Get Booked – Joseph Bikart And His Book “The Art Of Decision Making”

Hello, I'm Hazel and this is Get Booked for Women's Radio Station. I hope you're all ready and raring to get booked today, my show all about books and writers and with a little bit of an edge of emotional well-being and mental health. And today I have such a treat in store for you, I honestly do not even know where to start. We have Joseph— is it Bicart or bikeart? In London it's bicart, in New York it tends to be bikeart. Right, which should we go with? Bicart is fine. And if you're in Paris, I'm French, it's bicart. Oh, I'm going to go for bicart. Okay, great. With perfect accent, I might add. Oh, merci. Thank you, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for having me, Hazel. I've been looking forward to this. I've had your book for a while and I've been stopping and starting because I wanted to kind of let it all sink in. Link in and try and kind of address what you're saying and the different topics. The Art of Decision Making: How We Move On from Indecision to Make Smart Choices. Do you think you can make me make smart choices? I think the spirit of the book is not to make anyone do anything. It's for people to take some time, step back and reflect on what's stopping them from making these decisions for themselves and by themselves. So hopefully the process of, of going through this approach is that it gives you, first of all, more self-awareness of where you are as a decision maker. That's definitely what I got from this book. I mean, the thing is there's so many different elements and some will apply to everybody and some people can just You can take what you want from this book. Do you agree? Absolutely, yes. And I think it's all about breaking down indecision, why we are making bad decisions, why we're choosing not to make any decision at all. And it's just about reframing decision. Now, this book is, it's a bit like a history lesson as well, isn't it? Well, what I've tried to do in this book is not to write a self-help book, book as, as such, but try to draw on as many sources as possible and as many angles as possible, because I think it's such a complex subject, decision-making. If it were easy, everyone would make perfect decisions, of course. So it is a complex subject, and I thought it could benefit from more than one angle. So of course there is psychology in there, as you would expect, but there is also philosophy, there is literature, there is the arts, there is psychoanalysis, there is So there's many, many different— even theology, actually. So many different angles there. But the thing is, how dull would life be if we made the right decision and the perfect decision every single time? How would we ever learn? Exactly. Yes, we would not be able to look inside ourselves and kind of— I think the more mistakes I've made, the more I've understood myself even more. Yes. And one could say there's no such thing as a mistake. And sometimes we miss the mark, but doesn't mean that it's wrong. It means it's the place where we were supposed to be at that moment in time. That's the path we're supposed to follow. Well, you've got one of my favorite quotes in your book, which is— isn't it Mark Antony who says, "It's the next step that makes your previous step wrong"? Yes, and I use a musical analogy, and that's Miles Davis. Oh, is it Miles Davis? Well, it may be both, actually. Mark Antony is a great source of inspiration, but Miles Davis applied this to his music, to his jazz, and he said, "It's not the note you play that's right or wrong, it's the notes you play after that makes it right or wrong." So same thing in life, it's not what you do on a given occasion which is right or wrong, it's how you bounce, how you react, what you learn from it. I think that is the most important thing for anyone to take away as well, because if people understand that if they make mistakes, they can turn something— it's all about positive attribution. I love the idea of positive attribution. And it's just, I think it's good to kind of, what your book does, it helps people break down because we don't always understand our own psyche. And this book definitely helps with that. I've got to ask you though, how long did it take this book to be written? Altogether it took 3 years, but the actual writing was very quick. It took 6 months. So the first thing was, to have clarity in my own mind in terms of what approach I wanted to deliver and drawing on all these fields. And that's what took a long time. But once I got that, the writing was actually fairly quick. Really? Yes. It's something you obviously have a passion for as well. It is. And I found my— you know, I think every author has their own approach and my own approach, my own method to get writing, because like everyone else, I'm subject to distraction and I live here in London where I have a beautiful dog and she always wants attention, so there's always sources for distraction and the prospect of a nice walk. But I guess what I did is very simply I went on, I'm not sure I can mention this site, but it's a site where you can rent apartments for a short time which belong to various people and I found a place on top of a 17th century small building in Rome, in Trastevere, and I would rent this place for a week, 2 weeks at a time, and just go there and lock myself in, literally, from 9 to 6. And if I had written what I wanted to write that day, I would allow myself to go out in the evening, and if I hadn't, I would stay locked in. And it worked a treat. That's— do you know what? I mean, everyone has their little room in a 17th century kind of place. I mean, I have My house is bonkers. Like you, I've got a dog, one that's not quite convinced it is a dog. And the dog is bonkers, the cat is bonkers, the kids are a product of me and therefore are quite bonkers as well. And the house for me embodies a place of craziness and busy and activity. And so there's a particular cafe that I go to near to where I live, and I know if I go in there, I