Nicky Lowe [00:00:00]:
Hi, it’s Nicky Lowe and welcome to the Wisdom for Working Mums podcast show. I’m your host and for nearly two decades now I’ve been an executive coach and leadership development consultant. And on this show I share evidence based insights from my coaching, leadership and psychological expertise and inspiring interviews that help women like you to combine your work, life and motherhood in a more successful and sustainable way. Join me and my special guests as we delve into leadership and lifestyle topics for women, empowering you to thrive one conversation at a time. I’m so happy that you’re here. And let’s get on with today’s episode. Today’s episode is for every one of us who’s ever felt decision fatigue.

Nicky Lowe [00:00:51]:
Those moments when your brain is buzzing with options, your calendar is packed, and the world seems to demand clarity. Right now, in an age of endless information, how do we make decisions that feel true to who we are? To help us navigate this, I’m joined by the brilliant Vicky Tan, product designer, behavioral scientist enthusiast, and author of Ask this Book a Question. Vicki is currently a design lead at Pinterest, one of my favorite places to hang out and formally at some of the world’s most influential tech companies, including Spotify, Headspace, and Google. And Vicky brings a rare blend of being tech savvy, design thinking with that psychological depth. Her book doesn’t just promise perfect answers, it helps you ask better questions. It’s playful, it’s profound, and it’s deeply human. We’ll be exploring in this conversation how to embrace our cognitive quirks, find, find clarity amid chaos and shift from overthinking to intentional action. I don’t know about you, but I need this in my life more than ever because as Vicki says, every decision you make contributes to the narrative of who you are and who you’re becoming.

Nicky Lowe [00:02:11]:
That’s powerful stuff. So I won’t keep you any longer. Let’s introduce Vicki. So welcome, Vicki. It is a pleasure to have you all the way from San Francisco on the podcast.

Vicki Tan [00:02:23]:
Thank you so much for having me, Nicky Lowe. And we have rhyming names.

Nicky Lowe [00:02:27]:
Yeah. Yeah. Well, I can’t wait to dive into this conversation because I’ve had the privilege of looking at your book and reading it and I was drawn in and absorbed. And I know that what you’ve got to share actually will be hugely valuable. But also people will be really curious about all of the wisdom. And actually it’s interesting because as I was reading through it, it was all about helping you find a new type of wisdom. And obviously this podcast is called Wisdom for Working Mums. Like how do we tap into that inner wisdom? And I think your book is like this key that just helps unlock it.

Nicky Lowe [00:03:05]:
So for those that don’t know about you and your work, can you just share a bit about who you are and how you’ve come to write this book?

Vicki Tan [00:03:13]:
Yeah, of course, I’d love to. And hello everybody. You know, I started off studying behavioral science in university and I worked in research for many years. I think anyone who knows me now as a designer in tech wouldn’t have known that. But I spent many years working in hospitals, in academia, in research, oncology and looking at pulmonology and diabetes. And so that gave me a really strong, I don’t know, rigorous research background. And I believe anyone who’s, who’s ever worked in tech should, should have a job outside of tech because tech is such like a strange wonderland of, of not reality. But I, living in Silicon Valley, I feel like most people will dabble in tech just because it’s the main industry here.

Vicki Tan [00:04:04]:
So I got lucky. It was early days and a friend referred me into a position at Google that was just an admin or a coordinator position. But somebody saw my background, I got plucked out of the pile to work on a team. Looking at how kind of like what you do, how do we make great teams or good managers, how do people work well together, how to, how do leaders become their best version of themselves? And it was on that team that I discovered design and then I kind of became a self taught designer from there, moving more towards startups like Lyft and Headspace, more recently Spotify and Pinterest. And it was a really nice accident to be able to use that knowledge of human psychology and behavioral science within like product design. Because you don’t have to be strictly like an artist or like a fine artist. You can have a sense for esthetics and like creative direction. But since most of these companies have style guides and you’re kind of working within interfaces, you’re not having to like draw or like, you know, create anything from scratch in that way.

Vicki Tan [00:05:22]:
And so yeah, a couple of these positions have really leaned into behavior within product design. Like at Headspace we actually had a behavioral science team looking at how we build habits and how we can help people learn meditation and then other places I’ve tried to bring that in, you know, at, at Spotify or at Pinterest we don’t, we have user researchers, but we don’t have like a behavior team. So as much as I can bring that into my design toolkit. I think it just gives me an extra little special, special edge for, for as being a designer.

Nicky Lowe [00:05:59]:
Yeah. And I, in your book you talk about, was it the organization where you work to help them do ride sharing and actually overcoming? Because I. It absolutely makes sense. Why would you get in a stranger’s car and how do you change that behavior?

