A 3-question filter for your bad ideas. How smart people fool themselves every day.

Your sharpest ideas can still fool you into doing the wrong thing.  

Today we unpack why smart, driven people overtrust their thoughts, and how a simple 3-question filter turns hunches into high-quality decisions. Instead of chasing certainty, we practice decision hygiene: use evidence, test small, and weigh real outcomes before you go all in.  

We start with the cognitive traps that quietly steer choices: availability bias makes vivid stories feel true, while the halo effect lets first impressions spill into misplaced trust. From there, we shift to practical tools you can use today.  

You’ll walk away with a compact framework you can apply to health goals, career pivots, and strategy shifts: evidence → experiment → evaluation → expanded outcomes.  

If you’re ready to swap guesswork for smart iteration, hit play, save the three questions, and put them to work.  

If this helped you think clearer, subscribe, leave a review, and share it with a friend who’s making a big decision right now.  

Have more time to upgrade your thinking? Listen to the most popular episode of 2025:  

Simon Lancaster. How to speak like a leader: influence, inspire, educate to create change. Neuroscience of public speaking.

Transcript

Smarts, Humility, And Bias Traps

Availability Bias In Real Life

Halo Effect And First Impressions

Train Habits To Beat Bias

Question 1: What Evidence Do You Have

Testing Ideas With Small Bets

Choosing Better Sources And Models

Question 2: How Is It Working For You

Reality Checks And Pivot Points

Question 3: Other Possible Outcomes

Decision Trees And Outside Views

Action Steps And Big Life Decisions

Show Milestones, Gratitude, And CTA

SPEAKER_00 0:09

Hello and welcome back to another episode of Change Wired Podcast. My name is Angela Shorina. I'm your host. I'm your partner in change transformation. Your executive coach 360, body mind work, better, health, high performance, personal and collective evolution. That's what we are all about here. And of course, we are here about change. Change for the better, change for growth, change for progress, and learning how to get more consistent at the change we desire. Today, guys, as you uh probably understood from the title of this podcast, we're gonna be talking about ideas and filtering your own thinking and learning how to think better and how to fool ourselves less. I've read a couple of books recently on strategy and decision making, and these books and other resources agree on one thing: the smarter the person gets, unless they work on their humility and install better thinking and decision-making habits, the smarter the people get, the more they tend to overlook a lot of things and fall for many different biases that we have a lot of. Did you know, for example, that we have about, let me check the number here, about 200 cognitive biases, predictable ways of our thinking going wrong. So basically, we think certain things about reality, but they're not really true. So there are about 200 of them listed on Wikipedia, and they are constantly being added and discovered. So, an example of cognitive bias can be something like availability heuristic or availability bias. This idea that whatever comes to your mind easily and vividly, whatever you remember first, whenever thinking about an idea or being kind of asked a question, you think that that is more true than something that you have hard times remembering. Like, for example, maybe you read about some plane crushing, or maybe you saw a lot of things on your social media lately fed by the algorithm that adjusts to what you like seeing or what you've recently watched, or what keeps coming to your email. The more of that stuff, especially on one theme you see, the more you start thinking that this is how reality is, very often forgetting that that is just what you've been shown or you've been seeing. Another one is Halo effect. It's when, and I actually heard this back from a couple of clients just recently. It's when you see a person and or maybe a brand, and you have the first impression, like everything looks good and clean and clear, or a person looks good, they're well dressed, they are in good physical shape, and you start thinking they must be smart and they must be talented and they must be successful, and all those things. You know, there is this thing like of you can't you can never make first impression uh twice. And the reason why it works is because we often see the person, even though we don't really know a lot about this person, we form this impression, this understanding, this idea of this person, and then we are so much less likely to change it. And actually, quite a lot of things have to happen in order for us to change that opinion. Then so cognitive biases, your brain will literally, for example, just something as more true or more important simply because it appeared in your head more often. And nobody is biased free, but almost everyone can build better decision-making habits to work around and with biases to get better results. One of the simple practices is to begin with, is to simply start paying attention to your thoughts and take your own thoughts with a grain of salt, just like you would somebody else's ideas, right? Whenever I say something to my clients, no matter how long we work together with them, even though with time it gets better because I advise something and it works, and I get certain uh certain amount of credibility, but even that, whenever