When it comes to making great decisions, the way you think about things is usually a lot more influential than what you actually think.

If you ever hired a person who ‘looks the part’, dated someone who ‘gives you a good feeling’, voted for the party that ‘speaks the most sense’ or got into an investment that ‘cannot be missed’, only to realise you made a horrible mistake, you might have wondered how you ever talked yourself into it. Yet, even with the bruises you’ve earned, you’re currently likely to make exactly the same decision, the next time around.

The beliefs that guide your ideas and the instincts that drive your actions, are all informed by your unconscious biases (and literally every single one of us has them), which irrationally tell us one thing is good, and another is bad; one thing is absolutely true and another is utterly false; and make you act less smartly than you actually are. But the good news is you can learn to see them, to manage them and ultimately to overcome them.

In Don’t Believe Everything You Think, Colin J Browne, the author of How to Build a Happy Sandpit, shows you how biases work, why they matter, and how to reframe your thinking to make well-founded decisions about life and work, relationships and investing, and much else in between, to vastly improve your chances of success.