Using Intuition to Succeed at Work

Anita Brick: Hi, this is Anita Brick and welcome to CareerCast at Chicago Booth. To help you advance in your career, today we're delighted to be speaking with Jessica Pryce-Jones. Jessica, our relationship started because I was in London doing work at the London campus. I just got this feeling I should be at the staff meeting. I remember that time so clearly. It was in the midst of the financial implosion. A lot of people were very, very shaky, and the conversation in the staff meeting about you was how you brought everyone to a place of certainty within the chaos, and I had to meet you.

Jessica Pryce-Jones: That's a great story, Anita. I didn't know that.

Anita Brick: Yeah, well see, you already learned something new and I know I'm going to as well. But let me just give you a little bit about Jessica. Jessica Pryce-Jones started her career in finance where she learned about numbers, strategy and leadership. After 10 years in the corporate world, she earned a psychology degree. Wanting to understand really why some people who were her bosses were brilliant and others were frankly dismal. Those insights launched a new career for her in facilitating, coaching, designing interventions and writing. Her clients include multinationals in healthcare, professional services, fast-moving consumer goods, banking and the public, and not-for-profit sectors.

She published three books so far, and her latest one, which is what we're going to talk about today, is Intuition at Work. Let's start off with an alum had a question. There are a lot of questions about intuition and its squishiness, but there's a lot of science behind it in your book, which I really love the read. There's so many things where we can actually combine the data, the numbers and intuition, and this is what this alum is asking about."I am quant and not so open to the squishy stuff like intuition. How can intuition make my numbers more effective," and it's a little cheeky, "and me more brilliant?"

Jessica Pryce-Jones: Well, I'm all about everybody being more brilliant. Why not glitter away? The more the better. If you are a quant, your technical skills will take you so far. But when you look at the decisions that you have to make as a senior leader, and let's face it, you can't go from being a quant to C-suite overnight. That's a journey. You're going to have to make decisions where there are no clear answers. Your decision-making is around the unknown and the uncertain. Now, do we open or close a new facility here or there? Do I take on this person or that person? There isn't reliable quantitative data at that point, so you have to start applying both what you're guessing. And of course I'm saying put a process around hiring someone who you're going to depend on. Of course you're going to put process around that, but ultimately you're going to have to make a decision and you are paid to make those hard calls.

Data's super clear about that. The best decisions require you to use both. You need to be intuiting around your data and saying, okay, what's the best call that we can make on this? And also being rigorous that when you have an intuition, go get the data to help you. I'm not an either/or person. I'm a both/and. I'm not sure that answers the question, Anita.

Anita Brick: No, it totally does, because you need both.

Jessica Pryce-Jones: You need both. You've got to have both. So my book is very clear about that. For his numbers to be more effective, I would start saying, okay, stand back, take a look. Okay, what am I sensing feeling about this thing in order that it can be the best, the most effective and the most brilliant.

Anita Brick: I agree. Okay, so here's a student who goes one step further and is scared of intuition. "I'm actually scared of intuition. How can I run low risk experiments to get comfortable?" I love the fact that the person is open. How do we do that? How do we do it where the stakes are not so high that it could be big problem for us?

Jessica Pryce-Jones: Yeah, I think the first thing, if you're scared of your intuition, it's nothing to be scared of. It's just part of your own skill set. I believe it was there as part of our pre-linguistic survival skill set. When we were walking over the brow of the hill as a small band of early humans, we'd have needed to understand it, no, do we go this way or this way? And how would you have known? There would've been no data. It's a part of our survival skill set.

So that's just like embrace this thing. It is part of you. Understanding the alignment between your head art, gut energy, attraction towards something, that's all we're really talking about and the cues that you are picking up in your environment, because I do also think your intuition is, "Hey, what's my attention being drawn to in this moment?" That's an important part of it too.

As a low-risk experiment, and I would say, let's just run some field tests. First of all, welcome your intuition as a friend. Treat it as a friend. Have a chat with it. Because if you treat someone as a friend and have a chat with it, it becomes part of who you are. So we all chat to ourselves all the time. So chat to this part of you and then there's some really low-risk experiments you can do around your feelings. Shoot forward to the next meeting, how is my next meeting going to feel? How am I going to feel in that? And then check in with yourself. And I think the really big, big key to all of this is a journal. If you write it down, then you can see, was I right or wrong? Then you can just incrementally dial up on the risk that you're prepared to take.

