Decision Time

How do you roll?

Calm and collected or with an undercurrent of emotion?

We are not concerned with high-level decisions or problem-solving that takes place in a boardroom right now. We are talking about the decisions that determine your healthy lifestyle (or lack of), goals, and other everyday choices that affect you and your personal success.

Considering we make around 35,000 decisions a day, there are plenty of them. Depending on how your mind tackles them, it can mean the difference between a healthy approach and a stressed-out pressurized affliction.

Do you look at facts objectively before making a decision (logical mind)? Or, do you let feelings take the driving seat (emotional mind)? We will omit the issue of indecisiveness here as vacillation requires a whole piece to itself.

All decisions, even objective decisions contain emotion. A study (Bechara et al 1999, Damasio 1994), discovered that the participants who had injuries to part of their prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) repeatedly selected the riskier option over the safer one. Measures of their skin response revealed the patients were not experiencing emotional signals that lead to normal decision making with the fear of high risks.

It is the level of emotion and the impact that we are interested in here. Can you think of someone you know who is much more left or right-brained? How do you regard them? Do you rely on or implicitly act on their word, get frustrated, or dismiss it as an irrelevant perspective?

Let’s look at the extreme logical mind first.

Logical wants data, facts, measurable outcomes and other factual information. It has to make sense intellectually. A decision pertains to certain conditions being met. Feelings do not factor and can even be suppressed. 

Logical is what gets you out of bed to go to the gym on a winter's day. 

My father is very much of this nature. Growing up, my emotions did not get me anywhere and he still astounds me. He has extremely high intellect and had a successful career and run a profitable company too. 

There is a reason for this with his mentality, to be touched upon shortly. 

My dad is still pretty ruthless even though he’s 80 - the choices he makes for himself are no kinder!

Now the emotional mind requires none of the details that logical demands and it can be reactive and/or defensive. Emotion is in control when we act in fear, anger or joy. The emotional mind will derive choices from feelings about the desired outcome and the people involved. Personal feelings and those of others are taken into account and are of high importance. 

This describes my mother. She always thought about others - her career was in the nursing profession. I attribute my father's success, to her role. She was the point of contact to customers within the company and the more thoughtful influence. 

My mother would do anything to avoid hurting or upsetting someone, often to her own disadvantage.

The emotional mind is what stops you from leaving the warm bed for the gym. 

For most people, we are somewhere in between the examples above. Where do you sit on the Scale of Emotional Decision?

From where you stand how do you feel that has served you? 

I know I spent a period of my life making visceral choices that did not serve me well (I really was a nightmare to myself!). 

In business, I had processes and systems that ensured the best chances of success but away from that environment, it was very different. Even so, the business was affected by the decisions I made outside it. It was only when I examined how I was making choices that I was able to change and create better outcomes. 

I want to add that this did involve working on some limiting beliefs that were attached to those emotions in order to make the change.

If we are too logical we risk alienating people and depriving ourselves of more wholesome and rewarding results. We can come across as cold and unfeeling. 

Too much emotion and we could end up sabotaging our own success by constantly putting others first or regretting our reaction to events. 

Like most things, it’s about striking a balance.

This image by sums up that balance well:

Wisdom seeks to accept the emotions that are involved while taking into account the facts and acting in a reasonable manner. 

I can feel upset and still go to the gym. I will feel much better afterwards.

So how do we change the root of the decision?

The first step is to become aware and take your time. Most decisions do not require instant answers so give yourself time to let various factors come to mind that you might miss otherwise. Take note of the bigger decisions you make, investigate where they came from. Facts, data, feelings, personal gain. What were the outcomes of those decisions? Are you happy with them? (this has similarities to Peter Drucker’s feedback analysis).

From there we can work out what we need to incorporate or efface when making decisions. You have every right to ask someone to wait for your answer if you need to learn more about the situation or longer to contemplate.

When we start to see all our actions as a choice we begin to master our emotions and have much better control of our lives. We are not at the mercy of external influences that can cause us to act irrationally or make decisions that do not serve us. 

It all starts with becoming more self-aware and taking responsibility for what happens to us. We can understand and respond to others better when we know where they operate from, increasing our ability to have a positive influence on a situation. The result is better outcomes, creating a more healthy, successful future and better relationships with the people around us. 

These characteristics are attributed to the most successful leaders and are achievable by us all.

If you are interested in exploring how changing behaviour could improve revenue and relationships send me an email at [email protected] and we can have a conversation.