Gut Feelings and why I wish I'd listen to them.

I'm sure it is fair to say that we have all experienced gut feelings before. Some call in intuition or a sixth sense and I firmly believe it's remnants of our own human magic that we probably once employed a lot more than we do today. And yet how many of us ever heed the advice of our gut?

The very latest example of not listening to my gut happened about two weeks ago when a lovely bloke came around to measure my old and broken Crittall windows, as we have finally got the funds together to purchase new fandangled windows that will actually help us keep the house warm.

What could have possibly been the problem? It was about the halfway point of the meeting when suddenly my gut sprang to life. It just simply kept repeating "no" at me.

The psychology of gut feelings has been somewhat simplified. We see, hear, smell, taste or feel something (sense) and our brains rummage through the millions of memories we have and link that sense experience to a memory. In most of these events we cannot actually conjure up the memory so we are left with a gut feeling.

After my experience I was perplexed for days and tried to pin it down to something that was said or otherwise occurred in our brief meeting (measuring windows doesn't take long). But nothing would come up and in the end, and after several conversation with my husband where he reassured me I was nuts, I gave up and went ahead with the New-Windows-Process which involved new soffits, fascias and guttering too.

So the soffits fascias and gutters went up pretty much immediately and I was relatively happy. I mean, really, what am I going to know about these things? I was concerned about some unevenness on the front of the house but was assured that once the windows were in it would be fine.

It isn't.

On top of the issue of the wonky soffits I also had to deal with a very unprofessional and quite frankly - disgusting - workman, who refused to give me his company name when asked. I will find out his company name of course.

I was also quoted for triple glazed windows.

And they aren't.

So, there is a lesson to be learnt here. Even when you cannot justify your gut feeling, your brain is programmed to alert you to situations that haven't happened yet - because similar ones have happened before. Listen to it.