That's one way of doing it and another way of doing it is saying, "Hey, if there was a camera here, what would it focus on in this room?" So that you externalize this thing a little bit. You say, where's the camera focusing? And "I'm curious why," is another way of doing it. And third thing is to ask yourself, "What am I seeing and potentially not seeing here," and just let your mind just riffle through that. And so those are some ways that I would say low-risk experiments.

Anita Brick: Yeah, I would agree. Several years ago where there was something I really wanted to do, I had submitted my story to be part of this book, and I just got this nagging feeling that I should say no. Now guilt was getting in the way, but I got this nagging feeling that it wasn't the right thing for me to do, but it didn't make sense to me. I decided to share those feelings with the person who is the publisher. I mentioned it to him and he said, "You need to follow," I don't know if he used the word intuition or heart, but you need to follow, right? Follow that heart, follow the intuition. And I did. And I said, no. I said no to the opportunity. And there are some reasons for it that made sense, right? There was the data to back it up, but ultimately I had to make that decision inside.

And you mention this in the book, not my story, but you mentioned this in the book and you said that you'll know when you make the decision, you're going to feel bright and alive and energetic if it's the right decision. And that's exactly what happened. I said, no. He was totally fine with it and the editor was totally fine with it. And all of a sudden I had this surge of positive energy. Any conflict that I had about saying no completely went away. When you do these experiments, whether they're big or small, notice how you feel because I felt really bad before I made the decision and really great after I did.

Jessica Pryce-Jones: Yeah, and I'm sure that there was all the parts of you were aligned. So we have the sense of alignment, internal alignment or not alignment. The not alignment, the niggle, the itch, the quandary. That's the intuition, to tangle and tease and go, okay, hey, what is this thing? I do really think that most people have had that experience of making the non-obvious choice, but it being the right one. And that's such an important learning as you rise through any hierarchy. Really it is.

Anita Brick: It's true. It's not always obvious if the brick wall in the way, no pun intended here or the roadblock is to impede us so that we build our capacity and determination. Or if it's to say, "Hey, Jessica, pivot here." And I think it's only through that kind of experimentation that you're able to have more and more examples, like you said in your journal, of what you paid attention to and what the outcome was. So I think it's good.

Jessica Pryce-Jones: I was going to say on the pivot thing, it's really interesting because quite often in my head when there's a kind of pivot moment or a moment of like, do I push on here or do I pivot? And I get quite a lot of symbology in my mind's eye. So I always see the same great big gray concrete block, which is so enormous that I can't really walk around it. But if I can walk around it, then I know it's time to find a way around this/ and if I can't walk around it's time to pivot. So I think paying attention to what's going on inside you and what's coming into your mind's eye.

But it's really interesting because about 5% of population don't see things in their mind's eye. That's an extraordinary thing to learn. And I've only come across one person who was going, "But you see things in your mind's eye. How do you mean?" I was going, "Well, when I'm talking to you, I'm getting thoughts and images, which flows in." But if you don't have that, I'm sure you have a cognitive sense. You have the thought rather than the image.

Intuition, the description of what intuition is then gets complicated depending on what your own internal processes are. Two minutes to talk about what is this thing that we're talking about? Some people talk about it's your gut feeling. Well, that's great until you don't feel it in your gut. So I asked one woman, she said, "Oh yes, it's all in my gut. I had the intuition." Notice that one. Said, "Hey, could you just point out where your guts are?" And she pointed to the area around her neck. I went, "Okay, that's interesting." So we all experience this thing so differently.

So I talk about intuition as a feeling of knowing. Lots of people talk about it as a knowing without knowing how you know. Whatever your actual definition is, generally we can all agree that it's something that's subconscious, that it's speedy, it's just there when you look for it. It's somatic. And there may be there's a thought or a realization that's accompanying all of this, that's giving you some kind of information. So that's my little diversion into what do we think this thing is? And hey, notice the thoughts that are coming into your mind and your mind's eye at the same time.

Anita Brick: I like that. I think our audience may think, oh, is there one way to get here? And the answer clearly is no.

Jessica Pryce-Jones: No.

Anita Brick: It is very specific to us.

Jessica Pryce-Jones: It's incredibly specific to you. So it's like saying, "Tell me what is love?" And you go, "Well, here's my definition." You go, "Oh, well I never experienced that." It's a highly personalized experience and therefore learning what our own cues are and how they show up suddenly becomes really important. And that means real noticing, observing of you. And it's interesting, isn't it, Anita, because you know we go to school and we're taught all this active listening and focus on the other person.