can get 3 hours worth of work done in an hour. Café across the road, I go with my kids often. They want to get their milkshakes, their frappuccinos. In my head, that place does not work. The other place makes it work. If I've got emails that I need to be able to focus on a correct response, a polite response, and an informed response, I go to that café and it just produces it. There's a couple of bars as well, uh, near where I live that also have the same effect for me, but not places where I've been with friends where it's crazy and things like that. And it's just about finding the right place where you— and understanding your brain and knowing what works for you. Couldn't agree more. And, and I love your parallel between the place where you are physically, uh, the house, the café across the road, and the mind. And, and of course, one of the first, uh, uh, authors to to put this idea on paper was Sigmund Freud, using the house as a symbol for the mind. And I'm thinking now of what a French philosopher, Gaston Bachelard, wrote. He wrote, "Home is the space you inhabit." And it sounds slightly tautological, slightly obvious to say home is the space you inhabit. But whether your home is the place where you live or the café across the road or that small apartment in Rome, it's the space where you're fully yourself. Without distraction. You can expand, if you want, your mind. And this is the place I think we can all find in order to make our best decisions as well, since this is the subject we're discussing. We make our decisions from a place we inhabit, from a place where we're fully ourselves. And there's lots of distractions and demands on our attention, not just from other people or from my dog for that purpose, but from the mind. From the deep recesses of the mind and the shadow side of the mind that often would want us to do something else. I've just had a bit of a self-realization from what you've just said, because I quite often— I live in a townhouse and I'm on the top floor, my kids are on the middle floor, and then the living space is on the ground floor. And I often kind of chastise myself and saying it's It's in the daytime. Why are you up in your room doing work? And I kind of thought to myself, I was just being a bit lazy and it's the comfort of my bed and things like that and that it's not the right place to try and get work done 'cause it seems a bit lazy, but it's not. It's because it's my place of sanctity where it's just mine. Brilliant, you found it. And I, but I always kept on thinking to myself, why can't you just work downstairs at the dining table or something? It's because my brain doesn't work properly there because it's a hive of activity and there's too many things going on and the cat's jumping on me and I can see I can hear the washing machine, the dishwasher and everything. And yeah, wow. Well, I'm glad we did it for this idea today. Thank you, Geoff. Welcome, Hazel. So I want to talk about, I mean, we are coming up to our first break, so actually my next topic would actually probably cover the whole of the next section. So there's plenty of different concepts that you've written about. I want to talk about the concept of monoliving and how that could help people. You know, monoliving is the concept of taking away certain decisions so you've got more headspace to make more important decisions. For example, having cornflakes every single day for breakfast and just doing it means that you don't have to think about what you're having for breakfast, you've got more time to think about something else. That's the concept. Absolutely, and it's interesting that You talk about cereal and breakfast. Decisions are notoriously energy-destroying, energy-consuming. So we make our best decisions typically when our sugar levels are up. Oh, really? And there's a struggle when our sugar levels are down. So there is a connection between energy and decision-making. But beyond that, you know, there's two great examples. One is Barack Obama. Barack Obama notoriously decided the night before what outfit he was going to wear the following day. So he would prepare his suit and shirt and tie the night before. I've done that for the last 3 years. Brilliant, so you should run for election. There's one coming up, I understand. Well, funnily enough, I don't want that job. Um, sorry. Because Obama didn't want to start the day with a rather minor decision, if you want. And another one is Mark Zuckerberg, who only wears the same color of clothes every day and the same type of clothes every day, again to avoid making these unimportant decisions. And he seems to be making some pretty good decisions and it's working out quite well for him. That's the point. See, yeah, so that's just a case— this is what this book helps you to do, to kind of find different ways that are going to work for you. Some might, some may not. And what I want to talk about when we come back after this next set of adverts is the language we use in our decision-making, reframing. I actually read quite a few different sections in your book and I had to just put the book down for a bit and just kind of think about the times that I, even now, decisions I need to make now, how I could just reframe it, but also the decisions that we get other people to make by just rejigging the words and using language is such a powerful tool, but we can use it on ourselves as well. Yeah, language is the narrative we write and we write our own stories. So the words we use, the grammar we use, and of course grammar comes from the same word, the same etymology as grimoire, which is a magic book. So language has a magic power. It really does. If only we knew, do you know what? It's so powerful. There's so many people out there that just have the beauty of language and they're the ones that are really making waves. Let's just go over to our first set of ads and we're back in a couple of minutes and we will be talking about Joseph Baikoff's book The Art of Decision Making. 