You can also listen and subscribe on:

Show notes

Dr Grace Lordan is the Founding Director of The Inclusion Initiative (TII), Director of the MSc in Behavioural Science and an Associate Professor in Behavioural Science at the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Her research is focused on understanding why some individuals succeed in life and others don't. She is an expert on the effects of bias, discrimination and technology changes.

We talked about her new book “Think Big: Take Small Steps and Build the Future You Want” (published March 2021), which is a guide to choosing and succeeding at a career you will find fulfilling and a good match with your skills and preferences.

We talked about imagining how your life would be if everything worked out and then seeing the journey to get there as a long one but a manageable one, if taken one small step at a time.

We discussed the impact of and internal or external locus of control, i.e. whether you believe that you are totally in control of your life or whether you feel that outside forces have a bigger effect. Both have their pros and cons and we talked about identifying which you tend to believe and how to get closer to reality when it comes to your own successes and failures.

We discussed how thinking in a binary way (all or nothing) is unhelpful.

We talked through an overview of the book and the steps along a Big Thinking Journey.

Grace gave her views on career’s advice (It’s horrendous!) and explained what needs to change too help people make better choices. She talks about the need to stop thinking about job titles and status symbols and towards the tasks that will make up your day to day. She also talked about the negative impact of views on social class have on thinking clearly about occupations.

We discussed Grace’s own research on discrimination and bias and using behavioural science to minimise and overcome this.

We talked about the difficulty of overcoming your biases, even when you understand them and the importance of acknowledging that quick fixes rarely work. This led to discussion of perfectionism and the value to everyone of being more imperfect in public.

Martha asked Grace what her favourite cognitive bias and she talked about the compromise effect. We talked about how it can be used to trick us into buying poor value subscription services or wine and how we can use it ourselves to improve our productivity.

Grace’s book “Think Big: take small steps and build the future you want” is out now!

You can find out more about Grace and her work at gracelordan.com and follow her on Twitter @gracelordan_