Vicki Tan [00:06:15]:
Yeah, that was. So we have lived in the States, I guess you all Uber or the equivalent out there. And this was early days where, you know, Airbnb was just kind of getting to be a more popular option. And the idea of getting into a stranger’s car or staying at a stranger’s house or any of that, letting someone into your car, like, who are these people? There was a lot of thinking around, not only building trust around user profiles, the rating system, even trying to represent someone’s car in the app. Like instead of just saying who would, who would be bringing you. Like Lyft was really into people personalizing their car, kind of like adding flair, if you will, and making it feel very friendly. They encouraged you to sit in the front seat. So it very much felt like getting a ride from a friend.

Vicki Tan [00:07:08]:
And it might be that you left with a friend. Of course now it’s a little bit more impersonal, but I mean, in San Francisco we have self driving cars. I know, but it’s, it was such a cool, a cool way of like applying behavioral science mixed in with, with design. And each company there’s been a slightly different, they call it like a job to be done or a user need to fill. So it’s been fun, like a blend. And I think everyone who works with consumers or like in tech should have a little bit of that background.

Nicky Lowe [00:07:48]:
So that moves us beautifully on. So you said there about what’s the job to be done? Like what’s the purpose? What was the job to be done with your book? Like, what was the kind of compelling purpose that you wanted to address with your book?

Vicki Tan [00:08:05]:
Yeah, you know, coming from, I don’t know, I think it was a little bit of bridging those two worlds, the world of like science and structure and research and like evidence based things such as cognitive bias and decision making, which people tend to think of like, I need to like analyze my options and come up with the best decision and bridging that with like what feels to be like an emerging way of making decisions, which is much more intuitive. I think people feel so overwhelmed and a little bit paralyzed just with the uncertainty in the world today. And they’re turning to tarot cards and fortune tellers or whatever the version of that in your locale is, or just talking with friends or going with their gut. And I was really interested in bridging those two worlds, so injecting the structure into the more flexible and in some ways injecting more flexibility into what would. Would otherwise feel quite structured.

Nicky Lowe [00:09:10]:
Yeah. Because you start the book talking about the Magic 8 Ball, don’t you? About. Actually, I want to take you into this world where we’ve almost got like a fortune teller telling us what we. Where we should go and what we should do.

Vicki Tan [00:09:21]:
Yeah. It’s such a enticing concept, and I think people treat a lot of the chat LLMs like this. Now, like, the idea that you could just have like a thing to guide you feels like a salve, but also like a. A shortcut way out.

Nicky Lowe [00:09:37]:
Yeah. And how do you think your background as a designer has influenced how you’ve presented the book? Because it is. It’s beautifully presented, but it’s also incredibly engaging. So what, what do you think has. Has influenced that?

Vicki Tan [00:09:53]:
You know, I tried to design, and it was sort of an accident. And this kind of happens in design where you have a concept, and designers, they often try a lot of things. Like they go broad. It’s sort of this double diamond where you go really broad, and then you narrow in to see what’s working, and then you go broad again with those concepts, and then you narrow in. And with this. The concept I had was I want to teach people about cognitive bias. And I just think it’s like a wealth of knowledge that we would all be better off really internalizing just as much as we should know arithmetic or as much as we should know our geography and things like that. Like, if we could just understand how our mind tends to work, we can work with it.

Vicki Tan [00:10:41]:
If there’s a. There’s a kink in the road, you lean into it. And so that was like the thing I wanted to do. And I started off designing. It was a more interactive book. It was a just a pocket guide device. I started off very on the nose of, like, let me find fun, visual interactive ways of teaching people cognitive bias. And in time, like, talking to enough friends who wanted to quit their job or talking to enough friends who weren’t sure what city to move to, I found myself conveying the knowledge like, oh, have you heard of, you know, this bias? Or did you know, this might be at play? And that didn’t.

Vicki Tan [00:11:20]:
That didn’t click for them. And what really clicked were the stories that you’ve kind of alluded to. And there’s one in particular of my friend Grace, who was trying to quit her job at a very big tech company. And she’d been there for so long, she had come straight from an Ivy League into that job and all of her network was there, all of her stock, like it was a. It was hard to quit. It was, it was very much an investment into that company. And I was trying to explain the sunk cost fallacy and, you know, all of the biases that might be at present play. And it wasn’t until I cooked her dinner the mapo, it was a dinner that I cooked often for myself when I quit.

