A stiff neck might be your body's way of telling you that someone or something in your office is a being a "pain in the neck."  That dream you had about the vacant corner office might be a foretelling of a management position opening up.

Psychiatrist Judith Orloff thinks so.

"We all possess intuitive intelligence," what Orloff calls our "inner coach," she says. "Yet many of us don't know how to consult it," says Orloff.  Now she has written a book to tell how.  It's called Second Sight.

Says Orloff, assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at UCLA: "As a psychiatrist who incorporates intuition in my practice, I have learned that our body's wisdom is rarely wrong. Best of all, I've found that when employees learn to consult their intuition at work, great things begin to happen to their career."

Orloff offers four tips from her book on how to do that:

Obey body signals. Perhaps you find that your stomach clenches up when a certain co-worker leans into your cubicle. Or you feel a skip in your step whenever you're asked to be the designated scribe at the regular department meeting. These are your body's way of telling you something important. Listen to these subtle urges and hints. You may find out that the co-worker has been bad-mouthing you, or that you have a sought-after talent for writing.

Ask your dreams to provide answers. Our dreams often tell us, usually in symbolic code, what's happening in our lives. Keep a journal and pen by your bed. Write a request on a piece of paper before you go to sleep and put it next to your bed or under your pillow. For example, "What's the best way for me to get the promotion?" In the morning, stay under the covers for a few minutes, luxuriating in a peaceful feeling between sleep and waking, what scientists call the hypnagogic state. Those initial moments provide a doorway to remembering your dream. Open your eyes and write down everything you can remember; otherwise it will evaporate. If you do this several days in a row, a surprising answer to your question will likely appear.

Pay attention to seeming coincidences. Sometimes life itself will present moments of clarity in the form of coincidences. These can be powerful teaching moments. For example, you've been thinking about changing jobs, when you bump into a long-lost friend who tells you about a dream job that's opening up.  Don't let such precious opportunities pass you by. Such synchronous events are signals that you are in the right place at the right time, or that you need to stop and pay close attention to what's in front of you.

Tune in to your intuitive empathy. This is when you "pick up a vibe" from another person. For no apparent reason, you suddenly feel hostility coming from a boss who is smiling at you, or you sense that a co-worker is hiding something. This innate sense that we all have can be fine-tuned by becoming aware of it. It will alert you to danger - a bully boss who has decided to scapegoat you, or a co-worker who made an accounting error and is now trying to cover her tracks.

For more information about Orloff's work, visit http://www.drjudithorloff.com.