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Welcome back to our next section of Get Booked here at our delicious studio in Covent Garden. This is Get Booked, supporting women's emotional wellbeing. And we have in the studio today, Joseph Beiker. How we move from indecision to smart choices, the art of decision-making. We covered quite a bit in the beginning section. And I would now like to talk about the power of language in negotiation, decision-making. With other people and within ourselves? Sure. It's interesting you mentioned the word negotiation. I find that negotiations are a great analogy for decision-making. Not that we necessarily negotiate with someone else as one would in business, for example, or in politics, but any decision is a negotiation with the different parts of ourselves that may want different things. So let's take an example. You want to take a holiday in November, it's coming up, and you can't decide where to go, when to go, for how long. Now the problem is not with the decision itself. The problem is with the fact that different parts of you may want different things. So there is a hedonist side of you that may want to have the perfect, inverted commas, holiday, luxury holiday, There is the safe, prudent version of you that may want to save a bit of money in case, you know, you need it for other projects. There may be again many, many different parts of you. There may be the studious part of you that thinks, no, maybe I should focus on my work. And Aristotle— so we're talking, what are we, 21st century, so 25 centuries ago— was the first one to talk about the analogy between decisions, not with negotiation, but what he called deliberation. So almost like a jury in courts. And it's exactly the same imagery. It's what are the different parts of us that want different things. So the language we use in that context is very, very powerful. You know, I see a lot of clients in my work tell me, why am I so horrible at making decisions? Why am I so useless And of course, this is the language, this is the narrative they are writing about themselves. Then they end up believing it and it becomes reality. So I think first of all, we need to be careful about how we address ourselves, how we talk about ourselves to ourselves. And one thing which helps in that case is think about the good decisions you've made in the past. And actually, overall, you're probably a much better decision maker than you think you are. There is a a type of behaviour when we only remember bad events about ourselves. Well, that's why introspection is quite helpful. It's an excellent task to kind of embark upon because you could have just made one really shocking decision and it changes your perspective when for the other 38 years of your life you might have made really good decisions. Absolutely. But it depends on how detrimental that bad decision was, I guess. And so it's all about breaking down the decision, one of the main focuses of your book. But just before we go into breaking down decisions, the language that we use to ourselves as well in terms of, I've got to make this hard decision. No, I've got to make this impertinent decision. So it's not, and the same is, you know, if you asked me, if you said to me, I've got this decision to make, it's this, this, this. What you talk about in your book, it's about reframing that so that it sounds more like a positive decision that you have to make. It's reframing it so that the, maybe if you're asking somebody else to make a decision, you're reframing it so it's a decision, so it's a question that's kind of posed to them in a more positive light. I mean, that is, the power of language. It, again, you know, decision-making, negotiation. If you want, say, a friend to help you, it's again how you pose that question to them. And it's sometimes writing it down and figuring out you could use exactly the same words, just put them in a slightly different order. Completely agree. And sometimes people will tell you, I'm facing this impossible decision. Well, how likely are they to make it? They regard it as impossible from the outset. And— Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So I take this rather extreme view in my thinking and in the book that there are no impossible decisions. I could even say there really are no hard problematic decisions. There are problematic people. There are problematic psyches. There are problematic ways in which we position ourselves. When facing a decision, but the decision itself cannot be accused of being impossible, hard, or tough. That's something that people need to look into themselves to kind of break down why they're saying that. I mean, you say that it's down to the psyche. I mean, one, there was one concept that I kind of thought, I wonder if I've been a victim of this decision, the fear of heights, and it's nothing to do with skydiving. It's to do with what if you did go for that job and it did go well and you did become a success and there was more pressure possibly within that role, or maybe you did decide to go on X Factor and you did finally, you know, you became a pop star. Could you cope with that height? And it is sometimes our indecision is based on fear. Absolutely. And very often behind all our defense mechanisms, such as procrastination, which is one of them, and there's many more, lies the fear, which is really not so much a fear about the decision. That's another myth that we fear the outcome of a decision, the chaos that might ensue. No, actually what we fear is what the decision does and says about ourselves. And what I've done is, is done, if you want, a typology of all the types of fears of decision-making. And what's interesting is every single one of these types of fears mirrors a deeper fear about the self. For example, a typical fear of decision-making is the fear of rejecting a better option. You know, if I choose option A versus option B and option B turns out to be better, inverted commas again, um, you know, that will be failure. But actually what that fear mirrors is the deeper fear of