3 reminder to make efficient decisions
Ashi Singhal
Helping you build a healthy relationship with discomfort, thus creating desired experiences in life. Spots for 1:1 sessions are now open ??
There are many big and small decisions that we make every day.
Some decisions don’t have a huge risk attached to them. Some do. Regardless, effective decision-making can be a stressful process, making one overthink and yet reaching nowhere near the final decision.
There are three reminders that help me make my decision-making process efficient. Even when I find myself overthinking about a decision, these reminders help me identify the source of overthinking and connect me back with the reality, after which I make the decisions with confidence.
Today, I’m sharing these three reminders with you:
1) Your decisions have a life
One of the most common reasons for getting stuck in decision-making is the pressure of making the perfect decision. The decision that we expect to be perfect throughout our life. But decisions have a life like we have. And in life, nothing can really be perfect throughout. There exist inevitable ups and downs that can make you question the perfect decision you made years or months or even days back. Because life keeps changing and with that changes your decisions’ perfectness. What seems like a right decision today can turn out to be the wrong decision tomorrow.?
That which matters is: How do you manage the changes through which your decisions go through? Do you take them as the natural thing? Or do you take them as the reason for cursing yourself for not making the perfect decision?
It brings us to the second reminder…
2) Your decisions’ effectiveness can really be gauged by looking back
You cannot really know if the decision you’re making today is going to be the most effective. Of course, you’d try to do your best to make the most effective decisions. That’s why you’d gather as much information as you can, you’d take your time, you’d take suggestions from others…
But the truth is: A decision’s effectiveness can really be gauged in hindsight. You can make sure that your decision is the most effective when you’re making it. But it always has a possibility that in the future it may not turn out so. To deal with this possibility, understand that…
3) You make decisions with what you know today, not with what you’ll end up learning tomorrow
You can only know what you know today. You can count on yourself and to expand your understanding, you can count on others’ experiences. Ultimately, there’s a limit to what all you can know today about the decision you’ve to make. You cannot predict all that might happen in the future. Hence, you always have to give yourself a margin of error while making any decision.
领英推荐
You can fear the possibilities in which your decision may go wrong. But you can make decisions only with what you know today, not with what you’ll end up learning tomorrow. It’s a fact, which you can use as a reminder to deal with the fear of regretting your decisions in the future. After all, regrets happen when we expect our past-self to know what our present-self knows.
I hope these reminders will help you anchor yourself amidst the process of making decisions.
Happy decision making!
??
See you around,
Ashi
ps: This is how Barack Obama, the former president of the USA, makes decisions:
"The first step to making hard decisions is being comfortable with the fact that you're not going to make a perfect decision — not all the time, maybe never; and understanding that you're dealing with probabilities, so that you don't get paralyzed trying to think that you're going to actually solve it perfectly.
[.....]
Once I have all the information and I'm confident that I understand the challenge, if I could get to 51% probability on a decision, having consumed all of the available information, then I would make that decision and be at peace with the fact that I had made the best decision I could with all the available information I had."
(Source: Happy Sexy Millionaire, a book by Steven Bartlett)