All posts by DavidBDurand

Intuition Is Not An Accident

January 18, 2016 DavidBDurand

The Secret of this Article: It applies to EVERY type of decision whether you are a leader of a big corporation or simply engaged in personal decisions about your life: You can use this same pathway to decide whether to buy or sell a company, start or stop making a new product, buy or sell a stock, choose someone to date/marry, or to make critical health decisions. It applies to all decision making whether related to work life or home life….

The BEST DECISIONS are INTUITIVE! Have you made a few decisions as a leader or in any other aspect of life along the way and thought afterward, “There’s no way I could have seen that coming.” Wrong! In fact you could have seen most things coming in your life through the use of intuition.

Einstein On Intuition - Vincent Brown — Einstein practiced meditation and worked intuitively in all his discoveries.

Albert Einstein worked intuitively and used an intuitive process to get quiet before solving problems. He sat in a chair with his set of keys in one hand and used a process to get to mental quiet. When the keys fell out of his hand, it signaled him to begin working and to simply write down the answer to the problem he was addressing. Thomas Edison worked in the same way and would hold his hand to his ear before answering the questions of his postdocs. He was listening from a quiet place for the answers.

Does becoming intuitive mean you need to become a psychic? No. Don’t bother, because psychic work tells you where a person is and where they have been in their consciousness, which impresses a lot of people, but pure psychics have no ability to anticipate the future unless they are also truly intuitive. Lots of money is wasted on psychic work. You need to strive to learn to be intuitive, NOT psychic.

Intuition is not an accident. It is a process that can be learned. Intuition follows the combination of 1) Transcendence and 2) Meditation as a natural consequence, but only most powerfully when both are done.

Most human beings use the power of inference rather than intuition in making decisions, which is moving from a set of facts to a conclusion. That process is often in error, because the facts are often wrong and the connection made by the human mind may also be incorrect.

The true path of knowing is intuition.

So what are the these two requirements for practicing and developing intuition, namely, transcendence and meditation?

Transcendence means going beyond prior thoughts and feelings about a subject. Often our consciousness is clouded by conflicting thoughts and feelings. Transcendence is a process I teach to executives and their employees alike to eliminate that conflict and come to a quiet place of knowing. But what I’ve found is that transcendence alone is not enough for most people. Meditation is also required for reaching the fully intuitive state. We need both.

Meditation has now become a common “Western” practice. Sit in a chair, palms up, eyes raised to the 3rd eye location just slightly above the eyebrows at center, which the disciple John referred to as the “single eye,” and breath in and out. One simple mantra to use is the “I am” meditation, saying (without any motion of your tongue and without sound) “I” on the in breath and “am” on the out-breath. I….am….I….am….I….am…etc. Allow your breathing to lead the “I am” mantra rather than the other way around. Simply be as mentally quiet as you can in between breaths and when the breath comes in, say (mentally only), “I” and expire with “am” also mentally.

If you do your best to both transcend and meditate on a daily basis, you will become fully intuitive in time. It takes dedication and practice. There is no “bad meditation” as Deepak Chopra has said, and in my view, there is also no “bad transcendence.”

What do I mean by becoming “fully intuitive”? I mean to become as “fully” intuitive as you can become. Some people naturally have a head start. They were born with intuitive skills beyond many other people. You need to start where you start, and move up from there. Such is the ladder to higher consciousness. Start climbing! Wherever you start, I will be able to help you move higher, faster. That is my role, my area of service in this life.

One footnote I’d like to make is on where prayer fits in. Prayer, if done in a very active mental state, will bring up all the energy you have around a decision. That can be of potential use, especially if you don’t stop there! If, instead, you move from that initial mentally active prayer to a more quiet form of prayer, so that as you pray your consciousness becomes quieter and quieter, prayer will amount to a form of transcendence work. Still, knowing how to actively transcend is a very powerful addition to prayer, and it’s well-suited to the workplace and to other more non-ecumenical settings. Finally, if you pray and transcend, it’s still important to become even quieter through meditation prior to coming to an intuitive decision.