being rejected. If I make the wrong choice, people will rate me down, people will disregard me, I will lose out on opportunities. And as a result I will be rejected. So that's this completely irrational, deeper fear. The fear of failing, the fear of failure, is the fear of being a failure deep down. The fear of heights we're talking about is the fear that what happens if, if I fall, is the fear of breaking down. So behind every single fear of a single individual decision, there is a deeper, more general fear about the self, about what that says about us. That's a lot to take in, isn't it? And that's why it's good to take time. I think two things: it's good to take time when, when reading the book. It's not a book you will read in two days, but it's also good to take time when making decisions. I think that the first advice, bit of advice I would give people is never decide in haste. These are the decisions you might most regret because you You didn't give yourself, you didn't give your brain the time to really consider what would be best for you. Interestingly though, if you do quickfire, I sometimes do quickfire questions on some of the radio shows that I do, and you'd be surprised how honest people's answers are if they don't have much time to think about it. On more simplistic items, for sure, you know, tea or coffee, Sunshine, right? You know, it's snow, things like that. And people answer quite— if they don't have much time to think about it, you'd be surprised. Um, although, I mean, have you ever, have you ever tried a quickfire question? I'm not going to do it, don't worry. Feel free. Um, I think the benefit of quickfire questions are, if people are prepared to play the game, is that you can tap into the unconscious, you can tap into something which is not entirely rational, and that can be— for that reason, I agree, can be very effective. But also there is a risk that sometimes people might give a quick answer in certain situations to themselves or to others simply because they're under pressure, as opposed to because that's a deep decision, a deep decision that comes from the unconscious, and it may just be them reacting to authority, them reacting to that kind of pressure rather than saying exactly what they want. You may have someone saying, "Yeah, I'll have coffee," and then realizing actually, "I don't even like coffee." I do agree, actually. It's not foolproof, definitely. But you talked about the unconscious mind. The unconscious mind is responsible for what, 90% of our actions? I don't know whether it's— there is a— we can statistically, you know, have a firm answer on how much of our decisions comes from the unconscious. I think every decision is informed by the unconscious, and the best thing we can do is trying to bring that up to some level of awareness, knowing that we will never know all about it, whatever you call it, whether it's the unconscious for Freud, whether it's the shadow for Jung, for any of these great psychologists and authors, you know, Jung was the first one to admit you will never know who you are. You will never know the self. It's always going to be a mystery, but you can get some insights into it. Well, I am actually writing a book called 20 Weeks, and it's a 20-week process I went through breaking down my life up until that point. And I will always be learning, but I learned so much. I had therapists and whatnot kind of helping me. And what I learned from actually committing and focusing on those 20 weeks to breaking down things that I've done, mistakes I've made in the past, decisions I've made, good things I've done, why I've done those good things, 'cause sometimes we do good things for the wrong reason. And it's, yeah, I will still be learning, but it's who actually comes across the actual need to actually do that to themselves unless faced with quite tough decisions. Do you think there are people out there that don't have to make that many tough decisions? You know, I'm thinking about something rather dramatic is people who are unable to make any decisions. And it's rather dramatic because It's the story of modern slavery and how people, and most often it is women, who are freed from slavery in various countries, even in modern, you know, countries, Western countries, have lost the ability to make decisions, to make any decision. And that made me think, what are we slaves to when we cannot decide? 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Women's Radio Station, supporting women's well-being. Hello, I'm Hazel and this is Get Booked. You can listen to my show 5 AM and 5 PM every day. And throughout my shows, we talk about what I've read, what I'm reading, new releases, chat to authors, bloggers, publishers, and book enthusiasts. And my guest on today's show is Joseph Beiker. And we are talking about the art of decision-making. And just before we went over to the ads, we very briefly touched on, um, women and how they've only just very recently been able to start making decisions, and some women still are not allowed to make their own decisions in certain states. Discuss. In certain states, sometimes certain boroughs, frankly, there are communities culturally where women don't have the same rights socially as others. I'm not judging, I'm just saying it is a struggle. It is a present struggle, a universal struggle. But the thing is, I mean, you could even— I'll probably get a few things thrown at the radio, like people are sitting on the wireless on their iPad. It's that, paradoxically, maybe some people are going, well, I'm not allowed to make decisions, but it means I can use my brain for other things and it takes up so much. We're talking about the complexities of decision and indecision. If people don't I mean, by no means would I want the rights to be taken away from me, but these are, maybe they'll turn around and say, well, they make the decisions for me. My life is simpler. And what if now in 2019, we think women in a country like England have every right to make the same decisions as men. And