Vicki Tan [00:12:03]:
And it wasn’t until I kind of told her the story and made her the dinner of how that worked for me, like unlocking my year or whatever of self employment, that it really made sense for her. And it was so all to say it’s not the information that tends to lead to action, but like appealing to someone on an emotionally resonant level. And the rest of the book was formed in service of helping you either find the right story and the stories are in service of helping you learn the biases. So it’s a little bit backwards.

Nicky Lowe [00:12:38]:
Oh, it’s beautifully woven in. So I, I’ll hand over to you to describe the book because I think I’ll. I was going to do it then and I was like, no, why would I. Why would I sit in front of the author and tell her what her book’s about?

Vicki Tan [00:12:52]:
Well, I would love for you to supplement after I do, after I explain it what, what you took away from it too.

Nicky Lowe [00:13:00]:
Absolutely. So can you describe the premise of the book then?

Vicki Tan [00:13:03]:
Yeah. Yeah. The book is a. Choose your own adventure where the, the start of the adventure is the question that you bring to the book. The. The book that you ask to the. The question that you ask to. To the book.

Vicki Tan [00:13:17]:
And the whole first part of the book is about understanding why you even have this question. Because if you had an answer to it, you wouldn’t be here. It would be like, next, next, done. And so to. To begin to understand why the question has been so hard to answer. I asked you to go through a few. You could call them like lenses or filters. The first one is the most obvious.

Vicki Tan [00:13:41]:
It’s around like category. And I kind of am trying to teach you as you go with these visuals, I kind of think of them as trying to visualize thought, the relationship between subcategories and categories and the idea that urgent questions might like the Timing of a question might influence the way you think about answering it. And you flip through these pages, the hope is that you’re learning while you’re looking through them. And then what’s, what’s fun is that for each page, almost each page, there’s a, like a notation for where to go in the book when something resonates with you. And that is sort of like the personalization part of it, where even if, like, you don’t have a question about health or relationships and you really want to get to those existential questions, you’re being asked to look through these other things, and that might spark something for you or that might spark a learning. And then each of those page notations either go to a story like we were talking about, or a bias spread, but all of those are interlinked with each other. So the biases are called out in the story, related stories are called out in the biases. And the hope is that you kind of make your way really intuitively through the book, finding a path that, that resonates with you.

Nicky Lowe [00:15:06]:
Oh, beautifully said, Vicki. And I feel exactly the same about, as you said it, about going on this journey. It’s almost like you go into the woods knowing that you’ve got to go on this journey to discover the answers. But your book kind of takes, guides you without telling you the exact path. You still get to choose and select and self, self create the path that you take. And it’s almost like you come out the other end of the forest into the sunlight and you can see much clearer because as you’ve talked about, you really dive into this principle of cognitive bias. So for somebody that has heard that term but may not understand what it actually is, would you mind just giving your insight into what do we actually mean when we’re talking about cognitive bias?

Vicki Tan [00:15:56]:
Yeah, of course, cognitive biases are just a set of, you could call them mental shortcuts that your brain takes in service of helping you make faster decisions. Or you could say that in a world where there’s so much information, and I’m not even talking about the modern world when there’s information. Just think about before the Internet, before the modern day surrounding you right now. There’s so much sound input, there’s visual input, there’s, you know, tactile sensory input, and with all of that, you need to be able to take a step forward. You need to be able to choose whether to act or not and how to respond. And in any given moment, our brain is filtering things in or out, and you could Think of it as emphasizing certain things and de. Emphasizing other things. And a cognitive bias is just your brain’s shortcut for those which really help us get through the everyday.

Vicki Tan [00:16:56]:
And so the fact that they have, I think they kind of have a bad reputation. I think it’s such a shame because they’re so, so helpful and useful for our, our lives.

Nicky Lowe [00:17:07]:
Yes. And I love in the book that you talk about it, it’s not a flaw to be fixed as you say, but it’s a window into how we think. And if the more you’re aware of that, the more kind of empowered you are to navigate those decisions. And I thought I knew quite a bit about cognitive biases and then I saw how many are in your book and I’m like, wow, I’d got a bias on how many I knew. So like there were things. One of the stories, and as you say, you’ve got these beautiful stories that bring them alive. And one of them that struck me was, was it your friend Yance? Is it Yancey’s mustache? And I was like, this is intriguing. Would you mind sharing a little bit about that? So story.

Nicky Lowe [00:17:52]:
Yeah.

