I have a completely infallible decision-making tool and people, rejoice, I’m handing it to you right now.

It’s highly technical, deeply scientific, and requires no silver platter.

The process is very straightforward and fast, please pay close attention:

You lick your index finger, stick it in the air, and then start asking questions.

I know.

Stay with me.

The Finger of Infallibility was born years before I became a coach, when I was working on large important client projects with equally large important budgets. These were the sort of projects where somebody would eventually turn around and ask, ‘So how much is this going to cost?’, at which point a room full of intelligent adults would suddenly become deeply interested in their coffee cups.

The challenge, of course, was that we were often trying to put numbers on things that didn’t exist yet. There wasn’t a spreadsheet waiting somewhere with the correct answer hidden inside it. There wasn’t a formula. There wasn’t even necessarily enough information to make what most people would consider a sensible estimate. What we had instead was a collection of experience, instinct, expertise and educated guesswork, all mixed together in a slightly mysterious gazpacho (it’s hot today, ok, bear with me).

So we’d start feeling our way towards it.

‘Does this feel like a million-pound project?’

Absolutely not.

‘Half a million?’

No, that feels too low.

‘Seven hundred and fifty thousand?’

Maybe.

‘Eight hundred and twenty?’

Closer.

‘Eight hundred and twenty-seven?’

Actually…

That feels about right.

What fascinated me was that this process worked far more often than it had any right to. Not because we were psychic, and not because somebody had secretly done the maths beforehand, but because we were allowing ourselves to notice something before logic arrived and started demanding evidence. The number itself wasn’t magically appearing out of nowhere. What we were doing was giving intuition a chance to speak, and then using our reasoning brains afterwards to sense-check, refine and build around whatever emerged.

The ridiculousness of this is entirely part of the charm, but underneath the silliness there is also something genuinely useful happening. Because I think most of us, particularly if we’re neurodivergent, have spent a very long time learning not to trust our instincts.

We’ve been corrected, redirected, misunderstood, second-guessed and occasionally told, directly or indirectly, that our way of seeing the world isn’t quite right. After enough repetitions of that message, it’s easy to develop a complicated relationship with your own judgement. The answer must surely live somewhere outside yourself. Perhaps you need more information. Perhaps you need more opinions. Perhaps you need another spreadsheet, another conversation, another article, another week of thinking about it.

Meanwhile, somewhere underneath all that noise, a part of you is already leaning gently in a particular direction.

The irony is that neurodivergent people are often remarkably good at this sort of thing when we allow ourselves access to it. We tend to take in huge amounts of information, much of it below conscious awareness, we notice patterns, inconsistencies and connections that other people miss, and our brains are constantly building maps of how things fit together. Sometimes that gets us into trouble because we can spot patterns that aren’t really there, but very often it gives us access to a level of instinct that isn’t magic at all. It’s pattern recognition running in the background. The brain has been quietly collecting data, comparing it with thousands of previous experiences, noticing tiny distinctions and drawing conclusions long before the reasoning brain arrives with a clipboard asking for evidence. What we call intuition is often far less mysterious than we imagine. It’s simply the brain doing what brains do best, making sense of the world through patterns, only a little faster and a little more loudly than most.

The Finger of Infallibility isn’t really about finding answers. It’s about creating enough space to hear them.

What I love about it is that it works surprisingly well for things that don’t have objectively correct solutions. How long do I actually want to stay at this event? How many hours should I spend on this particular piece of work? How much support do I need? How much social contact feels nourishing before my social battery starts filing formal complaints? How much is too much? How much is not enough?

What you’re really doing is throwing possibilities into the air and noticing what happens. One option feels wildly ambitious, another feels far too cautious, a third makes you wrinkle your nose slightly, and then somewhere along the way you hit something that produces an almost imperceptible shift of recognition. Not certainty, not excitement, just a small internal sense of, ‘Ah, there you are.’

I think that’s an important distinction, because the finger isn’t looking for perfection. Perfection is generally the Judge’s department, and we all know how exhausting that can become. The finger is looking for fit. It’s helping us locate the place where something feels aligned enough that we can begin moving forward.

Looking back, I’ve come to suspect that a lot of decision-making works this way anyway. We like to imagine that we gather evidence until we arrive at a conclusion, but much of the time our brains have already started orienting towards an answer long before our reasoning catches up. The reasoning brain then gets to work explaining why that answer makes sense, which is perhaps slightly less scientific than we’d all like to admit, particularly those of us who are very attached to the idea that we are creatures of pure logic.

What the finger does is allow that process to happen more consciously. It gives intuition a seat at the table without asking it to take over the meeting.

And no, before anyone writes in, I don’t think fingers possess mystical powers.

The finger isn’t measuring or predicting anything.

The finger certainly isn’t infallible.

What it is doing is helping us reconnect with a voice that many of us have spent years learning to ignore.

Which is not a bad return from something that started life as a funny turn in a budget meeting.

Although I should stress that licking the finger remains an essential part of the process.

Otherwise you’re just pointing at the sky and hoping for the best.