About

 

About Jane Mara

Jane Mara is a published author, researcher, keynote speaker, executive coach and facilitator trainer specialising in the science of intuition and its application to decision-making in business and professional practice.

For more than twenty years she has researched exactly what intuition is, how it works, and developed the methodology to effectively train it.

Intuition is not mystical. It is measurable. It is trainable. Grounded in heart coherence and somatic intelligence. Blended with rigorous analysis, it produces faster, clearer, more confident decisions. That is the foundation of Expert Intuition, the consultancy Jane founded and has led for over twenty years.

Her first book, Intuition on Demand: Activate Your Intuitive Intelligence for Business Success (2005), was built on original research conducted across multiple occupations globally. It remains the only comprehensive study of its kind outside the academic world. AFR Boss magazine selected it as one of the Top 50 Management Books of 2005.

Her second book, Think Like an Entrepreneur: The Mindset of Success (2017), developed in collaboration with Professor Murray Gillin, draws on thirty years of scientific research into what makes entrepreneurs succeed where others do not.

In December 2025 Jane published More Than Just a Gut Feeling: The Power of Intuition in Nursing in The Hive, the journal of the Australian College of Nursing, on the role of clinical intuition in nursing practice.

Jane has delivered masterclasses, training, facilitation and keynote presentations for AMP Capital, PwC, Optus, ING, Johnson and Johnson, Fairfax Media, the Australian Graduate School of Management, Queensland Government, Queensland Health, the Australian Institute of Management, the University of NSW and Griffith University. Client satisfaction ratings have consistently reached 95 per cent and above.

In the age of AI, data is not the problem. Interpretation is. AI will never replicate human intuition. The leaders who develop that skill will thrive. Those who rely on data alone will not.

Qualifications: Postgraduate Diploma - Management (MBA) program - Macquarie Graduate School of Management; Facilitator for the Australian Institute of Management; Holistic Counsellor; NLP practitioner  

Books:

Intuition on Demand – activate your intuitive intelligence for business success

Think like an Entrepreneur – the mindset of success

Have a read of the following interviews with leading thinkers on how to access intuition for clarity of decision-making.

Excerpt:  Michael Rennie

Michael Rennie was the Managing Director of McKinsey at the time of this interview

Michael is a person who is very aware of intuition and uses it actively in his daily life. He expanded on this subject relating how intuition fits into the overall mode of thinking in his view: 

I have come to realise that there are a number of different modes of thinking. There is a logical mode of thinking where you can sit down and work through all the pieces, which is a lot of what we do here [at McKinsey]. Then there is inductive and deductive thinking within that. We get trained a lot in those different thinking modes and how to communicate that to clients — that is a big part of the model here. 

There is also feeling, and the more you come to realise that thinking is not just analytical/rational — [it] rather has an irrational and feeling component to it. So I have learnt to be quite sensitive to what I am feeling, when I am thinking, because the feeling comes first, often, and actually creates the thoughts. All the research seems to support that. 

You start to realise that there is analytical logic and feeling. And there is an aspect of feeling, which can often be very logical and it actually directs you.

So when you go, “why am I feeling this?”, it actually directs you towards certain logic, or it can appear illogical and you can’t work out in the moment why you are feeling that.  There is something going on that you need to be aware of, or take account of, and there is a deeper form of thinking. I call it intuition or knowingness. The way I think about it is very much a physics analogy. We have a Newtonian world of physics, which is large objects that move very slowly — zero to 200 cycles per second, and then you have the world of the quantum, which is very small objects moving at 500,000 cycles per second, and everything is operating in a quantum reality. 

You then go into the deeper side, that there is actually, information. And everything that is happening is actually recorded as information in the quantum through wave action and theory. There is a way in which you can tap into the quantum. The logical is very much at the Newtonian level, and there is a quantum level of thinking, which is intuition. For me it is about tapping into the field of quantum energy — so how does that work? 

It’s like a ‘U’. I did a lot of work with people like Otto Scharmerⁱⁱ, who has developed the Theory of U, when I was working in the States. It is a nice way of thinking about it. Essentially, the key to intuitive thinking, to me, is the physiology — three bodies — the physical, mental and emotional. 

You have a physical body, the lungs, mental–emotional brain and nervous system. The feeling part of it - thinking - is happening in the emotional body, and then it is coming into the physical body as action, or the stimulus is coming from the emotional body. And there is a third body, which is an energetic body. 

The key is how you tap into the third body, and the way you tap into that is essentially for me a two-prong process –— the first is that you have got to intimately connect yourself with the subject matter, essentially you have got to be in it, intimately. 

Once you are deeply in it, it’s like the veils between the worlds — you have got to go into it, and there is a point at which you sort of let go into it, and you wait for what comes — it is like a small voice that comes to you.