Vicki Tan [00:17:52]:
And you know, Yancy is some of you, if you’re familiar with startups, I suppose Yancy is the co founder of Kickstarter and he started a new venture recently. But I just think it’s so funny to imagine because you can imagine his face. So Yancy, the co founder of Kickstarter, you would think he would have all the confidence in the world and be beyond imposter syndrome. But he himself was in the situation of writing a book as a first time author, although he was a music journalist before he was a co founder and he was trying to write this book on how we could have a better world, just a manifesto for a more positive future. And he was feeling a lot of like uncertainty, like can I do this? Is this good? I think a lot of us feel that for anything new and it’s, it’s probably why we hesitate to, to do the new things because of our, what can be a paralyzing kind of worry around it being good or people laughing at us. And so for him he, he took like a page from the Beatles or just this idea that if you could take on a Persona of a person who knows how to do the thing, then you can do the thing. And so in his case he grew a mustache because Mustachio Dancey was the type of person who could write like an incredible book on this topic and, and having it’s sort of like the idea of like the magic ballet slippers or anything like that, your lucky pen, just this thing that can temporarily help you and your insecurity get out of the way of yourself so that you can do the thing or use the insight or the intuition that was there all along that even led you to the place of doing that endeavor.

Nicky Lowe [00:19:50]:
And so from a behavioral science perspective, is it fair to say that that is called effective forecasting?

Vicki Tan [00:19:57]:
Yeah, I’m trying to think of the specific, specific biases in Nancy’s story. And yes, there is an effective forecasting aspect and for anyone who, I wouldn’t imagine anyone knows this one, but affect, not effect. Your affect is just your emotional state. It can be a, like a positive or negative affect. We say. And what’s fascinating is about with effective forecast forecasting, we tend to think that how we feel in the moment, when we think about something is how we’ll be in the moment. So if you’re going on a big trip or you have a big talk, you feel nervous, you and are, we tend to forecast that in the future we will feel nervous. But in actuality, our brain and our bodies have all these coping mechanisms that kick in in the moment to help us do the thing we’re so afraid of.

Vicki Tan [00:20:49]:
And so if you think back about a time you were nervous about a trip and then you took the trip and it was incredible, we tend to under emphasize the actual, like natural facilities we have. And so the mustache or whatever you want it, your lucky hat, can help displace a little bit of that nervousness in the moment.

Nicky Lowe [00:21:09]:
I love that. And how many biases have you got in the book? I didn’t count them all up, but there are, there are tens of.

Vicki Tan [00:21:18]:
Yeah, I think there’s 48 maybe, or something like that, just short of a nice flat 50. But in terms of spreads, where I’ve taught, where I talk about them in, in detail, there’s maybe 48 and then in the glossary there’s probably hundreds.

Nicky Lowe [00:21:36]:
And so I, I think that insight alone, I mean, it is a beautiful book with amazing stories. And I said to you before we hit record, I think you’re a powerful storyteller. And we said, actually your role in design, design is about telling stories with whatever way you’re, you’re kind of expressing that. And by reading those stories you really get an insight into all those cognitive biases. And that alone, I think for anybody that’s not familiar with kind of behavioural science, it is so powerful. And I think, particularly for anybody listening, because as I Said to you, Vicki, my audience are professional women that are navigating big decisions in the workplace, but also a lot of decisions in the home from, you know, even just like, what to cook for dinner tonight or, you know, where should my children go to school? And that mental mode and decision fatigue is real. And then you layer in somebody like me that’s in midlife with perimenopause, where your brain doesn’t work as well as you want it to, and you’re like, oh, I’m trying to make decisions, and I feel like I’m wading through mud. I think your book is a real enabler and empower around that.

Nicky Lowe [00:22:46]:
So in terms of giving my listeners an insight into how they could use this book, can you share a little bit more about what your hope is for somebody reading the book and how it might benefit them?

Vicki Tan [00:22:58]:
Yeah. I mean, a lot of it is this idea that, like, if you can internalize how some of these biases show up in our lives, for example, in the. In the must. In Yancey’s mustache story, it’s really. And it doesn’t even ask you to learn any of the biases or their names straight out. But the idea is, if you just remembered now you have a picture of him and his mustache, and you could probably imagine what your mustache would be your way of donning, like, an alter ego one, a Persona who could do the task at hand. That alone, that sort of, like, memory or mnemonic device. I love that example as a way of not having to feel like you have to memorize a list of things.

Vicki Tan [00:23:47]:
Because, like, I could tell you, like, okay, this is how you, you know, optimize your meal planning, or this is how you optimize decision making or something like that. And it wouldn’t be. It wouldn’t necessarily be right for your situation. And I think that’s what the book is trying to emphasize. That, like, I can sort of teach you these. These concepts in a memorable way. But it’s. It’s on.

