Strategic intuition isn’t woo. It’s a competitive advantage.
I’ve closed $13M+ in deals over my career. I’ve built product portfolios from zero. I’ve sat in rooms with executives who had more degrees than personality and held my own.
I also pull Tarot cards before major business decisions.
These two things aren’t contradictions. They’re the same skill operating on different frequencies.
What skill, pray tell, you ask?
Well, a couple. Listening to what people are telling you, and hearing patterns, for one. And listening to your inner voice telling you what the right move is, is another.
And, honestly, listening to what Spirit has to say too.
Grab your whiskey-coke and let’s chat.
Sometimes, Analysis Will Fail You
There you are, staring out the window from your wheelie desk chair. Your mind, having analyzed every available data point, has gone totally quiet.
You’ve mapped the pathways. You’ve considered the variables. You’ve heard the frustrations of your revenue team or customer or all the stakeholders pinging you on Slack for a “quick chat.”
And yet the breakthrough — the real insight — stays just out of reach.
I used to think I needed more when this happened. More research. Another framework. A longer pros-and-cons list. Another “strategy session” with the squad.
What I actually needed was a pattern interrupt.
William Duggan, a professor at Columbia Business School, calls this “strategic intuition” — when you’re stuck in the corner, banging your head against the wall on a problem, and just not getting anywhere. Then, months later in the shower or while taking your dog to the park, there it is. The idea. The solution. The flash of insight.
Clear as day. Obvious, yet elusive. And you understand everything about how to get from here to there in that very moment.
“Strategic intuition is very different from ordinary intuition, like vague hunches or gut instinct,” he writes. “Ordinary intuition is a form of emotion: feeling, not thinking. Strategic intuition is the opposite: it’s thinking, not feeling.”
Three Kinds of Intuition (and Only One Creates Major Breakthroughs)
Emotional Intuition is your gut feeling about people and situations. It’s sensing something’s off with a job offer despite the title. It’s knowing a colleague isn’t being straight with you. Valuable? Absolutely. But it’s about navigating what is, not envisioning what could be.
Expert Intuition comes from deep experience in a specific domain. It’s the surgeon who knows where to cut, the chess master who sees the winning move without thinking. This is pattern recognition from thousands of hours of practice. The problem? Expert intuition can actually block innovation. You’re so good at recognizing familiar patterns that you miss the unfamiliar ones.
Strategic Intuition is totally different. It’s that lightning-bolt moment where previously unconnected ideas suddenly click into a coherent whole. It feels surprising and inevitable at the same time. Duggan describes it as: “Suddenly it hits you. It all comes together in your mind. You connect the dots.”
This is the thing that creates new ventures, pivots that actually work, solutions nobody else saw coming. And it can’t be forced through more analysis. It has to be invited.
Why Tarot Works (Even If You Don’t “Believe” In It)
I’m not here to convince you the cards are magic. Honestly, it doesn’t matter whether you think Tarot is mystical or just a sophisticated random idea generator. It works either way.
Here’s why:
Pattern interruption. The random draw breaks your entrenched thinking loops. Your brain was circling the same five solutions; now it has to respond to an unexpected image. That disruption creates space for new connections.
Symbolic thinking. Strategy lives in abstractions—market positioning, competitive dynamics, organizational change. Tarot gives those abstractions visual form. Suddenly you’re not just thinking about “transformation,” you’re looking at a tower struck by lightning. Your brain processes that differently.
Permission to know what you know. Most of my clients already sense what they need to do. They just don’t trust it because it didn’t come from a spreadsheet. The cards give them permission to articulate insights they’d otherwise dismiss as “just a feeling.”
One of my clients is a CEO and non-profit founder. She’s used to having big ideas. But she came to me stuck on launching something new from her existing business. She’d been circling for months — drawn to create something more meaningful but couldn’t see how it connected to her established offerings.
One 90-minute session of honest conversation, prompted along by Tarot. That’s all it took. She saw not just what she wanted to create, but exactly how it linked to her current brand and customers, who her first clients would be, and what it could look like a year from now. She launched a successful beta within 4 weeks.
That’s strategic intuition, accessed through a tool that got her analytical mind out of the way long enough for the insight to land.
The Professional-Spiritual Divide Is Exhausting (And Unnecessary)
Can we talk about compartmentalization for a second?
By day, you’re the data-driven leader making evidence-based decisions. You talk about KPIs and market dynamics and scalable solutions. By night — or in private — you might meditate, pull cards, read about archetypes, wonder about meaning.
And never shall the two meet, because you’re terrified of not being taken seriously.
I lived this for years. It’s exhausting. It also limits your potential, because you’re only bringing half of your intelligence to any given problem.
Strategic intuition through tarot creates a space where both parts of you show up. Your analytical rigor and your symbolic thinking. Your competitive drive and your search for meaning. Integrated, not compartmentalized.
One client told me: “I feel like this is all the work that needed to happen internally before I could even approach strategy wisely.”
Yeah. Exactly.
Try This Yourself
You don’t need me to access strategic intuition. Here’s a simple practice:
1. Frame a specific question. Not “what should I do with my life” but “how do I approach this conversation with my board about the pivot?” Specificity matters.
2. Create a pattern interrupt. If you have a Tarot deck, pull a card. If you don’t, go for a walk without your phone, or lie on your back under a tree and stare at the canopy. The point is to break your analytical loop.
3. Notice what emerges. Don’t force it. Just observe. What connections appear? What perspective shift happens?
If You Want a Guide
I offer Tarot‑based coaching through Pocket Witch — for people who want a thinking partner who can pull cards, talk strategy, and hold both the mystical and the MBA‑level rigor in the same breath.
We meet twice a month. You get WhatsApp access between sessions. Everything is confidential. (No one needs to know you’re consulting a witch unless you want them to.)
What I want for you is to realize that your most brilliant insights aren’t always hiding in more analysis. DO that analysis. But let everything come together like a lightning bold in the way that our brains & spirits LOVE: where your mind finally stops gripping the problem long enough for the truth to surface.
Your gut knows things your MBA doesn’t. Trust it.
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