they hear something from me, uh their internal bullshit detector comes online. And like, uh, is it really true? Uh, where else have I heard it? What did I see on social media recently for my favorite doctors, etc., on social media? Like you have this uh bullshit detector coming up every time you hear something from someone. But very rarely, and for very few people, that the same detector comes up when you hear your own thoughts. You somehow think that because they came to your mind, it must be more true. And again, there are more than 200 cognitive biases. Then we have cognitive fallacies or errors in logic. Like, for example, I'm still trying to understand better this like difference between bias and fallacy. For example, one cognitive fallacy is if you're a bad person, you must always be wrong, or if you're a good person, you must be right. Like the same I can relate to the fact that if I like the person, I'm more likely to think that they are right whenever they say, like whatever they say. And if I don't like this person, I am more likely to think they're wrong. Even though in reality it has no correlation whatsoever whether the person is right or wrong on the subject, but my likeness make it more or less likely for me to believe. So perhaps you can relate as well. And these fallacies and cognitive biases, they are quite common for most of us, and unless we train ourselves to create different thinking and decision-making habits, and we create frameworks and different processes that then we repeat, making it into a habit, it's gonna be almost impossible to not fall victims to those biases, and because of that, make not so such great decisions, and because of that, not get such great results. But hopefully, again, with experience, what we can do is we can adapt better practices that decision-making scientists create and that we can observe in different business cases or different life cases, and then we start using different decision-making processes, different thinking processes, and then we're gonna start getting better results from our decisions, not because we got unbiased, but because we know of our biases and we start using different methods to approach our thinking. And today you're gonna learn about three simple questions that will help you to be less biased towards your own thinking and evaluate and start evaluating better your own thoughts, just like you would evaluate any other person's advice. And these are the questions that I came across, learned from different decision-making scientists, uh, poker champions like Annie Duke, for example, who uh did a lot of writing on decision making, uh thinking in probabilities, thinking in bats, how to make better decisions, quit, like why it is important to understand when to pivot and stop something, not just to keep pushing and uh trying to be gritty with everything, wasting very often time on things that don't work, where we could be doing things that have better potential to actually work. So, three questions that I'm now using more with myself and with my clients, which are a simple way to help you evaluate your thoughts better so you become so you fall again victim less to all these biases and fallacies and make better decisions short and long term. So, the first question that will help you de-bias your thinking is whenever a thought or idea comes to your mind, simply ask your question, just like you would if somebody else gave you an advice. What evidence do you have? Like Angela, what evidence do you have that actually this will be true or this will work? Not vibes, not theories, not intuition, not stories, but actual evidence in real life that you can be reasonably sure of. And if you don't have much of that evidence, you can also ask, how can I test this assumption before going all in? How can I dip my toes before diving? Like, for example, if you're considering a certain career or a new f think in your business, don't jump all in and pivot all of your business to that idea. Dedicate part of your resources, 20% is something which is recommended by different strategists and innovation thinkers. Dedicate some of the resources of you and your team, your whole company behass. Perhaps Google, I think their number was 10%, so their people can work on different experimentations from which some great projects came out, like Gmail, for example, right? So they dedicate 10% of their people's time to different experiments. But yeah, like what evidence do you have? And if you don't have really good evidence or you haven't heard it from enough sources, like somebody also asked me the other day, like Angela, what's your take on all this protein thing? Is it really that important to eat in all these big numbers for that person? It was big for me, it's always you know, maybe not enough. But they asked me, like, what's your evidence? And before when I was younger, I would say, you know, all because of this, this, and this, that, and that. But these days I try to not never give answers in absolutes. And I said, Well, here is my logic. I hear this from this kind of doctors who work with athletes and who also in their you know 40s and 50s, and they are super well functioning, they still train, they still perform, they still compete, for example, and their but the their looks are amazing, and this is what they recommend. So, this is why I'm listening to these people, and this is who I'm listening to, versus some doctor who barely has any muscle, look like they haven't stepped in a gym in 20 years, or super skinny woman who seemed