of course, we forget sometimes that even the right to vote is a recent right. I think it's 1920 in this country. I'm going to admit my old age. I was born in 1969, and when I was born, Switzerland was a country— so we're talking about Europe— Switzerland was a country where women were not allowed to vote. Really? The vote in Switzerland started in 1971. So this is a very modern subject, you know, women making their own decisions. And I think there's two dimensions there. You know, what the law says. And thankfully, the law is now an equal playing field for men and women. But there is something else, which is what psychoanalysts call the superego. And it may well be that as a woman in 2019, you feel that even if you have every right to make decisions, there is part of the psyche that sometimes holds you back. Yep. And, you know, I was interviewing myself the head of the Institute of Psychoanalysis recently, and I asked him, what's the problem with decisions for men or women, for that matter? And what stops people from making decisions? And he said, it's very often an envious superego. And what he meant by that is— so the superego is the figure of authority in your mind. So it could be a parent, a grandparent, a teacher, a figure of authority. Live or dead, by the way, doesn't matter. And, and for all of us, men or women, that figure of authority in the mind unconsciously can stop us from making the decisions that are good for us. Because it could be that figure of authority parent, for example, that is jealous of your achievements, of your path, of your future, of your youth, for that matter. So these are the things that can stop us. And what I think is in society because of what we were talking about, for example, the right to vote, the part of the superego that tells us maybe, maybe you shouldn't be allowed to do that is actually alive in— I mean, psychologists have shown that there are tests that are being given to students, for example, in business school and various universities, and depending on whether the first question is gender or race, the outcomes are different. Wow. So for example, women do less well when they're asked the question, are you male or female, at the outset on these anonymous tests. Because, ah, because they think they're being judged. Whereas if they put, if a woman put that down that they were a man, then they'd feel a bit more empowered and less judged about their decisions, which is This is the point that was going through my head as you were, as you were talking, is that I've been judged of the decisions I've made, decisions that men have been making for ages, um, because women are still seen as being gutsy for doing the same thing as men. And it is, you know, I have friends who make brilliant decisions, but they make bold decisions and they're classed as feisty. Yeah. No, they're just making the decisions that men have been making, or decisions that they are allowed to make, and it's seen as contentious. And so, yeah, I completely see what you're saying. That's— I never thought of that. And you know, my day job is I coach executives, and, uh, and I'm afraid I have to admit, as a man, it's kind of painful, but the science of leadership shows that women are better equipped to be leaders than men. When it comes to various aspects of leadership, they are actually using a better approach than most men in this field. It's more of an emotional approach though as well, isn't it? Yeah, they connect better, they engage better, but men have more confidence. Yeah. Which is what gets them to the top. More often, you look at boardrooms today, I think there's this, what was this statistic, that there's more men called John in boardrooms than women. Yeah. You know, so there is more confidence. Of course, there's more of a supporting network, if you want, around men possibly than women to get them to the top. But thankfully, this is changing. Thankfully, this is changing today. And there's many initiatives in various companies, in many companies to support women getting the same opportunities as men. I have actually been given a book recently, or I can't remember whether it's arrived yet, or I definitely know it's coming. It's about imposter syndrome. Syndrome. Yeah. And it's, and it's focused on women. And, and, and imposter syndrome is absolutely fascinating. I hear that from a lot of clients, you know, struggling with that. And the research in imposter syndrome is not, is not recent. It dates back to the 1980s in America. And the premise was women suffer from imposter syndrome more than men. The conclusion from that research was it's not true. Men and women suffer equally from imposter syndrome. So what may harm women's chances is the belief that they are more likely to be imposters than men, when in fact we are equals in that matter. Oh, wow. I'm trying to get my head around that. It's— this is the thing. It is. There is so much to unpack in this subject. Surely you must be wanting to write another book. Have you been asked to write a follow-up to this? I'm not sure about a follow-up, but I've got probably 4 or 5 books in my mind which I'm dying to get started with. Oh really? Go on, tell us. Oh, I can tell you about the next one. The next one addresses the thorny subject of lies. Please come on my show when lies— yeah, because lies are— it's so multifaceted. I mean, people lie for good and for bad. Exactly. Sometimes it's to protect others, sometimes it's to protect ourselves. But there's a difference between the lies we tell others for that matter. But there's also the lies we tell ourselves, which are more dangerous in a way, because we can do that with little awareness of what's happening to us. Wow. That's going to be incredible. Please make sure that comes to me. Have you got other books as well that you're considering? They're more remote, so I'll come back to talk to you about that if I'm invited. They're still sitting on a desk somewhere in the 17th century. Oh no, sadly I have to empty it after a week. Because it's only