It was an early morning, and cold enough to see your breath.

Mark heard a loud “crack!” and felt a bullet whiz past his ear, so close he could feel the wind as it flew by.

He turned to find Chris, a fellow special forces operator, pointing a 9mm pistol at him as if he’d meant to kill him.

But Chris had no such intention. He’d accidentally discharged his weapon during their morning training at the shooting range.

Mark had been walking, but he’d stopped a moment before Chris pulled the trigger. If he’d taken another step, that bullet would have entered the back of his head.

But something told him to stop.

Mark—known to many as former Navy Seal commander Mark Divine—told me this story when I interviewed him for my podcast.

He said, “All of a sudden I had this sensation that someone put their hand on my shoulder and said, ‘Hey, stop.’ I paid attention to that. I stopped.”

“I knew intuitively that no one put their hand on my shoulder, but it felt like someone reached out to put their hand on my shoulder. There was no auditory ‘Stop.’ But to me it was loud and clear.”

Mark says that if you ignore or discount your intuition, you’re not training it, and you’re certainly not benefitting from it fully. When you pay attention to your intuition, he says, you give it the power to speak to you more loudly and more frequently.

Trusting your intuition might not save your life. But maybe it will help you make more intelligent choices, plan and prioritize each day more quickly and effortlessly or say the right thing at the right time.

And who knows? Maybe it actually will save your life someday too.