In summary, if you intend to be intentionally intuitive, learn transcendence (contact me if you don’t know how at 424-234-6401) and meditation (contact me for a recommendation of what I believe is the most powerful meditative practice) or you may miss out on your natural born power to be fully intuitive. There is no charge for talking with me about your path to higher consciousness. That is why I’m here…

Thanks for the photo go to Vincent Brown.

medical leadership

Medical Leadership: How Your Patients (or End Clients) Will Lead You to Success in Two Areas

April 1, 2015 DavidBDurand

Medical leadership, like any leadership position, requires that you remain well informed. I simply call it being “aware.”

The picture below shows two doctors on patient rounds together. You need to do your own business “rounds” on a regular basis. You may think this is obvious, but then why are so many corporate leaders out of touch or missing the mark with their marketing or products/services? Stay with me, and I’ll give you the specific action steps that will help shape your business in a tangible way.

To achieve awareness in your business you must go out into your clinic, hospital or research laboratory or get on the phone to find out what your opportunities and your issues are.

Medical Business Rounds — Have you done your medical business rounds this week?

If you run a practice with numerous doctors, are you aware of the satisfaction level of each doctor’s patients? Is that level declining for some of your staff and rising for others? If you run a home care agency or an assisted living facility, is the number of complaints from your patients increasing?

If you run a translational research institution, private or public, are you aware of what patients are saying about the forms of treatment under investigation? What side effects are being talked about on social media?

If you run a drug company, are you aware of what patients are saying about high priced drugs on various websites? Patient acceptance or lack thereof, whether that is based on price or other considerations, can kill a treatment modality early on in its gestation or disrupt your relations with shareholders later as prices come under government pressure.

For all medical leaders, keeping in touch with your end clients’ needs and frustrations, whether they are patients or otherwise, will guide both your product development and your marketing.

If you don’t talk to several patients a week, you are not in touch with your end customers. Ask them what they like about your services and what they don’t like. Even the CEO of a diagnostic company might occasionally speak to a concerned patient to clearly convey the impression that his/her company does in fact care that their diagnosis is correct, as well as use the feedback to correct the failed process involved. It’s a great way to head off a potential lawsuit. Patients who are treated with honesty and respect may not file suit.

I saw the value of staying in touch with customers and meeting their needs when I was part of the management team at UroCor, and a patient occasionally doubted our diagnosis, because their local pathologist was not as experienced with diagnosing prostate cancer and happened to call a prostate biopsy “atypical” rather than “adenocarcinoma.” The outside pathologist was proven wrong, but communicating with the patient in a supportive way helped to smooth things with the patient, prior to full resolution via a third opinion.

Even if your business is more remote from the patient, such as in a medical supply business, you still need to be talking to several of your end clients per week, who might be pathologists, nurses, or administrators for example, or you’ll eventually be out of touch.

As the medical team leader or CEO, you may not do ALL the communication certainly, but if you do NONE of it, you are not going to be connected intuitively to either your product development or your marketing.

Stay in touch with your “end clients.” Your bottom line will look better and better over time, and those you are leading will thank you for remaining “aware.” And if you have a board to report too, they’ll appreciate your awareness-driven insights that successfully shape your product development and marketing.

Action Steps (without these, the above is worth next to nothing; practicing this consistently in your business will add multiple points to your emotional IQ):

1. Speak to two patients or end clients (or more) within the next week or so.

2. Put it on your schedule. I and others like to point out that when we don’t schedule a task, we simply don’t get it done very often.

3. Set a mental or written INTENTION for each conversation BEFORE you have it. When you set an intention, you will often meet that intention. If you simply say “I’m going to talk to some end clients,” your results won’t be as defined and helpful as they could be.

4. Write down/type out the questions that you’ve wanted to know the answers to for a long time before making the calls or visits. Ask each end client what worked well for them in regard to your services and what suggestions they might have for improvement.

5. Record the insights you have after each conversation.

6. Draft a bullet point summary of your results at the end and decide whether your survey has uncovered actionable ideas.

7. If the answer to 6 is “Yes,” convey your ideas to relevant team members and schedule follow-up meetings as needed to assess potential marketing and/or product development changes.

Finally, consider enrolling in my program to further improve the level of your awareness among other vitally important qualities. Every serious leader has a coach, including me! Read more here:

Moving Up to the Next Level

Please call me from 10 am – 6 pm ET at 424-234-6401 or email me below…