During a drive back in 2019, a good friend of my dad’s shared with me advice he learned over the course of several years running his business, as well as life experience. This advice was about making decisions, and the six key steps in doing so.
- Is what is going to be done a need? (lit. is this action necessary?)
Before deciding to do anything, you need to take ample time to evaluate your decision – to take a certain action or give a declarative speech.
Consider what circumstances, speech, and behavior – external, internal, and personal – are automatically factoring into your thoughts and feelings during this evaluation process. Weigh in various pros and cons and determine if this speech or action you intend to take is necessary or not.
- Consider your choices.
The more factors you add in, the more choices you’ll be presented with in your process of thinking and rationalizing your decision. Be reasonable and don’t overthink it. Accept when certain parables are beyond your power to control.
- Be rational: How important is this decision?
A good way to manage decisions is to rank them. Contemplate on the bigger picture and see if and how various dots are connected. That way, you can determine which decisions should be made first, based on pre-defined levels of importance correlation.
- Make a selection.
Often when making a selection in the range of choices, you will find emotions running high. Positive or negative, they can sabotage the integrity of a originally good decision. Ponder on this.
By being overly positively emotional, you might:
- Order the wrong product. (If I stockpile this, I’m gonna be super rich in 5 years!)
- Marry the wrong spouse. (Oh she’s so beautiful I’m gonna have a lover! Yay!)
- Spoil your child and thereby cause them to be entitled (Give me, give me, give me!)
By being negatively emotional, you might:
- Take things personally.
- Trigger unnecessary arguments and conflict.
- Scare people into leaving you – employees, friends, even family.
Ensuring emotional factors and external forces are managed and mitigated can help a great deal in making a good decision.
- Implement your decision.
Once you’ve weighed your factors, defined your ranks, and stabilized emotions, go for it. There should not be any second-guessing or self-doubt. Hold tight to confidence and courage.
- Review and get feedback.
After a decision has been made and implemented, there will be speech spoken and actions taken – by both you and other people. These have effects and consequences – sometimes positive, sometimes negative. Sometimes seemingly trivial, often impactful and profound. It is crucial that a review is conducted after the implementation to determine if the desired results and outcomes are as originally intended and hoped. Feedback from others is also beneficial, as it allows you to observe and understand the outcome of your decision from a perspective that you would not be able to grasp otherwise, as different people think, understand, and observe differently.
All in all, these six basic principles allow one to be able to calculate their moves before they are made. I hope this is helpful for all those out there trying to make the best decisions – whether you are business owners/managers or not.