like nobody somebody didn't fit her for quite some time, right? But whatever they say, I wouldn't listen to them simply because hey, I don't want the same result. And I don't really know anyone else who I aspire to be like, who have the results that I want, who train or work with people I admire, create the health and athletics that I want. I don't know anyone, you know, speaking about that. So maybe that's not something that I'm gonna take as my advice. And I give this kind of reply, and uh that it goes back to this question like what evidence do you have? And somebody else during high-performing entrepreneur reboot challenge yesterday, when we were talking about how if you want to elevate your goals and your standards, you gotta elevate your reference group or who you aspire to be like, whose advice or voices on social media you listen to. And somebody asked me, But Angela, can we have like different people for different areas of our lives and also not follow the same person for everything? Like, for example, Elon Musk. Maybe I would look into how he does business, but maybe I would never look to him up to him for how he does the rest of his life. Like, is that a valid thing to do? And I said, of course, like nobody is a perfect snow snowflake, and we gotta emulate results and philosophies of people who exhibit certain results in a specific area. So, what evidence do you have and what logic do you have for listening for that specific evidence? So that is a very, very useful and simple way to analyze your ideas a little bit more than believing that they're true just because they came to your mind more recently and or more frequently. Now, the second question is how is it working for you? In some of my coaching certifications, I got this question and this methodology of working with clients' resistance that I really love, and I also find it very useful for evaluating the validity of my ideas or things that I do in life and business. So the question is, how is it working for you? And uh, whenever a client proposes something that uh I don't personally personally agree with, I don't say, you know, you know, it's wrong and don't do that. No, I actually ask them because I also understand that I might be wrong, just like any other person. So I ask them, okay, so why do you think this? Why do I want to try this? What sounds good to you there? So I try to question help them question their own thinking. And then I say, well, try. And then when they do try for a couple of weeks, uh I ask, how is it working for you? Because if it's not working, no matter how good it sounds in theory, that maybe even if it's to some degree right in some context, maybe it is not right for you. So if you're trying it and it's not working and you are now trying to change yourself or the world to fit in into the theory, maybe it is better to try another theory instead of wasting time for something that doesn't work for you because you already tried it and you've seen that it doesn't really work for you. The same I had a case uh recently with a client, and he's like, Well, again, like the protein thing, and I don't think I want to be eating that much protein. And we actually have been working for quite some time and asked him, Well, when you do did follow this advice, did it work for you? And it actually did. And I asked him, Well, now you want to try something different, and on basis of what? Right? Again, just questioning thoughts more and helping them to see that they need to evaluate their thoughts instead of just jumping all in into the thing that's from evidence might not be the thing and might not be the working thing, especially if you have success evidence, but now you're like, Yeah, I'm gonna try something, you will try. But if it doesn't work, perhaps change for something else. So, how is it working for you? It's a good reality check. So, whenever you let's say, from the first uh question, like on what evidence, what evidence do you have, right, for that idea, you decide to run an experiment. And before running an experiment, set up a date, let's say in a couple of weeks or a month, when you're gonna ask the second question, how is it working for you? Because if it's not working, it's time to adjust to pivot or do something, or not follow insanity principle, doing the same thing again and again and again, expecting different results. Or if you want to do the same thing again and again and again, you still gotta justify to yourself why do you want to continue? On what evidence? And then uh there is the third question which uh I learned from uh the work of Annie Duke. She is again world sportier champion, decision scientist. She wrote now, I think, three books on decision making, and she always brings into her work of other people and real life cases from business or life. And the question that came out from from her work and what I use now, this is a shortcut to better decision making. Gotta get some water in first, hydrate, guys, your brain works better when hydrated. So the the third question is what are other possible outcomes? Whenever an idea comes to us, we tend to think, ah, this is a great idea that will lead to X outcome. And it happens often so fast that in our mind it's like a straight line from this idea to this outcome. But actually, there is a whole range of outcomes that can happen when we take almost any action. So, what are other possible outcomes that you have not considered? So slow it down, especially if you are about to invest your own resources, time, energy, money, and