Deciding to decide well
Deciding on the right outfit or who you’re going to marry isn't decided on mere knowledge. In fact, I found it hard to decide what to write - there’s so much I needed to exclude!
If you look up on Google ‘How to make decisions’ it will give you a list of transactional steps. For example:
Investigate the situation in detail.
Generate good alternatives.
Explore your options.
Select the best solution.
Evaluate your plan.
Yet who makes decisions based just on facts? To make good decisions, there’s a bunch of stuff going on in our gorgeous brains. It’s much much more than a chemical, electrical and biological process, though.
If you find it difficult to make decisions or doubt if the ones you made will work, there’s a few reasons for that.
Firstly, decisions are never just about a step by step rational approach. Your decision making brain is innately linked to emotions. There have been cases when people who have damaged behind their eye – where sits a part of their brain linked to processing emotions – they can’t make decisions. At. All.
The mix of rational and emotional elements in your decisions depends on so many factors. If you’re making a big decision, like buying a house, good practice is to give the decision to your subconscious. If you distract your brain to do something fun, sleep on it, and then the subconscious does its work and the decision will seem to pop up with great clarity. When picking something abstract like shares or investment property, using intuition isn’t useful at all. This is almost a totally rational decision.
When choosing a new place to work, if it was only a rational process, we would look at the performance of the company from their annual report, research the manager we’re working for and that would be it. And for the organisation hiring you, it would only want to read your C.V. But the process is much more rigorous - for good reasons. You’re dealing with much more than just a skill set.
So how do you make decisions? Do you tend to be more emotional than rational? Consider how you made the decision to read this, bought your last car or that dress that you’ve never worn (Yes, I mean look up from reading and consider it.)
Another big factor is willpower. This is a finite resource and you can run out of steam from making too many decisions in a day. That's why you can get to 4pm and say no to poor food, have a mad early evening and find at 7 pm. you’re chowing down on a sugary carbohydrate that you resisted earlier.
From knowing more on willpower alone, you can see that knowing how you make decisions can help you make better ones. (And if you haven’t paused to think about how you make decisions yet, try…now.)
To help you decide how you make decisions, here are some examples:
Past history (it worked last time I did it)
It makes me feel good
I’ve never done this before – adventure!!
The facts prove it’s right
My family won’t/will like it
I’ll decide later (no action is an action in itself)
Bias ( e.g. I’ve never had good experiences with ethnicities other than my own, so I’ll only hire them)
Familiarity ( I know this brand, I’ll choose it)
Perceived status
Did you recognise any of these? We usually have favourite ways to decide, and stick to those alone.
The painful side of decision making is when we usually berate ourselves when we think we’ve made bad decisions. We don’t decide about how or why we make decisions.
Then, many of us tend to sweat the small stuff. (Have you taken ages to decide what to wear, where to eat, re-done your make-up, adjusted pillows on your couch, or, for buying cereal? That’s sweating the small stuff. )
We tend to make bad decisions by:
Running out of time
Doing too many things at once
Using emotions instead of analytics to decide – or vice versa
Not asking or considering others who are involved in making the decision
Not having enough information
Having low to no confidence in ourselves
Giving small decisions too much weight
Using only our head, heart or gut to make decisions.
According to James Lehar, a neuroscientist and author, “The first step to making the right decision,…is accurately diagnosing the problem and figuring out which brain system to rely on… We always need to be thinking about how we think.”
It boils down, he says, to not having a formula for each decision, but knowing yourself.
Do you know how to get to make better and better decisions? Perhaps you have some big decisions coming up and could use a few pointers to make sure you’re not stuck in making the wrong choice.
A 20-minute discovery conversation will help pinpoint if coaching on this will be useful. Call me today on 021 721 781 to make a time.
The painful side of decision making is when we usually berate ourselves when we think we’ve made bad decisions. We don’t decide about how or why we make decisions.