Actually, this requires just the opposite. It requires a lot of focus on you. What's happening to you and what do you notice about you? When does your heart beat and your skin get slightly sweaty, or your breath short, or your energy drops right away? Those are the cues that tell you what your intuition is telling you.

Anita Brick: I like that. So here are two leaders who have very different perspectives based on the culture in their company. Let's talk about the one that leadership in their company doesn't really believe in all this intuition stuff. And the student said, "I have a manager who believes intuition and gut feelings are a different way of saying wishful thinking. Giving examples of the positive impact intuition has on me and our media team only seems to make things worse. Thank you, Jessica. Help."

Jessica Pryce-Jones: If the word intuition is something absolutely dynamite and horrible and explode up a situation, there's just no point using it. I'd like to take that in two ways. Now, wishful thinking to me is very, very different from intuition. In wishful thinking, there's quite a lot of ego-driven thoughts behind that I find is as a coach, and you can hear that. "I want a headhunter to call me," and "I'm wanting this really high-powered job, and then I can say, 'Hey, go stick it' to my current organization, because they're all such awful people and they just need to know how brilliant and wonder I am." So there's kind of daydreaming stuff going on behind that wishful thinking, can you hear that? It's all about how fantastic I'm and how somebody is going to recognize my brilliance. And so quite often that's what wishful thinking is.

But intuition is very different. It's just a small quiet voice which is coming back and telling you, "Hey, hey, look, just pay attention to this," right? Pay attention to this thing. And if you've ever hire the wrong person, you'll know it. There's a little voice going there, "Are you sure you should do this? Are you really sure that you should do this?" And then you go, "Yeah, yeah, I can manage," ego coming in again. "I'll put them straight. It's my job to sort this kind of thing out." And then three months later you go, "Oh, I was right all along. Why didn't I listen to myself?" The difference between a loud voice and stiller, quieter voice is generally how I describe it. And the more certain I am, the less certain I am it's an intuition.

Anita Brick: Oh, very interesting.

Jessica Pryce-Jones: So if I've got doubts and worries about it, I'm going, okay, that is probably my intuition. The moment I'm going, well, absolutely, I'm going hmm. So that's how it works for me. Let's go back to the boss. You can talk about your experience in my best judgment. So I would find different terminology to express the same thing. Strongly advise that you move away from the word, just call it something else. Say, "I've been doing a load of thinking. I've been reflecting deeply on this. As I see it, we have two solid options. This is the one I recommend." So I just switch up your language.

Anita Brick: I like that. Okay, so here's the flip side of that. And this is an alum, and she said, "Hi, Jessica. I believe that intuition is my secret power, my secret sauce. Others see that too. Now I want to help my team cultivate their intuition. How would you advise a leader to start showing the team members how to do this?"

Jessica Pryce-Jones: Well, I could do a shameless plug for my book now.

Anita Brick: Sure, go for it.

Jessica Pryce-Jones: Read my book. It's called Intuition at Work, and there's a chunk in it about how to help your team members. Also how to use team intuition because that's a thing and all the data and research is really clear about that, but we can leave that for now. So what I would do to do that, there are a couple of things. I would sit and talk to each of my team members just to say, "Hey, this is what I want to do and this is how I want to help you. Now tell me about a time when you used your intuition and it was right." Get them to try and identify their own cues. Now they may not be that aware of their cues, but I'm sure, how do you decide on a place to live or partner, those kinds of things, whether there isn't a right or a wrong, it's a gut feel. Everyone's had one of those. It doesn't have to be a time in work, and they don't need tell you exactly what it was. It's the cues that are important.

And then was there a sense of alignment or misalignment, expansion, contraction, energy for or energy not for, away from or towards. What their language and their cues were, so that you can come back to them. And when they've got a decision to make, ask, "What's the gut feeling about this? What's your intuition telling you to do?" If people don't know, just give them a little poke and say, "Well, if I wasn't here and you had to decide, what would you do? If you were in my position, what do you think that I would do?" There are some ways to push people to recognize and tune in. And I think if you share your stories of your successes and your failures and how it works for you. When you ask senior leaders how they make decisions, they all talk about when push comes to shove and it's difficult, they use their intuition. But if we don't talk about it, how do we start to learn to use this thing? So I think it's fantastic that someone is trying to help their team.

