Before the likes of Bridget Jones and Carrie Bradshaw there was Karen Salmansohn [1]. As a successful author, motivational coach, and LIME radio personality, Salmansohn has taught women "How to Succeed In Business Without a Penis" [2] and "How to Make Your Man Behave in 21 Days or Less Using the Secrets of Professional Dog Trainers." [3]Self-described as a creator of "self-help books for lazy people and those who wouldn't be caught dead with a self-help book," Salmansohn's latest venture is "Gut: How to Think From Your Middle to Get to the Top," [4] (September 2006, HOW Publishing). What, you ask, makes Salmansohn so qualified to teach you to trust your intuition?
"I believe you have to create your own good luck," says Salmansohn. "When I began pitching ‘How to Make Your Man Behave,' it got turned down everywhere, 100 percent." Even her agent at the time didn't believe in the book's potential. "In my mind I could see the whole book, and I convinced a friend to illustrate and design it with me," she continues. "I carried it with me wherever I went and when I went to write for Playboy magazine, I started talking with the editor about how frustrated I was not being able to sell my doggy book. He asked to see it and then brought in the fiction editor to look at it and she quickly wrote down this name and number to call and the next day I had a book deal."
Although it now can be summed up in one nice and neat paragraph, Salmansohn worked incredibly hard to publish a book no one thought would go through 17 printings, let alone be sold in nine countries. She trusted her gut, and consequentially launched her writing career. Today she counts Madonna, Jon Stewart and Deepak Chopra among her fans.
Geared toward busy professionals, "Gut" offers quick and breezy tips—backed by the work of Albert Einstein [5] and Carl Jung [6]—to help you become "your own favorite expert opinion." The book is populated with funky illustrations and pictures, making it feel more like you're reading a grown-up version of Dr. Seuss rather than some text-heavy self-help tome.
Salmansohn believes we waste valuable time when we don't trust our guts, instead opting to overthink or underthink a situation, and being wrongly influenced by fear, self-doubt or over-reliance on others. By learning to make decisions with both our animal instincts and our conscious mind, Salmansohn maintains that we can become highly intuitive, and able to achieve a higher level of success.
To achieve this instinctual balance, Salmansohn recommends such exercises as meditating to calm your conscious mind and experimenting with different activities like reading, journaling or walking, to discover your best conditions for intuition. Those suggestions may seem obvious, but she also devotes an entire chapter to a bevy of insightful tips that will help jump-start your gut instinct, so you're sure to find something that works.
Lately I've been testing out her suggestion to "practice" people: I guess who's calling me before picking up the phone or asking what time my roommate is coming home, the idea being the more I use my gut, the stronger it gets. So far, I've experienced about a 40 percent success rate. (Clearly, I still have some work to do.) Being a full-time writer, I've fared better with Salmansohn's procrastination method: "Waiting until the last minute, you know you have to tap into that higher power intuition to pinpoint what's important," she told me. Here, I average about a 60 percent success rate.
I'll continue working on strengthening my gut with Salmansohn's help, because her tips are themselves intuitive. Take for example, her method of procrastination: being deadline-oriented seemed obvious to me at first, but the more I thought about it, the more I liked the idea of looking upon my procrastination as a tool for success, rather than something that needed fixing. Most of the things Salmansohn recommends to help tap into your sensory perception are most likely things you do already, it's just looking at them in a different way. And though I may be new to this, my gut is telling me that just about everyone should go pick up this book.