How do you currently make decisions?

How’s that working for you?

We make many decisions every day. These are both little decisions: how to drive to work, what to eat, whether to buy something, and bigger decisions whether to stay in a job, move, go back to school, or start a family. The choices we make are big part of what shapes our days and if you add all those decisions up they shape our lives. That is why I’m passionate about making the choices in our lives easier.

I invite all of us to take some time to consider how we make decisions and if that's really working for us. I’ll outline a process to do so below and provide an example. As you walk through this, pay attention to what comes up and take some notes. I love capturing my thoughts on pen and paper or using a voice typing service (like the one built into Google Docs) to do this, but typing works too!

Think of three decisions you've made. Try to pick three very different decisions. For example, one might be a decision you make all the time that is easy for you. Another might be a choice you have regularly that is very hard for you. And the last one might be around a bigger life choice, maybe one you are really happy with the outcome.

For each of these decisions, write down the following:

1. What the decision was about

2. What did you do after you realized you had a decision to make? What were you thinking?

3. What about the actions you took or what you were thinking about worked for you? What about that did not work?

4. How did you actually make the choice?

5. What was the outcome of making that choice? How did that make you feel?

6. If you were to make the decision again, how would you do that differently?

Here is an example:

1. Should I go to the gym right now?

2. I became worried about making the right choice, started making a mental pro and con list, and I called someone to get their opinion.

3. Worrying just made me anxious about it. The pro and con list contributed to this because it was in my head while I was driving and basically making the decision. Calling someone else was really me trying to take the responsibility of the decision off me. That way, I couldn’t be made at myself for the choice, right? [No.]

4. I drove towards the gym and ended up there before I had really decided, basically because the person I called didn’t say “Oh no, you don’t need to go”.

5. I went to the gym. Because I didn’t really feel like I made a choice, I didn’t feel good about it. I ended up doing what made sense for the day, but I didn’t give myself credit for it.

6. I’d like to have stopped moving and going through the motions long enough to actually decide what I wanted to do, that way I would have felt good about choosing the gym.  

Remember, do this with each of the 3 decisions.

Now, looking over your answers and ask yourself:

• How do you currently make decisions?

• How’s that working for you?