This article was inspired by Linda Sapadin on Do You Have Difficulty Making Decisions?
Not so different from many others, I often spent time being stuck in a position of indecisiveness, where I cannot focus on the outcome of one options, since there so many things keep popping up in the ways. Indeed, our daily flow consists of hundreds, not to say thousands, of decisions big and small. The moment you decide to jump out of the bed, dress up for the office, or take the train, or buy food for dinner, or do homework, and write email, every single seconds demand not only our attention, but also our willpower to response and to act. For some of us, these come easily like autopilot, for many of us, and I myself fall into this category…making decision can be super stressful, even though they can be the smallest act like choosing the red or green shirt to put on for the date.
Choices can make us anxious, and furious. They cost us peace of mind even after we have made our final decision. We are taught sometimes, from our seniors, or from our own hard-learn mistakes, that sometimes small choices can lead to bigger impact. Thus we are stressed thinking about making choices, as we are aware, or fear the failure that associate with our acts.
Nonetheless, I believe that the ability to make decision is crucial for ourselves. If we don’t take action, we are doomed to blame others for our mistakes, live meaninglessly with the flow of others, heading to wrong directions for that we were never able to make the right effort to go where we need to.
It sends us into the abyss of facing the unknown output, and at the same time, it makes us work really hard to put idea into actions. But the rewards of making decisions is that you would learn tremendously from either failure or success, as well as living fearlessly because you own your actions. Being a better decision making will carve ways for you to be a respected leader who can take responsibility and encourage others to do the same.
There are a few suggestions on how to improve our decision making ability. Here are some of them:
1.Accept that you can’t have it all.
One of the decision making golden strategy is to master the art of saying NO. Making decision force us to close door on other possibilities. The most important thing to do when you are overwhelmed with decisions is simply tell yourself LET’S NOT THINK ABOUT IT Or ELSE THIS IS NOt GOING ANYWHERE.
2.More thinking is not always better thinking
This is so true. Most of the time having too many options would bring us fatigue and despair…we don’t know what is best to choose, but we are too sentimental of what we have to drop, to say NO to, to discard, so that we can focus on what most important. More thinking just take more of our brain power, that lead us to inaction because we are too tired browsing through all of the options that we are left with no energy to choose at the end.
3.Don’t defer decisions endlessly
Perhaps sometimes it’s not the overflow of information that drive you mad, and sometimes it’s true that we need more detail, more information to make a better decision, especially decisions that affect our long term plan and definitely make a bigger impact to us later on, like choosing a college to attend. Regardless, we all have to face the harsh truth that we are all gonna die someday, and that life can turn into something unexpected, so try your best to make the optimal decisions without deferring eternally, because you only know for sure the result if you make that choice now.
4.Even if you make mistake, be proud that you have had the courage to do so
Many people criticize others for making the wrong decisions, but in fact, without highest level of consciousness, we can only guarantee anything to be exactly what we expected it to be, if we have done it several times. That’s why practice is important when we want ourselves to master at something. But we are barely living in a society where in order to survive, we have to keep pushing boundary and doing new things, and willing to take the risk to explore, to fall, to hurt, and to be crashed (metaphorically and literally). That’s why I believe it’s important for us to face the harsh truth that we would never be perfect, and so does our decision.
In conclusion, in order to grow, we need to be a little bit less fearless about their consequences and be more open to any outcome that might go along the way. These tactics are seemingly personal, but when you work in team, or organization that is bigger than yourself, the decision making are not entitled to just you, but others. There should be a mechanism in place for faster, more effective decision making, and you should definitely need to discuss how decision would be make when you are in team, to minimize time and resources and maximize output.
Qbooz 