Have you ever driven somewhere familiar, arrived at your destination, and realised you can barely remember the journey? You stopped at the right junctions. You indicated at the right moments. You navigated the route correctly. But consciously? You were somewhere else entirely. Thinking about work, replaying a conversation, planning your evening. The driving just happened….
I want to tell you about a patient I saw in my consulting room. He was a smoker, had been for decades, and wasn’t interested in stopping. We’d had the conversation more than once. The health risks were well established and he knew them. But he had an answer ready every time. His grandfather had…
A friend of mine, miserable and exhausted from her job, underpaid compared to colleagues elsewhere, had been offered a role at another practice. She wasn’t taking it. When I asked why, she said something I’ve heard dozens of times in various forms. “But what if it doesn’t work out? What if the new place is…
Reactance bias can help or hinder us in life. Use it the right way, and it’s a powerful driver. Get it wrong, and we’re going to stubbornly hang on to the bad stuff in our lives just because we can. Let me tell you a story that shaped my entire career. When I was a…
The last lesson talked about worry, and this feels like an ideal time to discuss the four big emotional drivers behind our worry and how these can affect our thinking more broadly. Because here’s the uncomfortable truth: your emotions are running the show far more than you’d like to admit. The four emotional drivers that…
You’re stuck, though maybe you don’t realise it yet. Maybe you’re convinced you’re making progress, working incredibly hard and wondering why nothing’s changing. Either way, something’s not working, and that’s why you’re here. Here’s the uncomfortable truth I need you to hear. Getting the life you want almost always means making changes, and inevitably you’ll…
I’ve never actually seen a person with a halo above their head. Yet every single day, I watch good-looking people, popular people, and charismatic people get more credence in meetings than they really should be getting. I see attractive people in adverts selling you watches, perfumes, and lifestyles you don’t need. And I see you…
“Ooooh,” I groaned, tilting my head slightly and letting my voice rise just a touch at the end of the sentence. “Your joints must be telling you something?” I was deliberately using what’s known in NLP (Neuro Linguistic Programming) and Ericksonian Hypnotic language as a selectional restriction violation. Her joints couldn’t actually talk to her,…
One of the general underlying trends for the last few chapters has been about taking action (or the lack of it). This problem is confounded because often we don’t realise this is what we need to do, or what it is we have to do. There’s another bias that needs to be discussed with this…
By now, I hope you’re beginning to accept that how you see the world, and a lot of how you think, is influenced by your cognitive biases. These aren’t occasional quirks. They’re running constantly in the background, affecting every decision you make, every interpretation you create, every judgement you form. Most of what you do…