rented. Fair enough. Well, I kind of meant metaphorically. OK, great. In that case, it's everywhere. So we have just covered the fact that women are making decisions and sometimes the impact of how they would be judged. But what about the psyche of those people who are not allowed to make their decisions? I know I made a comment that even I didn't believe. It was just being— it was just kind of putting it out there. About, you know, how some people like it that they can make less decisions because it means then they're not thwarted by that inflection. But what about the psyche of people who are not allowed to make these decisions for themselves? Even in Ireland, people can't decide to abort a baby, you know, no matter what's happened to them. That's not a decision they can make over their own bodies. There's It's— but there's so many different countries. There's a lot of countries where women are not allowed to make any decisions. Absolutely. And, you know, there's two dimensions to decision-making. There is the individual psychological dimension. What are the inner struggles that stop us from making these decisions? But there is also, of course, the outer struggle with a regime, a state, a legal framework. Sadly, a book like mine cannot help you deal with a set of laws that prevents you from making decisions. No. But it can help you with the awareness that your struggle is the right struggle, that your struggle is a just, fair struggle. Then I think the message from that is about political engagement. We hear a lot about various countries including some huge— inverted commas, democratic countries around the world, where the wave is going against democracy, if you want. Now the question is, whilst it is legal, do you take up a board and start demonstrating and start having a voice against what you think is a threat to democracy? Or do you passively wait for that to happen? But that's the beauty of individuals. You know, we make our decisions as to what mark we want to leave on the world, who we want to be in this life. And some people want to be more passive and maybe it suits them more. And to others that want to make decisions and they are worried about being judged, the more you make these decisions, the less you will be judged eventually because people will follow. Hopefully, it might take a while, a couple of hundred years potentially. But I think, you know, decisions It's almost like watering a plant. It's the water that you use. And if you don't water a plant, it will wither and maybe die, and probably die. But the more decisions, the more water, the more decisions you make, the more you grow, either because they are, again, good decisions for you, or because they may be bad decisions for you, but you've learned from them and improved and bounced back and become stronger as a result. So again, the inability to make decisions because of personal psychological issues or because of a regime or because of whatever reason stops us from making decisions is stopping our growth. And interestingly, you said about the plant, because do you know what? Sometimes you overwater a plant and you get it wrong, but then you just need to let it dry out, prune off the dead ends, and hopefully give it a little bit more care and attention, and then it comes back. It's all in the recovery. Yes, it is. We're just going to go over to our last set of ads. I've got so many questions. Great. Managed to ask you. So we're gonna, we're gonna— it's not gonna be quickfire because, you know, we want to make sure that we're making informed answers, uh, but we'll be back in a couple of minutes. Fantastic, thank you. Welcome to Women's Radio Station. I'm Sarah Louise Ryan and welcome to Love Lessons Live on Women's Radio Station. Hello and welcome to Future Classic Women Awards with me, Stefania Passamonte, on Women's Radio Station. Hello and welcome to Julie May Is Listening. Hi, this is Anna Kennedy, and we're at Women's Radio Station supporting women's well-being, and we're talking all things autism. Women, the possibilities are endless. That's what makes us different. Hi, I'm Lauren Mishkon. I'm a birth doula and mum of 3, and I'm passionate about supporting women to have empowering and positive birth experiences. Please join me for my brand new show, From Tummy to Mummy, here on Women's Radio Station. Every week I'll be here with an expert guest talking about women's reproductive health, everything fertility, pregnancy, birth, and baby related, right through to the menopause and beyond. Please join us for an informative and fun hour. Hello, my name is Ingrid Marsh on Women's Radio Station, and coming soon is the Radical Wellbeing Show to help support women's wellbeing. Each show I share the airwaves with ordinary women like me and you doing extraordinary things. 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We're a registered charity operating in Sierra Leone and the Democratic Republic of Congo, and we produce and share podcasts via Bluetooth on mobile phones, focusing specifically on women and girls excluded from information due to extreme poverty. We empower those living in rural areas with media that transforms how they access, own, and share information. To find out more and be part of this movement, come check out our website at MediaMattersForWomen.org. You're listening to Women's Radio Station, supporting women's well-being. Women's Radio Station's creating a global network for the empowerment of women, and we want you to be involved. Join us on Instagram and Twitter @WomensRadioStation, that's Women's Radio Station, or Facebook Women's Radio Station to keep up to date with all our exciting programs. We are now here at our final section of today's Get Booked. I've just been looking through all the questions that I have for Joseph, and I just know I'm not going to get through all of them, so I'm going to try and, I'm going to try and stay focused. I've loved chatting to you, and I've just— likewise, I think you've actually helped me realize so much about myself just