Vicki Tan [00:24:12]:
It’s. It’s on you. And I think it’d be the most fruitful for. For you to then think about, like, what are the stories in your life? Or even if you think about the introduction, like, what are the mental models that you have of framing the way you’re thinking about questions? And so it’s a little bit sneaky, but what I want people to do is almost, whether in their mind or in their journal, create their own version of this book, which is how are you framing your questions? What are the stories that you really can come back to as life lessons. And then within those, like, why are they working? And if you can take out what’s working and lean on those things in your future decisions, like, you’re golden. Yeah.

Nicky Lowe [00:24:55]:
And just earlier today, because I was going back and reminding myself, because I’d read the book a little while ago and I wanted to go back and remind myself before this interview, interview, and me and my team communicate on Voxer. You know, the. I don’t know if you’ve ever used Voxer, but it’s, it’s a walkie talkie app, so you can either walkie talk real time, so you just hold your finger and you record a voice note effectively, but you can, you can respond to them real time. And it’s just, it’s, it’s a way we, we’re geographically dispersed, but it’s almost like we’re in the same room talking. It allows us to stay connected. And my business manager had left me me a voice note to say that earlier today she went to a networking event and it was in her local town. And she lives in this kind of small town in the north of England that she grew up there, moved to London and then moved back there. And whenever she’s done networking events, she’s always felt like she needs to go to London or the big cities.

Nicky Lowe [00:25:58]:
Like, you were talking earlier, you went to Edinburgh. So she, she was like actually to network professionally and to meet the right people. She felt like she’d always had to go and travel to the big cities. And somebody had invited her to a networking event that was in a local town. And she was like, there’s no point going, these aren’t my kind of my work people. They might be where my friends and family are, but they’re not my work people. So she went pretty cynical. And she’d left me this voicemail going, oh, my God.

Nicky Lowe [00:26:27]:
I had totally underestimated that I would connect with people that I really resonated with. And I was like, I’ve just been reading Vicki’s book again, and that’s your cognitive bias around, you know. And I was like, I don’t know what the, which cognitive bias it would be, but it was like, yeah, how that kind of psychological trap of actually, this is a small town. It doesn’t necessarily have people that were the similar type of business to me, therefore it wouldn’t be useful. And she was like, oh, I realized that actually I’ve been cutting myself off and perhaps just not having to travel so far to, to connect in A business way.

Vicki Tan [00:27:03]:
Yeah, that there’s a lot of. I feel like that would be. I’m trying to think of the names of the biases, the availability bias. So this happens pretty broadly. But the availability bias, it’s the name, it’s all in the name. The things that come to you more quickly, the things that are more obvious or available, whether that be like, this is where networking happens, so this is where I need to go. Or these are the three cities I can live in, so I have to trade off between those three. Or these are places I can work, these are jobs I can do.

Vicki Tan [00:27:38]:
Like we default so frequently to. This is what I’ve heard. Or this is what came to mind and similar to your friend, like there’s infinite other options. Then the first thing that come to mind and as soon as we can start to get creative with that, the more the world opens up, which is like, you don’t have to be so limited to. To the first thing.

Nicky Lowe [00:28:05]:
And what I thought was fascinating in your book, you. And I don’t know if I’m going to capture it exactly, but it was almost like we, if we’re going to buy a new home appliance, we might do loads of research about what’s the best one, what’s the. Like, what are the ratings? What do people say? What’s the. I don’t know, the energy efficiency. And then some other, like, very existential life decisions will just go, I don’t know, it just feels right. I’m going to go with my gut instincts. And I was like, oh, we are so complex as human beings aren’t. We will do like loads of research to buy an appliance, but then not necessarily for some of the bigger decisions.

Nicky Lowe [00:28:40]:
Not that that’s right or wrong, but just interesting how we do that.

Vicki Tan [00:28:44]:
Yeah. It’s paradoxical and I think it’s because for toothbrushes or appliances, you can, you can. They have the stats and you want to feel like you’re doing your due diligence and it’s sort of like maximizing within a very small context. And that can be misleading because you’re like, yeah, I’m doing a good job. When like the, the results are not inconsequential. It’s important to have a good appliance. But where should you be spending your time and effort? Maybe. Maybe the bigger decisions.

Nicky Lowe [00:29:15]:
And I’d love to know what’s your favorite story from the book? Because there are so many. What. Which one kind of is your. I suppose your, your favorite. If you’re if you’re allowed to have a favorite.

