After more than 25 years as a psychologist, Maria Di Pietro often knows something about the person sitting in front of her.
She can’t necessarily explain how. She calls it intuition. But, “It’s intuition with experience.”
What happens to our experience when we’ve accumulated so much of it that we no longer consciously think through what we know?
I’ve known Maria for more than a decade. We originally met through Thought Leaders and have remained connected as colleagues and friends.
What interested me wasn’t psychology as a profession. It was the accumulated experience of someone who has spent decades sitting with people, working inside organisations and helping people through difficult situations.
I went into the conversation wanting to ask: After all those years of observing people, what has Maria learned to see?
I expected that we would talk about observation. And I expected trauma to feature strongly. Both appear, but something else keep showing up: intuition.
Maria talks about “gut feel”, energy, knowing and trusting herself. She describes experience not simply as having encountered something before, but as accumulated wisdom that can transfer into situations she hasn’t previously experienced.
“We all go, ‘Oh yeah, I’ve got experience.’ But what does your experience actually look like? What does it mean? How do you use it?”
I asked Maria where she experiences intuition.
Her answer: “I get the feeling in my body.” And eventually: “You just know.”
This lead to further questions:
And how does she know when to trust it?
Maria tells a beautiful story about her mother questioning how a psychologist could understand something she hadn’t personally experience.
That leads Maria to an important distinction: professional experience isn’t simply “I’ve been through that too.” We carry knowledge and experience from one situation into another.
How much of expertise is having encountered the same situation before, and how much is learning how to respond when you haven’t?
Most of the intuition discussion is about experience accumulating slowly over decades.
But Trauma raises almost the opposite possibility: What happens when a single experience changes us?
I asked Maria: “Where does trauma fit into experience? And can one incident change your whole future?”
Maria discusses why two people can experience the same event differently and how previous experiences, relationships, social support and personality can affect what follows.
It suggests experience can occur at two very different scales: slowly over time and as a result of a single significant event.
Towards the end, I asked Maria what decades of working with people have done to the way she sees them.
She says her experience has reinforced her belief in “the power and the courage of the human spirit.”
After decades of seeing people struggling, overwhelmed, traumatised, angry, frightened and uncertain, what has all that experience caused her to see in people?
Potential. Courage. Possibility.
This conversation ranges across intuition, self-trust, trauma, regret, potential and the strange process by which years of experience can become something we simply “know.”
How much of what you know can you actually explain how you know?
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