The Closer Podcast brings you the inside story of deals changing the world, told by the people who know how it all went down.

Understand the human motivations behind groundbreaking business decisions with host Amy Keene.

Listen to The Closer, wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to the HBO Idea Cast from Harvard Business Review. I'm Sarah Green Carmichael. I'm talking today with Teref Houston. She

earned her PhD in psychology from Carnegie Mellon and she is the author of the

brand new book How Women Decide,

what's true, what's not, and what strategies

spark the best choices.

Terese, thank you so much for talking with us today.

Thank you, Sarah.

It's an honor to be here.

Oh, thank you.

So I want to just dive in on decision-making because I think it's really the core of good leadership.

And yet, I know a lot of us are guilty of judging decisions by the outcome with the benefit

of hindsight rather than looking at the process and saying,

you know, even if it didn't turn out the way we expected, this was fundamentally a good

decision. So when we encounter some of these obstacles that get in the way of

making good decisions, What are some of those

obstacles and why can't we follow a good process all the time even if we know what

it is? What's derailing us here? It's a good question. The primary problem is that we don't realize how narrow our view is and the fact that we're too narrow in our view because that's where we're looking we don't

notice that there be other places that we could be looking. An example that I

sometimes use is let's say someone says to you you really need to be more adventurous with your

breakfast you're looking at your shelf where you have your cereals and you're

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