Zach Greenfield: Trusting the Intuition of the People You Work With

Below is an excerpt from the Find Your True North podcast interview with Zach Greenfield. In it, he describes how he has developed his intuition over the course of his career, and the importance of listening to the intuition of the people he serves. 

To listen to the episode, go to iTunes or Soundcloud. 

“I don’t feel like you can train someone to have the correct gut feeling on something. It goes into your training as far as muscle memory and everything else. But gut feeling is something that you have to develop over a career. My gut feeling is always changing for the better even now.

It’s definitely a feeling that you can’t really describe. You can look at a patient and see if they’re sick. You get this feeling and the priority level goes up and your heart rate goes up and you get an adrenaline rush. Sometimes you’re feeling that and you don’t even know why yet. But the fact that you’ve seen so many patients in that condition… you just feel it.

I’ve learned to trust patients intuition as well. A lot of times when a patient in a critical situation says that they feel like they’re going to die a lot of times they’re correct. And a lot of times that’s their intuition, inside them telling them. They feel like they’re going to die. And a lot of times that gets us on our feet and makes us look really close at what’s going on. Start looking a few steps ahead and seeing how we can be prepared for that because we actually will prepare for that if a patient says that. So some of it is trusting patient intuition as well. If they’re feeling chest pain and they have a history of heart attacks, well does it feel like the same chest pain they had when they last had a heart attack? They might say yes I feel like I’m having a similar heart attack. A lot of times they are correct. So I think part of our intuition on the job is listening to the patient’s intuition about what is going on with them as well as developing your own gut feeling.”