Vicki Tan [00:29:25]:
Yeah, I don’t know if I have a favorite. I think I have ones that I like more. You know, it’s funny, I tried to find my favorites for the ordering of the book. Even though you’re supposed to choose your own adventure, I was aware that some people would just read through it linearly. So I think I definitely put a few of my favorites at the beginning and the end. And I tried to use. There’s a concept called the, the peak end effect. And I tried to put the best ones in the beginning and the end.

Vicki Tan [00:29:54]:
So you start on a high note and leave on a high note. But obviously the one about Charlie, my huge dog, my favorite. Yeah, because it’s such like. It’s also really fun to tell in person, especially if he’s there just because. Yeah, it’s. It’s a funny kind of heartwarming one. And I think we should all have pets and, or adopt things and be open to the encounters that those bring. But yeah, please tell.

Vicki Tan [00:30:23]:
Recount the story for the listeners.

Nicky Lowe [00:30:27]:
Yeah, so I, and I. I’m a dog owner as well, so I could really relate to this. So was it in lockdown you decided that you would get a dog and you’d got this criteria. And I could completely relate to the criteria. You wanted a dog that you would be able to go out on hiking and go out for walks so it could be active. But equally while you were sat working, it wouldn’t kind of be too playful. So it got that kind of placid nature as well. And you’d got in mind perhaps the kind of size or breed that would work for you.

Nicky Lowe [00:30:59]:
And you went to a rescue center and the lady ends up suggesting rather different dog to what you had anticipated and turns up with this rather bigger dog in a car. And I’ll let you kind of describe the story from there.

Vicki Tan [00:31:19]:
He’s just a huge. He’s 120 pounds. In fact, he weighs more than I do. And he’s, he’s just a completely white, fluffy. It’s. It’s a great Pyrenees. I think those in Europe might be more familiar with the pyrenee and mountain dog. But people have described him looking like a polar bear, like, just like a mythical sort of creature.

Vicki Tan [00:31:41]:
Never ending story. I get a lot of references, you know, from, from like, from like cartoons as well. And it just. The rest of the story just goes that I was so skeptical, similar to your friend about networking. I was so skeptical. I was like, this dog, first of all, the fur like, how much does he eat? Like, what if I have to lift, carry him somewhere? Like, I can’t. And my mind immediately jumped to all the reasons not. And in time, you know, walking with him, seeing people’s reaction, I think.

Vicki Tan [00:32:13]:
I think adopting a dog invites so many beautiful human interactions. Or just being a pet owner itself is. Is really meaningful. But when you have a huge, huge white dog that people can’t help commenting on or asking you about, like, it’s like walking. I joke in the book, it’s like walking around with a D list celebrity because I was living in New York with him as well as here in San Francisco. And everyone talks to you at every moment. You can be. It can be like first thing in the morning, you can be on the phone.

Vicki Tan [00:32:48]:
Like, even if you’re in a bad mood or good mood, you need to respond. I felt like I should at least respond to these people. And it’s such a good practice of realizing, and this was kind of the moral of the story, that I see him every day. I’m kind of used to him, but for everyone else, he’s so remarkable. And it was a practice of getting out of my own mind and remembering that, like, look, everyone sees the world so differently. And every single time I walk with him, I’m reminded of our bias, our egocentric bias, our nature of, like, kind of beginning from our point of view. So, yes.

Nicky Lowe [00:33:26]:
And I think you. You present that so beautifully in that story, because I hadn’t come across the egocentric bias. And I’m sure many of us have been on the receiving end and can kind of get the essence of it, but to know actually, oh, it’s a bias that exists. And yes, when we can get out of our own world, it’s. Suppose it’s the basis of empathy, isn’t it? And put ourselves in somebody else’s shoes. But knowing that our bias doesn’t necessarily make that easy to do.

Vicki Tan [00:33:52]:
Yeah, exactly. Or even like an attentional bias. This idea that, like, Charlie was walking around so slowly, like, slowly smelling everything very. He’s very, like. He sort of meanders like more than a typical dog. He’s quite Zen, like. And this idea that, like, you can shift your attention to whatever you want it. The attentional bias is this thing where I don’t know if you’ve ever noticed someone with your same glasses or your same car or something, and all of a sudden you start seeing it everywhere, or someone talks to you about something, something, and all of a sudden you start hearing it everywhere.

Vicki Tan [00:34:29]:
That’s the Attentional bias. Like, once we. Once something is called to our attention, our brain does some pattern matching. And I think that that one’s really cool because you can start to pay attention to the things you want to pay more attention to. It’s almost like a gratitude practice, and then it’s almost like seeding your own awareness.