within the last 45 5 minutes. That's very kind, Hazel. And what I want to focus on is the effect of well-being in our ability to make decisions, which is kind of covered in your section, Under the Hood. Sometimes, especially when we've got depression or anxiety, it affects our decision-making. It's affecting our synapses. It's affecting how we do everything. Anxiety is based on fear. Depression is based on lack of confidence confidence in ourselves and self-love. So how do we deal with making decisions when we know we are not in the right frame of mind? So you're right. I think the problem with indecision, with procrastination, is it becomes very quickly a vicious circle and we're caught in it. And as the great psychoanalyst Carl Jung wrote, we tend to live in shoes too small, to walk in shoes too small for ourselves. And that becomes neurotic. It becomes a smaller life than the life we're called to live on this world. And so how do we break free? How do we break free from that? You're talking about the physicality, the aspect of, you know, well-being connected to physicality. And I think mindfulness, for example, is a great way to reconnect the link between body and mind. So I think it's a great initiative that people can try. In the section you mentioned, Under the Hood, what I talk about is something people are not necessarily aware of, is the connection between 3 levels of our decision-making, which are the emotional level, the feelings, and finally the action we take. And what's been proven by neurologists is that before we decide consciously, rationally, I want to do that, The body has already decided at two levels, which are the emotion, number one, and then the feeling. And there is this sequence in our minds that we go first from emotion, which is really purely a physical expression of how we are. What defines an emotion is it's got a facial expression that's attached to it. For example, sadness. Yes. Then it goes into a feeling. And then it goes into a thought. So what I'm talking about here is when you struggle with the thought, it's probably because you struggle with the emotion and the feeling that you can't read them. So go deep inside, try to understand the deep feeling. You were talking earlier about, about, you know, the gut and the gut feeling. And that's also another great sign of where we truly are, of tapping into the unconscious, of tapping into what our inner, you know, reality really wants from us as opposed to the outside demands on us. But our gut though, our gut also taps into fear. So your gut can't always be trusted. Your instinct, I mean, sometimes they work fantastically, but sometimes intuition, can they always be trusted? They can't. And absolutely. You know, fear, the spirit of fear, or rather the spirit of evil, is the taming of our life force by fear. That's again a great Carl Jung sentence. The spirit of evil is the taming of our life force by fear. So we go back to the question that we talked about a few minutes ago, which is what's the fear about? And we need to start with what am I afraid of? And again, if the fear of decision is a fear about the self, what is the fear about the self? And that's what we need to heal. You see, I had a big decision that I needed to make about a year ago, uh, actually probably about a year and a half ago, but I didn't make it until a year ago because I knew that I wasn't in a position to make an informed and, um, correct decision based on my emotions being all over the place. And I knew that it was— I was not capable of it, and I knew that I wouldn't trust it. And I wanted to make that decision when I could trust my own psyche. And I did wait, and it's— I now feel like I made the right decision. And sometimes, especially when we've got hard decisions to make, we need to feel like we're putting ourselves in the very best position to make the right decision, because you can't go back from some decisions. Yeah. Um, and weirdly One of the excellent points made in your book, I can't remember, Mary somebody, Mary Schultz, is it? What point was it? 10, 10, 10. Oh yes, that's Susie Welch. Susie Welch, exactly what I said. Don't know where I got Mary Schultz from, somewhere else. They're cousins. Yeah, yeah, well I knew that, that's exactly what it was. And she said, you know, how do you think you'll feel 10 seconds after you make this this decision 10 months and 10 years. And do you know what? It's perfect because sometimes you make a decision and the relief after 10 minutes and you feel good about yourself, but you're like, actually, would I be happy with that decision in 10 months? And the point is people who are poor at decision-making suffer from something called a lack of self-continuity. So their focus is on the present. You know, how will I feel in 2 minutes about about the decision I made and how will I regret the decision I made in 2 minutes as opposed to, but what about the longer term? How do you create that link between the present you and the future you? Susie Welch, great example, 10-10-10 technique. A great fan of that is Warren Buffett, a brilliant businessman, so it works. There is a slightly more extreme version of that which was Saint Ignatius, so we're talking again, 15th, 16th century, and his advice was, "Imagine yourself," it sounds really ominous, but, "Imagine yourself on your deathbed and think about the decision you were facing at the time. How would you feel about it now?" That gives a completely different perspective, but it's worth putting that perspective there. Another way to look at perspective is a great fear is the fear of regret. You know, what if I regret doing that? And what science has shown is in the short term, the thing we regret the most are what's known error of commission, i.e., doing the wrong thing. Yes. When in fact, in the long term, the thing we regret the most are errors of omission, not deciding on something, not acting on something. So we need to rebalance the mind to think in the short term. It's not just the thing we do we may regret. It's