have handed him a business to run that had strong cash flows, good revenues, and you know, a healthy balance sheet, not his intuition. His integrative intuition says, Here, Mike, or sorry, here, here, John, here is a tiny bankrupt real restaurant for you. And he trusts his intuition, he quits his job, rolls up his sleeves and walks into that tiny bankruptcy of the restaurant. That tiny bankrupt little restaurant ended up being a brand called Eastside, Mario’s location number one, and over the next 20 years, he grew that to over 1000 locations with acquisitions and other brand names to earn $2 billion dollars in revenues. All because it felt right. That’s the power of intuition. That’s how it works with its signals. Those are the four types.
Mike Malatesta 49:58
So let me do thank you for that. Let me do a mild pushback here. So I’m thinking about the people like Bernie Madoff people, people who’ve been ripped off by somebody. And it seems like when those people tell their stories, that the intuition that they’ve been had comes later, when the evidence shows up that they haven’t been had, but at the beginning, some person or people have convinced them of something that they’re into that’s that is completely false, made up, but their intuition, if that’s what it is, and that’s why I’m sort of pushing back and asking you their intuition has invited that into their lives what’s going on in a situation like that?
Sunil Godse 50:51
Yeah. So that’s where you’re highly emotional. And so when you’re looking at investment decisions, and somewhat someone is saying you can make 23% returns year over year and a conservative market or whatever the case is, people get really hyped and they get there’s a lot of emotion involved, and they don’t look at what’s going on. Sometimes we get into a sociopath like Bernie Madoff, you can easily get convinced and what some people stop, they don’t do is they don’t take a step back. To really evaluate if you look at the four types of intuition as a template. Let’s enter in Bernie Madoff’s case. Let’s take a look at that. So let’s say from a relational intuition perspective, let’s say that you believe him because he can convince you somehow and you don’t notice the twitches or his body language, or you don’t notice that
Mike Malatesta 51:40
situation. He’s more skilled than you at.
Sunil Godse 51:44
Exactly, exactly. From a situational intuition. Other people he’s prevent presenting your reports that other people have gotten the same game. So he’s showing you reports that, oh, look at this graph. It’s nice. And we always love those hockey stick graphs. And then creative intuition, you’re taking a risk, perhaps you’ve had those risky decisions in the past. But the experiential part is, have you had any experience looking into this data? And really taking you know, if you’re going to put enough money? You know, is there enough experience in that, and there’s a fellow actually I forget his name. But he was at UBS securities in the UK. And he invested heavily in Bernie Madoff. And he started getting these reports of these amazing returns. And he’s to say, I have never seen this before, you know, and he starts going through the reports. And he’s missing some key data points in that report that he needs to make sure that all the dots are connected, and you know, the i’s are dotted T’s are crossed, and he couldn’t find that information. And he phones Bernie Madoff’s office and says, Can you provide me that data and his office as well? Bernie Madoff says no. So he personally flies to New York. And doesn’t tell anybody’s coming goes to Secretary says I like to, or he just walks into Bernie morose office, knowing who he is, and I really wish I could remember this guy’s name. And he goes to Bernie Madoff and ask for that, that information. Bernie Madoff says no. And he says, Listen, I’ve got I think it was $25 million, my money and your assets with UBS securities. If you don’t give me that information, 24 hours, I will be pulling out all my investment from you. And Bernie Madoff said no, because these are obviously made-up numbers. And so he goes back to UBS in the UK, he pulls all his assets, he advises everybody in UBS securities that they should pull out as well. And in some didn’t, some didn’t. And obviously, Bernie Madoff ended up being a fraud, as we all know, and those people that didn’t listen to this fellow all lost their money, but somebody use that his intuition to say, something’s not right here. It’s great to have these, these blips and these excellent returns. But I’m not seeing the logical data that I need as an investment advisor, or somebody mired in investments to justify those returns, because I’m not seeing some numbers. And so he was able to pull out his money. So that’s kind of how intuition works in a case with Bernie Madoff. And the other thing is, sometimes we learn from our failures. And I always say failures are excellent. In this case, it could be expensive failures. But that also is a data point for your intuition. So the next time you meet someone that has a great sales pitch, your data point, if you invested in Bernie Madoff, it’s gonna so say, Okay, I’ve already gone this through this before I’ve lost whatever amount of money, I better change who I start listening to and take a little bit more of a conservative approach or start trusting different people when it comes to my investments. And that’s how your intuition continues to learn from the failures that you’ve had. Again, it puts it in the subconscious, your or your brain, so that you never make that mistake again. So it’s
