About Maria Galli, PhD
I’m Maria Galli, a researcher and educator in Barcelona. I’m an Academic Collaborator in the Marketing Department at Esade Business and Law School (Universitat Ramon Llull), and I design and deliver training for universities, business schools and organisations.
I’m a researcher by training and by habit. For more than twenty years, I studied what influences human behaviour outside conscious awareness. Today, I bring that research together with teaching and further training to work with people who lead and people who teach, in companies, universities and business schools, in group programmes and one to one.
The question underneath all of it is simple:
Why can we understand what we should do and still find ourselves doing something else when it matters?
The research
I earned my PhD in Management at INSEAD and have taught at universities since 2004, including faculty positions at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and Universitat Pompeu Fabra.
My research has explored nonconscious processes, affect and cognition, with publications in the Journal of Consumer Research and the Journal of Consumer Psychology, where my 2011 lead article received the C.W. Park Award for the best paper published in the journal that year.¹ I also co-authored the chapter on affect and cognition in the APA Handbook of Consumer Psychology.
My full publication record is on ORCID.
The question that changed the work
Research gave me a way to study the forces that shape behaviour without our awareness. But the literature could tell me a great deal about how patterns form and very little about how they shift.
That gap moved my work beyond explanation and towards attention: what we notice in ourselves, in another person and in the situation before we try to regulate, solve or respond. It became the foundation of what I now call State Before Strategy: the principle that the state a person is in when they act shapes what they notice, judge and do, so understanding that state comes before choosing the strategy.
What I trained in
To explore that question beyond the laboratory, I completed the 350-hour Compassionate Inquiry® Professional Online Training, along with ten weeks of specialist training in recognising and responding to acute emotional distress. I am also a certified meditation instructor.
These approaches inform how I work, but my work is not therapy or clinical mental health care. My focus is on the effect of stress and pressure on attention, behaviour and the nervous system under load.
Attention before regulation. Most approaches to difficult emotion go straight to managing it. Mine starts one step earlier, with what the emotion is registering, because an emotion managed before it has been understood tends to come back, along with the pattern that produced it. Regulation matters. It comes second.
How I work now
I teach The Action Gap and Evidence-Based Decision Making at Esade. I also design and deliver training for institutions. In May 2026, I delivered a five-session programme for the teaching staff of the Esade Language Center. See that example and the formats I offer.
My current research is on psychological safety in learning environments, with Raquel H. Ribeiro. Our paper, Feedback, engagement, and integrative learning: a trace-based case study in a synchronous course, is published in Research in Learning Technology.
Alongside institutional programmes, I work one to one with people who lead teams or companies through AI for Leaders, and I teach AI for Conscious Creators, a small live course for people who want to use AI without handing over their thinking.
Keep exploring
I write essays in English and Spanish on the ideas behind my research, teaching and programmes.
If you’re interested in bringing this work into your university, business school or organisation, you can see how I work or book a conversation.
Or see how I work.
¹ Galli, M., & Gorn, G. (2011). Unconscious transfer of meaning to brands. Journal of Consumer Psychology, 21(2), 215–225. Awarded the C.W. Park Award by the Society for Consumer Psychology.