more importantly the thing we didn't do. The thing— But that is one of the main things that comes up when somebody is diagnosed with a disease that is unfortunately going to end their life early. They suddenly go bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, and they make all these decisions. And then you have people saying, why are we waiting until we're about to die to make these decisions. And, but you know, it is because they know that they don't have to suffer with the fear of what possibly could happen. I mean, it is, but if we break down the decisions we need to make, if we did take the wrong job, what's the worst thing that could happen? Well, you either ask for your other job back, or you try and get another job similar to it, or you try and make the job better. What if you end a relationship with somebody and it was wrong? If it was really right, then maybe it will come back again. If you feel this way, Should you be there anyway? It is about breaking down the consequences, the supposed worst-case scenario of these decisions. You know, what if I do go on that holiday and then I can't afford so-and-so and so-and-so? Well, yeah, but what if it sorts out your psyche and you got a well-earned break and it made you make better decisions in the long run? And it's, you know, which could therefore be even cost-effectively better in so many other different ways. We just need to break down Absolutely. I think one of the main problems in decision-making is the notion that there is a right and a wrong decision. I write in the book about this most famous line in theater, Shakespeare, Hamlet, "To be or not to be, that is the question." Of course, Hamlet is the worst procrastinator in the world. That's what undermines us is to be or not to be today, to do or not to do. That is the question. Interestingly, the first version of Hamlet, it says something completely different. It says, "To be or not to be, there's the point." It's not the question that needs answering. The point is that we can make a choice. It's how we position ourselves, how we place ourselves. The greatest strength we have as individuals is the fact that we are able to make the decision, is not whether it's right or wrong. Not so long after Hamlet was written, a great philosopher, Spinoza, in Amsterdam, wrote the same thing. He said there is no right or wrong decision. There's only decisions that are good for you or decisions that are bad for you. Or just be happy that you actually are in a position to make that decision. Exactly. Imagine if you weren't allowed to make that decision. Imagine if you weren't in a position to be able to follow through with that decision. We're quickly running out of time, so I want to get your 3 tips for making good decisions, please, Joseph. Haha, you can imagine how daunting it is to summarize 200 pages in 3 tips. But here goes. The first one I'm probably not allowed to say, it's have a break, have a KitKat. You are allowed to say it and you did, so it's good. I think give yourself time, be gentle with yourself, don't rush into a decision. This would be the worst decision. The second one I would say, don't hesitate to ask a friend, to ask an expert, to ask people who have been through the same situation before, they could be your greatest, not only source of information, but also of perspective. They will give you a different perspective on your own decision. And it's research. Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. And, and I, I think again, try to think it's not about will this decision be right or wrong, because there is no such thing. It's about what's going to be good for me, what will make me feel good about this. And you talk about the 10-10-10 approach, that's a good way to 'Look at this.' So 3 tips, this would be my— can I add a 4th? Oh, go on then, because it's you. We tend, and this is again proven by the psychology of decision-making, we tend to limit our objectives when we make a decision. So for example, will I take that job? We think, 'Hey, it's better paid, so I should go for it.' This is only one objective. The more objectives we consider, the better the decision we make. So that would be my 4th tip. Informed decisions. Well, your book, The Art of Decision Making: How We Move From Indecision to Make Smart Choices. I think we should all have it, you know, we should have it at the side of our bed. It should now become the book that we have at the side of our beds in hotels. That's very kind, I certainly would not say anything opposite to that. You've got to get involved in this. Joseph, do you know, it's been an absolute joy to be able to read this book and then actually ask you the questions. And I really enjoyed the interview, Hazel, thank you. Please come back again when you write this next book. With great pleasure, thank you. Thank you for joining us, Joseph Beichart, everybody. And thank you for listening to Get Booked. Welcome to the Women's Radio Station, supporting women's well-being. Women's Radio Station is all about diversity, from opinions, career, ethnicity, education, and most importantly, women's well-being. We ain't celebrate the individuality of every woman everywhere, providing opportunities and the platform for your voice. Visit our website womensradiostation.com for more information. I'm Tamina Zaman, founder of Empower and Enrich. When it comes to money, do you clam up or get confused? Do you wish you could save more money, or are you hoping you have enough for retirement? You are not alone. Many women want to be smarter with their cash but just don't know where to start. At empowerandenrich.org, you will find a host of options to help you take charge of your finances and learn how to put your money to work for you in an easy, affordable way. Get in touch with me at empowerandenrich.org and let's change your future together. Hello, my name is Natasha Anne Callaghan. Welcome to you lovely lady listeners of your very own women's radio Station. 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