I’m here in beautiful Egypt in El Quesir on the Red Sea. Today our topic is decision making. People can have a very hard time in decision making. It can be one of the most difficult things to do particularly if you are not aware of how you make decisions.
I have a friend who every time he goes to make a decision, it’s a long and arduous process. Why? Because first of all he says “I can’t make a decision.” thereby giving himself a command to make it difficult. He is not aware of this. Secondly, he comes up with a number of choices, ever more choices and then he thinks about why this choice isn’t perfect, why it won’t work. So it’s agonizing for him.
Do you have a difficult time when making decisions?
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I have another friend who gets an idea then does it and often finds it’s not necessarily the right idea.
Two very ineffective decision making strategies. One consists of generating many options and then doing what we call in LAB Profile terms analyzing what is the problem, what he wants to move away from in each one of those options.
The second person jumps into decisions without thinking them through. He’s very proactive and he needs to be a bit more reactive.
So let’s look at some tips to how you can make better decisions.
First, be aware of how you make decisions. When you’re going through a decision making process what is it that you’re doing? How are you doing it? Are you pleased with your decisions in hind sight? The only way to evaluate a decision of course is what happened later.
Here are some tips for how to make decision making easier and how you can make better decisions.
First of all ask yourself what’s important to you with regards to this decision. If you’re making a purchase for example, what does it need to do for you? So if you’re going to purchase a camera, let’s just take a small example. What’s important to you? Do you want it to be able to take pictures under water? Do you want it to be easy to use? Do you want to have many adjustments so you can fine tune what you do? Make a list of your criteria: all of the things that are important to you. Figure out which ones are the most important criteria and the ones which are optional; the must haves and the options.
Second step, what are the choices available? Now here it’s important to choose the right number of choices. If you have too many choices but no set of criteria, it’s very hard to know what to do. Once you have your criteria, get yourself three, four, or five maximum choices and evaluate them against your criteria; which ones line up the best. If you’re not sure at this point which choices are the best according to your criteria, ask someone you trust to help you evaluate these.
Third, imagine you’ve chosen one of the choices and imagine you’re in the future. Is this the right decision six months from now, two years from now, three years from now because the only way to know if it’s the right choice of course is to look back from the future into the past and see if it was the right one.
So there are some tips for making a decision: decide what’s important to you, evaluate the options against those criteria and pretend you’ve made this decision and had to live with it for a while, does it still feel like it’s the right one.
Do you have a difficult time when making decisions?