other people, perhaps your team, perhaps your family. It's good to ask, what are other possible outcomes? And even better, invite and what is called in decision-making an outside view. Ask yourself, what would my friend say here? What are other possible things that I'm not seeing? Or actually ask your friends or other people you can take advice from, or ask ChatGPT or Claude. Then consider those other probabilities, possibilities, downside costs, upside potential, and then evaluate like how likely the upside to happen, how likely potential risk to happen, and am I ready to pay the price of potential risk for the potential upside? Because again, when you think about idea or a thought or a course of action, it rarely, if ever, has only one possible outcome. It almost always has a whole tree, which is where it comes from. Decision trees. Every single thought, every single action, uh, everything has many different probabilities. So have you considered all the other possible outcomes? Or the the question that I'm using these days is what are other possible outcomes? Not just the one that you are considering or that came to your mind, but all the others. And no, guys, you don't have to need to, you don't have to analyze every single idea and thought to death. But before you invest serious time, other people's time and money and energy or say no to things that might work better, it's good decision hygiene to scrutinize your own thoughts the way you'd scrutinize someone else's advice. Because if you think about that, whenever somebody else gives you advice, and usually the less credibility they have, the more you question it, you always ask things like, Yeah, that might be true, but there are other things that might be true, there are other possible outcomes, right? And you look at the person like, how's it working for them? I don't really see the evidence, right? And what evidence do you have or they have to believe in this idea? You would scrutinize other people's opinions and ideas, but you wouldn't your own. And why? Just because they came to your head doesn't mean them that they're anymore true. Our brain is actually objectively really bad at thinking about objective reality. We always have some sort of lens, and that's why Wikipedia keep listing ballot cognitive uh biases and cognitive fallacies, because that's just the nature of our human brain. So, over to you, dear listener. Where do you need to doubt your own thinking more? Where is it working for you? And where is it not working for you? And what small thinking habit could help you today to start start thinking. Better, start making decisions better consistently. And again, trying to de bias yourself and learn all of the biases and all of the fallacies, it's just unrealistic. But creating different protocols or habits or routines for evaluating any idea that you might decide to pursue, and especially if that idea connects to something that can change the course of your life, like changing your career, changing your place of living, or your relationship, or like marriage, or so many meaningful things. So especially for those things, uh question your thinking more. Because as 200 plus biases confirm, our brain is not great at all at telling us truth about uh reality, and that's how smart people, and research says smart people do it even more, fool themselves quite often. So before we stop, guys, don't forget to read a review. Today, by the way, Buzz Sprout did this 2025 playback, and it said that our podcast, Change Wired, has been around for eight years. Eight years of showing up, guys. This year I recorded 3,000, or maybe it's overall, but 3,613 minutes. This year we've done 138 episodes. Listeners listen to us in 193 countries. I'm like, are there so many countries at all? So our podcast is a global podcast. Our most favorite countries, or where we are most famous: US, UK, and Canada. Then also, our podcast has been listened to in 11,092 cities. Sydney being the biggest fan. So, guys, if you are in Sydney, you are Changewired biggest fans out there. So thank you so much. We got 28,000 uh downloads for this podcast with the most uh favorite podcast done with Simon Lancaster, who was speaking on Changewired Podcast about the way leaders speak. It was a blend of conversation and communication science and neuroscience. So check it out. We're gonna link it in the show notes. So, guys, let's keep it up, let's keep it going in 2026. Let's blow up to 50,000 downloads this year. Also, please do share, please do rate us, review. You know, if you have a couple of minutes today, please do so. It means so much for the podcast, you know, and all this noise. Trying to bring something that has grounding in good sense, real life, real stories and cases, something to help you, to help myself, to help the world grow, create more positive impact, and evolve our human potential. So please rate, review, and share. And till next time, guys, yes, keep growing, but also start questioning your thinking more by adapting one of the questions that we talked about today. Question number one: What evidence do you have before jumping all in on your idea? How is it working for you for the ideas that you're trying or testing or been working on? And what are other possible outcomes? So, whenever it seems like your idea has just one positive outcome: 99.9.9%. This idea that you're considering doesn't just have positive outcomes, it also has a bunch of outcomes that you wouldn't like that much. So, question your own thinking and keep growing. Until next time.