I used to be a skeptic.
Ever think about when you became one? Three year olds aren't skeptical.
At some point you learn you can't trust people. Or worse, you can't trust yourself. I learned both.
And I was proud of it. No one was getting one over on me. You can't be fooled when you assume everyone's lying. There's real power in that.
The skepticism wasn't wrong, either. I learned it somewhere. So did you.
But it doesn't stay pointed outward. Eventually you turn it on yourself.
Here's the thing about intuition: it isn't the absence of evidence. If you're an intuitive person, you're taking in data constantly — tone, pattern, what someone didn't say, the thing that doesn't add up. You reason inductively. You see patterns everywhere and arrive at the answer before you can show the work.
So when someone asks how you know, you can't produce the spreadsheet. And you've been trained to believe that anything you can't prove on paper doesn't count.
It counts. You just can't cite it.
What I miss least: spending three hours researching a decision my gut answered in two minutes.
I still ask hard questions. I just stopped making myself prove it.
I'm a leadership coach and an inductive thinker and I help people operate from self-trust.