Nicky Lowe [00:34:49]:
So, yeah, and I think that’s amazing. I absolutely do. And I said before we hit record, obviously my background is as a coach, and I know the power of asking really, really good questions and also how that helps people unlock these psychological traps. As you talk about, you know, the fact that we don’t see the world as it is, we see the world as we are. And almost starting to uncover where we’ve deleted information or distorted information and being able to have a different option about how we then walk the world with that reclaimed information. And I think your stories and bringing attention to these biases really, really brings that alive. So I suppose I’m curious as to which of the bias really surprised you when you were doing the research for the book. Which ones, I suppose, changed how you see the world? Clearly you’d got a background in behavioral kind of science, so you probably were aware of these at some level.

Nicky Lowe [00:35:47]:
But were there any that kind of really brought into sharp focus for you?

Vicki Tan [00:35:52]:
Hmm. Yeah, I think the. The ones that I investigated a little more for the book, Like, I had known about the denomination effect as something very simplistic. Like when you have smaller denominations of money, think change or dollar bills, you’re more frivolous with them. You give them out or you throw them away, like you’re spending a few dollars on coffee every day. But when it comes down to spending a lot of money, you know, we take a little bit more time, I think, I hope in general to think about that. I think that was what I had known about denomination effect. But as I dug into the book and tried to tell more stories around biases around, that one really expanded for me to include reframing it to include time.

Vicki Tan [00:36:46]:
And this idea of, like, big denominations of time, we are very hesitant to invest in, like, oh, that’s going to take, you know, our whole weekend over many months. Or even on the. On the inverse, like, very small denominations of time can. Can add up. I called them time confetti in the book. But this idea that we have 15 minutes here or five minutes there, and we tend to use those for nothing. But the idea that the things that we might kind of toss or leave by the wayside can be so valuable if you’re intentional about using those denominations. I think that one was a really cool one for me because I just hadn’t seen anyone not only flip the denomination to, like, make use of the.

Vicki Tan [00:37:35]:
The small ones, but also to change what we think about as the resource from. From money to time.

Nicky Lowe [00:37:43]:
And it’s interesting. I literally last week listened to an interview between Michelle Obama and Bruce Springsteen. She had him on her podcast because they. They’re clearly really good friends, kind of behind the scenes. I knew that Barack Obama was really good friends with Bruce, but as couples, they’re really, really close. And they were talking about being parents. Bruce was sharing that his dad was what he called. Oh, what was the term he used? Absent.

Nicky Lowe [00:38:18]:
Absent in the home. And what he meant by that was some people have absent fathers that might leave home. But his dad unfortunately suffered with mental health and was an alcoholic. So even though he was in the home, he was absent because he wasn’t able to emotionally connect and sometimes even mentally connect with them as children. And he was talking about he’d found his solace in music and writing. And that’s kind of part of his healing. But it also meant that he was quite addicted to his work because it helped solve a lot of the trauma that he’d had as a child. And his wife had ended up making him aware that, look, you know, your children are missing out on time.

Nicky Lowe [00:38:58]:
And Michelle Obama tells this story of like, yeah, you know, it’s how you spend the pennies and you know, and they talk about it might have been how that you spend the cents or actually those small little parts of time build up. And actually, as you say, that dominate denomination effect, it’s like, I’m only going to work for another five minutes. But five minutes turns into an hour. And actually, if you’re doing that every day and then. Yeah. So I hadn’t realized that they were absolutely talking about that effect.

Vicki Tan [00:39:28]:
Yeah. And the fact that they used pennies. And I think that was what they. The original bias was based on just the idea that when you have pennies, you tend to like, throw. People would throw them away. I think they’ve gotten rid of pennies.

Nicky Lowe [00:39:41]:
You used to throw them into wells as like, good luck to wish on. Yeah. And there are so many stories like that. So I would really, really, anybody that is listening to get the book. It’s that. Ask this book a question. And it literally is like asking a fortune teller your question. But you are empowered.

Nicky Lowe [00:40:03]:
You’re not giving that kind of answer away to somebody else, which is what I love about this book, you’re not giving any advice, but you’re just empowering people with the wisdom to be able to navigate those questions in a more empowered way. So if there’s just one thing that somebody listening to this conversation takes away, what would you want that to be?

Vicki Tan [00:40:26]:
That’s a good question. There’s so many. Yeah, the, the one tricky part of the book is there’s so many different aspect. Aspects of it. But one part of the book that I feel like is really helpful is a part we haven’t talked about yet, which are the blockers. Because sometimes it’s more helpful to think about what’s getting in the way of you answering the question versus the actual question. And so I ask these six questions over these. The last.

