It Was Just a Hunch, but It Paid Off

Does success depend on more than hard work and luck? These Southern Californians say their intuition helps, and cite these examples of hunches that paid off:

“I responded to a rape call and began questioning the victim. She was very vague about her assailant and told me she couldn’t identify him. I remember this overwhelming, powerful feeling that the rapist was someone who lived close by, someone who knew her routine. I could almost feel his presence still in the house. I kept trying to get information from her. I even talked to her while she was on the gurney going to the hospital. ‘Start at the top,’ I suggested. ‘Do you remember his face?’ Finally, she remembered a bandage on his hand. We checked at the closest hospital. They had just released a man with a hand injury. He had walked home from the hospital, two blocks from her house, and committed the rape on the way home. He was arrested and later convicted.”

--Kathlyne Speirs, Burbank Police Department detective

“At a writers’ conference, I was not going to stay for dinner but then had a strong urge to stay. I had a strong hunch that an editor there was someone I should talk to, so I sought him out. He ended up becoming the editor for my novel. There were lots of people to talk to. It was just a hunch that he was someone I should know.”

--Philip Goldberg, Los Angeles novelist and screenwriter “A woman, 53, was emotionally exhausted and complaining of fluid retention. Other doctors had thought she had a sluggish thyroid. I don’t know what pushed me to test for Cushing’s disease (a condition in which the body overproduces natural steroids) at that time. She didn’t look like a classic Cushing’s patient, but she was. In medical school, we’d call this clinical judgment, not intuition.”

--Dr. Margaret England, endocrinologist, Century City Hospital; UCLA assistant clinical professor of medicine

“A very wealthy businessman lost his wife 10 years ago to cancer and was raising his two children alone. He called me to see his boy, who had behavioral and emotional problems. I went to see the boy in the father’s home office. The house was beautifully furnished. The only room not beautifully furnished was the living room--it looked dead and dreary. All of a sudden one day I connected the word living with life. As a result of my intuition, it became apparent that the father was still grieving. When the father worked through his grief, there was a dramatic change in his life. He began dating and ultimately got married. As the father’s life improved, so did the rest of the family’s. The connection between living and life didn’t occur to me while I was thinking about the family or about work. I was just lying awake in bed one morning.

--Robert Chard-Yaron, San Diego clinical psychologist and intuition researcher