If you listen to enough interviews with entrepreneurs, there's one piece of advice you will hear over and over: Trust your gut.

Unfortunately, this may be the least practical advice ever, because "trusting your gut" looks and feels different to everyone. And if you're a billionaire who has built and sold ten companies, trusting your gut may seem like a more valid strategy than if you're Joe Shmoe starting a dog food business in his garage. After all, Joe's gut doesn't have much of a track record.

But this is exactly why I wrote my book Everyday Intuition: What Psychology, Science and Psychics Can Teach Us About Finding and Trusting Our Inner Voice. Intuition is just another word for "trusting your gut," and I believe it's a tool that we can all learn to use.

One of the funny paradoxes about intuition is that it is both derided as not real, and then trotted out in the highest-stakes moments. When faced with the choice between two jobs or two apartments or two romantic partners that both have an equal ledger of pros and cons, where there is no clear winner, what do you do? You go with your gut. It's a fine idea, in theory, but why should you trust your gut at these critical junctures when you haven't practiced using it in the day-to-day? We need to cultivate everyday intuition.

When I first started writing about intuition, it felt like trying to staple Jell-O to the wall. Because, what the hell is it? I'd use a very technical term, like "vibe." That didn't exactly seem like something you could take to the bank. Intuition is indeed a vibe, and it's also knowing without knowing why (I'd argue the "why" isn't all that relevant, but your knowing is), and it's direction: Go this way, not that, move toward this and away from that. You can't always show your work to mark how you got from point A to point B, and that can make you doubt the final destination.

But after exploring intuition from many different angles — neuroscientific, corporeal, psychological, metaphysical, spiritual, and the........

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