One more tip. I interviewed the CEO of a company called Cosworth, operates in states in the UK. What he'd set up for his team members was something that he called a gimme and a gimme is Hal didn't believe in it, but if you feel very strongly about something and it's within what he thought was an acceptable risk profile, because Hal's very keen on let's just manage this stuff with a risk profile so we don't go out of our lanes, then do it. What one wants to do is to teach the whole senior team how to use their intuition. So what this leader can do is say, "All right, if you feel really strongly about something and you want to do it," you don't have to call it a gimme. You can call it whatever you like, to manage that learning-based intuition because it is something that you have to learn. It's a skill, like everything you learn.

Anita Brick: It very, very true. So two different situations, and I think they want to learn. I think they want to get some ideas from you to learn. So the first one is a student and he said, "I'm not very comfortable with on-the-spot decision making because mistakes are not really tolerated in my company. How can I mitigate the risk of quick decisions by incorporating intuition?"

Jessica Pryce-Jones: If he's got to make a quick decision, or she, there's a couple of things that you can do. There's an explorer that I spoke to called Matt Pycroft. Matt talked about flipping a coin, and Matt was an polar explorer. So the decisions that he makes about to cross this crevasse or not cross this crevasse with a team are literally life and death. Very few of us have those situations that we have to deal with. Matt is relatively young, in his thirties, and quite often he's with a crew, a film crew. He's taking people with him who haven't necessarily signed up to be part of that risk. So obviously it's dangerous stuff.

Well, when he's deciding, do I cross the crevasse here or there, what he does is he flips a mental coin. He assigns crevasse left, crevasse right to either side of the coin, and while the coin is in the air and before it comes down, he knows which side he wants it to land on and that's the side he chooses. And I thought that was a very neat mind tool. That's a way of doing it, of learning to do it and trusting yourself.

There's another one, and you can do two or three at the same time and see do you get the same stuff? Get a sticky note, write yes, no or choice A, choice B, choice C, stick them in front of you, and see which one do you want to pull out? Which is the one that is literally calling to you? If none of them are calling to you, go away, do something else, come back. But I do recommend if you've got to make a decision quickly, if you're told you've got 30 minutes, you come back to us in 30 minutes, I would make the decision in the first five, 10 minutes, I would leave it and then I would come back and test my decision again. Do I still feel good about this decision? And if I don't feel good about this decision, I would ask for more time, because otherwise you're just playing heads you win, tails you lose. It really is a coin toss. I would do that. The main thing is to make a decision because you can undo decisions, but I think getting stuck is worse than no decision.

Anita Brick: But in his environment there's a low tolerance level of mistakes. I guess he has to take that into account. But the other thing that you said earlier that if you go into the A, B, C are the three options, and you are making that decision from a strong sense of ego, then your intuition, is not going to really be incorporated into what you do. Correct?

Jessica Pryce-Jones: Absolutely. If you make an intuition, I'm doing little inverted commas in the air now as I'm talking out of fear, worry, anxiety, it's not intuition. Intuition, you are hearing it when things are quiet. So it's like take 10 deep breaths and think about what you really want. If you're feeling super pressured, move out of the situation that you are in. It's almost impossible to hear your intuition. And then people say to me, "I used my intuition, it was all wrong." Then it wasn't your intuition. There is corollary or caveat to that, which is sometimes the right decision is the wrong decision. So you do something and it looks like, "Oh my God, I made a terrible decision." But actually it turns out at the very end of it was the right decision. You just didn't know it at the time. And those are very painful things to have to go through, and you only know that with hindsight.

And then we have a hindsight bias, and that's another thing to watch out for. We haven't talked about bias as being part of the risk register in all of this, but that's why keeping a journal is so important, because we are living on these kind of waves, aren't we? And it's not a decision is a thing that's final. It's often sub-decisions and sub-things that happen after that. So what you think also is right at the time may be actually wrong. Oh my Lord, existential crisis coming up now.

Anita Brick: And we only know what we know at the time. The idea of keeping a journal, whether paper journal or an app of some kind, is really important because I think the other bias that can come into play, like someone said, "Well, here's my intention, but my intention and my intuition are usually incorrect and I fail." The question I would have back to that person is, is that true? If you stack it all up, is it zero wins, a hundred failures? Or are there some wins? Because if there's some, then you still have data to build on.

Jessica Pryce-Jones: Intentions are really helpful. I do believe that you can just turn your intuition on. You don't need to call in your angels and sniff incense or whatever it is. You just go, okay, what really is pulling me here? In which direction? If you can't get any quiet for your mind, it's like literally walk outside, take 10 deep breaths, change your environment, switch up, get a drink. It is very hard to be intuitive in [inaudible 00:21:50] circumstances, which is when you are hungry, angry, lonely, tired, and then overwhelmed. That's called, no, don't do it. I know that my intuition at seven o'clock in the evening is just way off. So that's why learning what it is when it shows up, how it shows up is so important.