Vicki Tan [00:40:56]:
It’s sort of like the last part of the first part of the book where I think that if for any time you’re stuck, you could ask yourself these six questions in a series, it could be a helpful like almost like a checklist. And you can ask. It’s how is your intuition feeling about this question? Is it that you cannot trust your gut or your internal compass and you’re misaligned in that way? Maybe it’s that you don’t have the resources to answer to like actually handle this or address the question. It could be that you don’t have your, the skills and maybe you need to actually do some sit, sit down and build up skills before you can make this decision. Support. Maybe your friends, family or acquaintances aren’t like aligned with you and you’re kind of finding yourself hiding or, or withdrawing that because you don’t have their support. And then the last two are, maybe it’s that you’re not emotionally ready to dig in and you need to do a little more work to kind of build up the emotional capacity to get there. And then I think this one is interesting, especially these days, but have you thought about the impact your question or the decision will have on people around you or the environment or even just the world? The world and the future.

Vicki Tan [00:42:15]:
And so just running through these six questions, I’ve kind of found that like it’s a nice gut check that can help help you understand like which direction to go. And then you don’t have to know any of the biases to get started with those.

Nicky Lowe [00:42:32]:
And those are so powerful. And particularly as you say those last two about I don’t. Do I have the emotional resource? Because often we think about, oh, have I got the information, have I got the data? We go from very head driven but to drop into the body and go, actually, what else is it? I might need to feel ready for this and that piece around the ripple impact. And as a concept in coaching, we talk about the ecology check. So when you’re trying to make a decision, what’s the impact on the ecology around you? Whether that actually be the physical environment, but just the people or kind of family or whatever it might be. So I love that you have got those six simple frames to think about. Blockers.

Vicki Tan [00:43:15]:
Yeah. I feel like just knowing. Knowing that the answer to your question or the. The sort of way to approach your decision is to not look for a quick answer as well. Like, hence these further questions is a thing to become comfortable with. And if you can become comfortable with the idea that expanding and leaning into kind of like the. The uncertainty. And that’s sort of the key first step is, is.

Vicki Tan [00:43:44]:
Is a good practice to have. And I hope the book teaches you that.

Nicky Lowe [00:43:48]:
Oh, no, it does. And I think this book’s probably needed now more than ever in a world where we’re probably leaning on AI to help us make decisions. You’re kind of taking the humanness back and go, no, no, come back to you and actually just clean the mirror a little bit. So we’re not letting kind of these biases kind of and helpfully lead us, but that I think you’re bringing us, connecting us back to more of our humanness. And I think that’s really powerful in the world that we’re kind of navigating going forward. And the irony of you coming from the tech world is not me. And that. Yes.

Vicki Tan [00:44:19]:
So many people have asked, why don’t you just build an app instead of writing a book? And I’m like, I can always do that. I mean, and it sort of loses some of the, like, introspection. So you can’t sit in a park laying the grass in bed. Like, I think in a moment, when we’re trying to kind of separate ourselves from some of like, the sort of tight grip that technology has on us, I feel like better to start here. And I can always go back into the realm of tech.

Nicky Lowe [00:44:49]:
Yeah. So for anybody that wants to find out more about you, where to get the book, where would you suggest they head to? And I’ll put all the links into the show notes.

Vicki Tan [00:45:00]:
Yeah, I mean, Vicky Tan.com is my website and it has sort of just some. Some tidbits about the book. Otherwise, Instagram is where I post a lot of, like, the behind the scenes of making the book. You can see that the book at before in early days was a much more visual interactive board book. We didn’t get to that, but you can check it out on Instagram.

Nicky Lowe [00:45:24]:
Handle.

Vicki Tan [00:45:24]:
It’s Vicky Hart. So V I C K I H E A R T And yeah, you can find Charlie there too.

Nicky Lowe [00:45:34]:
Amazing. So Vicki with an I and tan T a N. And the book is Ask this Book a Question. Thank you, Vicki, for all of the work that you’ve put out into the world and for what you’re doing. I just think it’s amazing.

Vicki Tan [00:45:49]:
Oh, thank you so much for chatting with me. This was really fun.

Nicky Lowe [00:45:54]:
If you’ve enjoyed this episode of Wisdom for Working Mums, I’d love for you to share it on social media or with the amazing women in your life. I’d also love to connect with you, so head over to luminate.co.uk where you’ll find ways to stay in touch. And if this episode resonated with you, one of the best ways to support the show is by subscribing and leaving a review on itunes. Your review helps other women discover this resource, so together we can lift each other up as we rise. So thanks for listening. Until next time. Take care.