I am fascinated by the power of our minds; by the fact that 95% of the times we run on autopilot and only remaining 5 % are conscious decisions. I am fascinated by the diversity of decisions in people exposed to the same circumstances and same information and taking diametrically different decisions; by the neuroplasticity of our brains that can remain malleable up until a very old age even death ( provided that we keep on providing them with new stimuli).
Decision is the end of the deliberation and the beginning of an action. As Albert Camus once wrote: “Life is a sum of all your choices.” We are a sum of our decisions and the moment of decision is when we are making up our mind based on the information available to us. It can take seconds, minutes, weeks or even years.
The decisions (or indecision for that matter too) affect our entire lives. Many would say that humans are smart and logical beings but we also know that some of the most important decisions of our lives are frequently based on emotions and instinct: partner, career or parenting choices etc. Moreover, there are also lots of indirect and deeper reasons, sometimes not even linked to the subject matter that influence decision-making such as need for recognition and acceptance, fear of rejection, social approval, love, need to belong that may make a decision seem illogical. At times, certain emotional needs outweigh good sense.
And that’s why it is important to understand why and how are we taking a decisions and what need is being satisfied with a particular decision? Here, we might need to dig deeper. If you don’t understand all the motivators behind your decision making you may be taking a bad decision. Let’s say, if you listen to someone with a vested interest, if you have wrong or insufficient information on the subject or ironically if you are too much emotionally attached or too little emotional invested( you don’t take enough time to understand a complex issue).
In my life, I have always thought that some of my best decisions even about crucial things such as choice of university studies or career choices have been gut-based decisions. Sometimes, to my great embarrassment, I could not even properly verbalise them logically but I knew that they were coming from a place of “deeper knowing”. But I get it. Gut decisions are not everyone’s cup of tea. The risks attached to decision making are sometimes huge, whether emotional, financial or social so it’s only natural that many would like to make decisions 100 % proof solid, predict scenarios and use the most sophisticated algorithms and calculations to get it 100% right. You guessed it. It’s not always possible and there are times when we need to rely on our intuition a little more.
“We don’t admire gut decision makers for the quality of their decisions so much as for their courage in making them. Gut decisions testify to the confidence of the decision maker, an invaluable trait in a leader. Gut decisions are made in moments of crisis when there is no time to weigh arguments and calculate the probability of every outcome. They are made in situations where there is no precedent and consequently little evidence. Sometimes they are made in defiance of the evidence.” HBR (Leigh Buchanan and Andrew O’Connell, January 2006). I also think, gut-decisions are made when we feel that the truth is coming from the core essence of us.
In conclusion, good decision-making is a result of intuition and reasoning based on facts and other relevant info and understanding. The magical formula is to know what dose of which ingredient you need more and this is why decisions making can sometimes be painfully difficult.
What’s your decision-making pattern?
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