When you're going for a job interview, or soliciting a new client, or interacting with media, or giving a speech it's good to keep this quote in mind.

It's called "transference" in therapy, and refers to fact that people remind us of other people. And fact that that happens is something you can't control for. If you happen to remind HR Manager of her high school English teacher that she hated, you have that going against you, and there's no way to control for that. Which makes it all more important to control for what you can. That means take care of basics:

Intuition is an EQ competency, that is it's considered something necessary to successful living, and something to be respected and valued. In recent years it has emerged from obscurity, even suspicion. What exactly is intuition? Main Entry: in·tu·i·tion 1 : quick and ready insight 2 a : immediate apprehension or cognition b : knowledge or conviction gained by intuition c : power or faculty of attaining to direct knowledge or cognition without evident rational thought and inference(www.m-w.com) According to Intuition magazine online, “intuition is increasingly recognized as a natural mental faculty, a key element in creative process, a means of discovery, problem solving, and decision making. Once considered province of a gifted few, it is now recognized as an innate capacity available to everyone--not a rare, accidental talent, but a natural skill anyone can cultivate.” Remember those math problems you got correct answer for, but you didn’t get full credit because you couldn’t show your work? Intuition, Intuition magazine says, “is a key ingredient in what we call genius, and it is also an important tool when applied to everyday life.”

That having been said, from where does this almost mystical ability come?

In their amazing book, "A General Theory of Love", authors Lewis, Amini and Lannon, all doctors, agree that all of us acquire wonderfully complicated knowledge that we cannot describe, explain, or recognize.

They cite researchers Knowlton, Mangels and Squire, who devised an interesting experiment – they gave subjects task of predicting weather in a simple computer model. They designed experiment so that as unhelpful as cues looked, they did relate lawfully to outcomes, but relationship between cues and effects was deliberately such a complex and probabilistic function that even smartest person couldn’t figure it out. It was way too difficult for logic to unravel; that is, subjects would have to approach this task without use of neocortex.

The researchers were right. No one figured it out, but that didn’t stop them from getting better at system they couldn’t understand or describe! After just 50 trials, average subject was right 70% of time, which means, of course, that some were doing far better than that. What they were doing was gradually developing a feel for situation and intuitively grasping essence of what was going on.