Making decision making simple

Yesterday I posed the question ‘have you ever made a wrong decision?’. And there’s a very simple answer to that question - no, you haven’t.

Now I know what many of you will be thinking at this point, “but I went out with that guy who turned out to be a total idiot, that wasn’t a good decision” or “what about the time I decided to try to take 3 exams and it was more work than I could manage and I failed all of them?” or “I told my boss I could get the report done this week and now I’m totally overwhelmed and I’ll never get it finished! How is that a right decision???”

In all of these, and indeed any other, examples the key thing that makes the decision feel wrong is HINDSIGHT. 

In the moment that you made the decision it was the right one. Based on the information you had available at that time, your beliefs and your values at the time, it was the right decision. With the beauty of hindsight, later on you can look back and think ‘but it was a wrong decision’. But actually what you are seeing is that the available information changed, your beliefs changed or your values changed. You might wish you could change the decision in retrospect but (unless you’re a time traveller!) you can’t.  

What you can do is look at ways to maximise the opportunity of making the best possible decision the first time and if you later feel like it isn’t working, revisit the decision powerfully.

So what do we need to look at to make a powerful decision?:

1. Ask yourself if the information you have available gives you enough to be able to decide? If not, get more information. If so, make a decision! Sometimes ‘enough’ is difficult to define so what you can need to do is no 2….
2. Trust your intuition. When I work with 1:1 clients we talk about the 5 Women’s Powertypes?, one of which is the Queen. Bring that Queen part of you to decision making, your Queen is the part of you that knows when she can be decisive and when she needs to seek further counsel. 
3. Seek counsel if you need to. You cannot be the expert in everything! A trusted friend and advisor can give you a different perspective and some knowledge and expertise that maybe you don’t have. 
4. Remember that action is better than paralysis. Staying stuck and going round and round without doing anything does not help. Make a choice to either seek more information and/or get advice or just take a decision! It is rare that you cannot adjust route at a later stage if needs be so move forwards and course correct later.
5. When new information comes to light, you can then revisit your decision without the guilt and judgement that a 'wrong' decision brings. Identify the options for changing direction and then go back to step 1 and gather that information again.

A client recently reframed this beautifully, she said “I’ve always told myself that I make wrong decisions and have to fix it afterwards. Instead I can see now that I actually make right decisions and later adjust my course. That feels so much more powerful!”

What decisions do you need to make more powerfully right now?

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