Force yourself. What am I really thinking and feeling here? Do it around something small. I have a great friend who's an angel investor, and he says, "I'm never going to give you a big chunk of money if I haven't given you a small one. I'm never going to give you a load of my time if I haven't given you half an hour." It's the same for intuition. Take it small. What do I notice about that? What is my attention to being drawn to here? Where is safe for you?

Anita Brick: It's a good point. You could practice, so to speak, your intuition by deciding which film to see, which restaurant to go to. And not that they're completely inconsequential, but they're not so big where you don't get that hour and a half, two hours, whatever back when you are at the theater. But beyond that, there's not much lost.

Jessica Pryce-Jones: Another great way of going around it, Anita, is take the pressure off yourself. Coincidences and serendipities are turning up in your life and be open to being open because coincidence and serendipities are a little, well for me, they always feel like, "Oh, I'm getting a little nudge here that this was the right thing to do." So I got in a London cab a couple of weeks ago, and my husband's writing a book about climate science and environment, and there was a fire in East London a couple of summers ago, which was quite a serious fire. And at the time there was a water shortage and a heat wave, and the hospitals were all literally melting down, and so were the roads and planes couldn't take off, et cetera. 200 firefighters at the scene. And my husband had been trying to find one to interview and he couldn't and they wouldn't talk to him. They were all absolutely fed up of talking to journalists.

And I happened to get in a cab. I went to see my old neighbor where I used to live, and I suddenly went, "Oh, I've been talking too long. The only way I'm going to get to my next appointment is if I take a black taxi." Ordered one of those lovely London cabs, got into it and started chatting to the guy who turned out to be a firefighter in his spare time. He drove a London cab two and a half days a week, and two and a half days a week he was a firefighter. He said he came from Essex, which is where this fire was. I said, "You didn't happen to be at that fire in East London, did you?" He said, "Oh yeah, I was." And I said, "Oh, interesting. You wouldn't mind talking to my husband, would you?"

Anita Brick: I love when things happen.

Jessica Pryce-Jones: He went, "No, sure." And I took his number, but had a conversation. Those are the little things. And you go, huh, okay, I'm just getting a little ding from the universe here. It feels fun. Those kinds of things feel fun.

Anita Brick: To jump in here, coincidence and serendipity are not intuition because they come from the outside and intuition, I learned. See, I read the book. And intuition comes from the inside. So are you thinking of coincidences and you can't see my air quotes either, and serendipity as nods saying, "Yeah, you're on the right track." It's just like confirmation?

Jessica Pryce-Jones: To me, they're just little nods.

Anita Brick: At least for myself, I need them.

Jessica Pryce-Jones: Yeah, most ancient societies tell us that they are. They help us feel that we're on the right track. If you are western educated, we think, oh, it means nothing. But I think they're just worth paying attention to go, "So what am I taking from this?" For me, when I get something like that, I go, keep doing what you're doing. That's what I get from it.

Anita Brick: Yeah, that's good. The risk of not paying attention to at least saying "interesting" is a loss.

Jessica Pryce-Jones: And they're fun, they're funny, they're peculiar. They give us good stories at the very least. And when you connect with people, we're always going, "Oh my goodness. So you are from X, me too." That mini-coincidence help us connect with others in a way that we generally find meaningful.

Anita Brick: I agree. Do you have time for a couple more questions?

Jessica Pryce-Jones: Totally.

Anita Brick: Right. So this one is very different, but you talk a lot about observation, observing the environment, observing the mood in the room, lots of observations. So this was a really thoughtful question, probably others who are listening can relate to. They said, "I am not originally from the US. While I'm keen on observing, especially in my home country, I miss cultural nuances. How can I increase my leveraging intuition when I miss a big chunk of the context?"

Jessica Pryce-Jones: They're talking about social intuition here. We have intuition that we use in lots of different spaces. Social intuition is one of the things that of course it's most important to, well, who's with me? Who isn't? But there's also intuition around timing. There's intuition around is this the right thing to do? Is this the best right thing to do? All these different kinds of intuition come to play. So I think that they're talking mostly about social intuition. Is this person with me or are they not?