Mike Malatesta 55:05
really, is it really a developed intuition that’s never wrong Sunil or
Sunil Godse 55:10
it’s it’s always learning, always learning all the time. And and you know, when your baby, of course you don’t know much and you know, somebody says Don’t touch the fire, and you know, you’re going to do that, right. And so he starts the fires, Oh, that’s hot. And for some reason, you might see somebody else do it with a stick and glows really nicely, oh, that looks nice. Even though my mom and dad told me not to do that, Oh, my God, you know, this big fire comes. And so you start learning as you go through life, and then you start learning the different signals that you have. But when you’re much older, you know, most people have gone through quite a bit in their life. And the the types of decisions that they need are the intuitive signals there. And one of the things that when you’re presented with a negative signal, it doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t make that decision. It just means that okay, my intuition says I need a little bit more information. So depending upon which of the four types that is sending you a negative signal, you take a step back. And if it’s a experiential intuition, then you need to talk to somebody, or you need to read a bit a bit more about whatever decision you’re about to make if it’s, it’s situational intuition, something in the situation or the business units aren’t working, what is it that I need for them to work together to make sure that the decisions can be a good one? Relational intuition, there’s something I don’t trust with that person, even though he or she is saying things. But I don’t trust her body language. There’s like seven micro expressions that you can’t hide. Something’s off about how this person normally speaks. There’s something in the tone that changes or the body language that says no, okay, maybe I should get some more information other people that other people or trust, or and then last one is creative intuition. If it’s filling a red signal, normally a red flag normally, that’s because one of the other three intuition types are sending your negative signal. And the decision you’re about to make is too risky for you. You’re taking on, you’re biting off way too much that you can chew based on your past history. So perhaps you need to take a step back, find out what’s the risk element, make sure you’re comfortable with the risk element. If you are, and you’ve taken the steps to change anything in those four types of intuition, that negative signal now turns to a positive signal. Because you’ve added more data points to your subconscious or your brain, you’ve done some more learning about that decision. And then if you’ve got four positive signals, you move ahead with that decision. Now obviously, I’m slowing things down a lot.
Mike Malatesta 57:29
And yeah, we’re just we’re just opening the lid on this thing is absolutely Hey, we’re just opening the lid. So Sunil this has been fantastic. I’m glad that we opened the lid I like my mind’s going a mile a minute about learning more about intuition. I told people at the beginning how they could get a hold of you. Is there any other ways that you want people to reach out to you or the website the best way?
Sunil Godse 57:54
Yeah, but website among all my socials LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Amman, tic tock, I don’t do any dancing, because if I did, you know, the intuition of other people are gonna say, Hmm, perhaps I shouldn’t be listening to this guy. Yeah, but any of the socials, my websites, their webinar, there’s a is a, you can check how strong you are in your business intuition as a business intuitive strength quiz on my website, so feel free to take them. I’m gonna Yeah, for sure. But yeah, lots of ways to get a hold of me. So yeah, please do and hopefully I can help you make the right decision by you getting to trust your intuition.
Mike Malatesta 58:27
And don’t forget his podcast episode, which is intuitive branding. Right. Absolutely. Intuitive branding. So Neil, thank you so much. It’s been a pleasure to have you on the show. It’s been awesome.
Sunil Godse 58:36
Thank you so much. Okay, excellent. Sorry, I got way too technical into this. Sorry.
Mike Malatesta 58:44
No, that’s cool. I kind of I kind of, I think I feel like I kind of wanted to go there. Because it’s too easy to just talk about intuition. Because everyone’s like, I know what intuition is like, yeah, I have it. You know, I just wanted to sort of dispel that and get into, because I know you. I know. There’s a lot to it, but Well, cool, man. Thank you so much for doing this. If you did enjoy the experience, I’ll ask you to leave me a podcast. Absolutely.
Sunil Godse 59:11
I’ll definitely do that.
Mike Malatesta 59:12
That’d be fun. I did leave one for you, by the way. Just
Sunil Godse 59:15
Oh, thank you. Appreciate that. Yeah, yeah, I’ll definitely do that for you for sure.
Mike Malatesta 59:20
Okay, cool. I’ll let you know when everything comes out. And it’s been great.
Sunil Godse 59:24
Excellent. I appreciate that. Hopefully, keep in touch.
Mike Malatesta 59:27
Okay, sounds good.
Sunil Godse 59:28
Thanks.
