Can't Lose Decisions

When it comes to making decisions, I lived most of my life with the unconscious mindset that there was pretty much always a ‘right’ choice or at least a ‘best’ choice. I only recently discovered that was a “No-Win” mindset.

“a by-product of that mindset is that we overemphasize the moment of choice and lose sight of everything that follows. Merely selecting the “best” option doesn’t guarantee that things will turn out well in the long run, just as making a sub-optimal choice doesn’t doom us to failure or unhappiness. It’s what happens next (and in the days, months, and years that follow) that ultimately determines whether a given decision was “right.”

I’m guessing many people often believe there is some certainty in which choices are right or wrong, or we have a degree of confidence in how they will impact our lives. The truth is, we really have no idea.?

Take a job for example. We have a job offer that has a better title, better pay, better product, and we like the hiring manager. We complete some due diligence, looks like a good company with a good culture, so we make the decision with high confidence that this is going to be a big improvement in our life and work!

After that great decision, maybe there is a re-org, and you get a new boss who is rude and demanding; maybe there’s a pandemic, and that company goes out of business; maybe that job was at Enron… You get my point; by all reasonable logic, you made the ‘right’ choice, and things ‘should’ have worked in your favor, but that short list of examples demonstrates that a lot is out of our control, and we never really know what could happen.?

If any of those events occurred, it would be a difficult situation to navigate - made even harder if we add the pain of regret and constant thinking, "I should have never left that last job..."

This concept of a decision being bad or good, right or wrong, is a myth. We should really look at a decision in the context of whether it is taking us in the direction we want to go. Does this choice align with our goals and core values? Will we learn valuable lessons from this decision regardless of the outcome?

Making decisions can be hard. It is even harder when we believe there is one definitively ‘right’ choice and that making the ‘wrong’ choice will lead to undesirable and unintended consequences.?

Before I became aware of the No-Lose model, I wasn’t paying any attention to what I believed about making decisions. I can now see that I was operating under a myth that if I had enough data and thought hard about it, I could 'guarantee' myself a good outcome. With that mindset, I actually never win because I’m never completely happy or satisfied with the decisions, the process, or the outcomes (unless, by some great fortune of luck, they all work out exactly as I had planned - very rare!).

Here’s a simple comparison of a ‘No-Win’ mindset and a 'Can’t-Lose’ mindset

research by Florida State professor Roy Baumeister and others?suggests that good decision-making is tied to our ability to anticipate?future?emotional states:

“It is not what a person feels right now, but what he or she anticipates feeling as the result of a particular behavior that can be a powerful and effective guide to choosing well.”

Here's a fun thing to think about, we all have the choice to decide how we want to choose ????. We can choose the No-Win mindset for decisions or the No-Lose mindset. When it comes to decisions, we'll never really know the outcome, but if you chose the right mindset - you can't lose! This is how your mindworx, use it to your advantage!