Pay attention to some of other cues first. Who's looking at who? Who's looking away? Who's nodding when you say something? Who's doing nothing? I do understand if you're working remotely, that's even harder because you're picking up or not picking up on it. Feeling alliances, who talks after, who talks before who. So you start to just notice where alliances lie. And then who feels more open and closed, and what feelings am I getting from whom? I live in France, and sometimes I miss nuances in French. Absolutely. There's a phrase that said, and I just go, huh, a little colloquial phrase that, I don't know what it was, but you can still feel whether someone is with or not with you. Start to notice feeling rather than actual words and sayings, and I think that will give her a different level of information, or him.

Anita Brick: That's a really good point. Those things are universal. I like that. And it lessens the impact of the cultural nuances. While those are certainly important, you're building a base of experience that supersedes that.

Jessica Pryce-Jones: Absolutely. And if you know that senior leaders use it, suddenly it becomes imperative to do that and to learn that thing and to understand your own cues. There is another little trick, which is for this person to ask the last question, you could have a little rainbow or have a little cloud and you can just move it around people and just put your little rainbow or a little cloud over a person and does it belong there? Your intuition will tell you yes or no.

Anita Brick: That's fun. The research that you did shows that the vast majority of people who are successful in executive leadership, intuition is a very important part of their, for lack of better word or phrase, toolkit.

Jessica Pryce-Jones: Absolutely. And I really liked Zak Brown when I interviewed him, and he's the CEO of McLaren, and he said, "I cannot tell you of time when I'm not using my intuition. It's always there and always on, and I get data around my intuitions and I intuit about the data, and it doesn't matter which one comes first, but it's always on."

Anita Brick: Got it. Let's make this intuition, the aspect of intuition, a more powerful tool for everyone who's listening regardless whether they're early in their career, whether they're more junior, more senior. You gave us a lot to think about. Your book, Intuition at Work, it's very practical. When you think about it, what are three things that you would advise an individual to do to leverage intuition in their career to be more successful, not just in their career, but in their life?

Jessica Pryce-Jones: Let's go back to keep a journal, write stuff down, share what you think with other people. Just test it. Test it with someone else, with using your own vocabulary, because then you are finding out what other people think. One of the first books I read was by Robin Hogarth who wrote a book called Educating Intuition. He said, "Intuition with no feedback, it's just guesswork." You've got to write it down. You've got to get feedback. You've got to find out what other people are thinking and practice around small stuff.

And I think the other thing is think about what an acceptable hit rate is. 50/ 50 is not an acceptable hit rate to me. What do you want it to be? Do you want it to be 80%? You want to be 80% correct? Then you've got target to work towards, and you go, okay. You can see where you start to fall down. And if you write enough things down, for me certainty was incorrect, so too much certainty was wrong. So I need to feel a little like, ooh, sense of doubt here. And you can create some principles for yourself.

And finally, I have a little LinkedIn group, and if anybody wants to join that, go find me and I'll show you where the LinkedIn group is. Stick your questions there because it's really hard to learn alone. Community is a much, much easier way of learning.

Anita Brick: So journal feedback, set some principles for yourself, and community. And it sounds like you've already created it for us.

Jessica Pryce-Jones: Yes. Looking forward to seeing some people there. We haven't really talked about have we, Anita, bias? People mix up, it's a risk, a bias that you make a bias judgment and you say, it's my intuition, and it's not. But it's bias if you're cherry-picking data. You're making decisions you've made before. You're not ready to move. But a bias should dissipate if you challenge that rationally. But intuition won't disappear and it won't dissipate, and intuitions feel softer. That for me is one of the ways of understanding the differences between the two. You can challenge yourself by saying, "What would need to fundamentally change in this situation for me to change my decision?" So you look at it the other way around.

Anita Brick: Well, it also sounds like the bias is you've made your decision and you're looking for evidence to support it. Your intuition is you're allowing a little bit of doubt to come in so that you can incorporate something that may not be so obvious, but that is critically important.

Jessica Pryce-Jones: Yeah.

Anita Brick: Anything else you want to share with us?

Jessica Pryce-Jones: No, just to say thank you so much for inviting me. It's been great fun spending the last hour with you.

Anita Brick: I really like the book a lot. It demystified intuition for me. And knowing that you come from this place of integrity, what you're saying has even more value because you want people to do better and be better. And I think that's what we all aspire to. So thank you again for writing it.

Jessica Pryce-Jones: It was a pleasure. It was hard. I'm so glad I've done it. Thank you.

Anita Brick: Thank you. And wish you all the best with that. And I know we'll chat again soon. And thank you all for listening. This is Anita Brick with CareerCast at Chicago Booth. Keep advancing.