Call it what you may. But, we all seem to use it everyday.

Intuition, to most people, sounds much like a mystical force, even a monumental gift. However, according to a new study, intuition is a sort of background sense: a sense of how things should work, with its facts hidden in the brain. Of logic. And, more than all that - a personal power. A power, which every human being is endowed with, although not all of us are aware of its immense possibilities, or uses.

Intuition, as a matter of fact, was once attributed to women more strongly than men, because it isn't a rational process. Popular perception has it that rational thought is the domain of male intellect. The idea gained mileage because tasks, or jobs, traditionally assumed to be women's work, required very little by way of intuition. Specialists now argue that men and women are equally intuitive and equipped to use this powerful tool - no more, no less - in their everyday lives.

All of us believe in meaningful coincidences. A telephone call, a tryst at a restaurant with a loved one. And, the fact remains. You can use intuition to enhance every area of your daily life, and to recover lost information about the past, verify unknown information about the present, or predict information about the future. You wouldn't believe one word of it. No problem. But, intuition can empower you to be productive and active in any situation. With intuition, you'll be able to reclaim some measure of competence and control over your life. It will improve your decision-making. Deduction: make it an integral part of your life, like exercise and meditation.

Employing intuition will open you up, add to the quality of both your thinking and your emotional selves. To begin with, you should establish what is truly important to you; then, respond to your merits and shortcomings. Once you have done that, you ought to react. You have to be brief and honest. You should act like a plumber - one who is plumbing your unconscious. Don't just peek ahead. Be patient.

You'd use a tape-recorder, or a notepad. To articulate your own thoughts, or write them. But, be careful. Because, what you may wish for you may get. To get into the act, you should become better acquainted with yourself. Allow your mind to relax and move back to the places within - where you hold your memory. Have faith that your unconscious will generate memories that provide the information you need to answer your question. Allow yourself to get all the components of what's meaningful about the question. As you analyze, allow yourself a stop every time your perceptions want to travel; or, permit them to run, until you hit another memory. Don't worry about whether it's a real memory, or that you're just making it up. Write down at least four recollections in your intuition notepad.

• First, each question must be specific and unambiguous so that a precise answer is possible 
• second, each question should be simple rather than compound
• third, each question should be directly relevant to the issue you want to know about
• fourth, be exact.

Intuition is, quite simply, a capacity - something that's within us all, like the capacity for language, or thinking, or appreciating music. It's not an acquired power. Rather, it's an integral part of every human - mental, emotional, and psychical process. Each moment, all of us receive information intuitively. Only thing is we're simply unaware of the process, although we use our intuition in all those practical, reasoned decisions we make everyday: from choices as routine as to what we eat for lunch to what we pursue by way of a career, or whom to marry. The trick is using your intuition more effectively - to bringing the unconscious data. It supplies us to a place where our conscious mind can interpret it.