PS: If you prefer, you can also listen to this episode here.
If we think about it, decisions are what make our lives, well, our lives. We make around 35,000 decisions every day, ranging from the unconscious to deciding whether to eat one or two pieces of bread at lunch all the way to the big ones, like where in the world we should live.
Decisions are also those peculiar things that we only sometimes practice intentionally. It sounds silly even thinking about it - practice making decisions. Why should you practice something that comes so naturally to you, right? We think far more about the outcomes and the implementation of the decisions than we do about the decision-making process itself.
What do I mean by that? If we know something must be done, for example, you must let an employee go. You quickly start sabotaging yourself with the difficulty of implementing that decision, such as how to communicate with the person you're letting go, how to handle a potential negative reaction, how to deal with the team morale after that, and so on.
Those are all distractions that prevent you from making the right decision, which at that point can be parting ways with that employee.
Trust me, I've made this exact mistake a couple of times. I knew the right step but hesitated because I knew it would be hard.
What, then, is the way forward? How can we ensure that we start making good decisions from now on?
I'll explain two tactics that helped me get more comfortable making hard decisions.
The first one is using speed and frequency to your advantage.
As with most things, making good decisions comes down to practice. Making quick decisions, even if they turn out to be wrong, means you'll be able to learn much more and much faster than you would if you just postponed those decisions.
The more wrong decisions you make, the more comfortable you'll become with making them quickly. With every wrong decision, you’ll learn invaluable lessons that you won’t repeat next time. You'll also learn that most of the things you're worrying about are not really that important.
The second tactic is separating the implementation from the decision itself. If you know the best decision at a given moment but are hesitant, consider whether you're hesitant because of the implementation. You'll often find that you know which path to take, but because you might know that the path will be difficult, you bail out.
Again, prioritize making decisions fast and embrace wrong choices because they’re opportunities to learn something new. Above all, never let implementation get in the way of making the right choice.
Over time, we all develop a gut feeling that helps us navigate difficult choices and the sooner and more sensitive we can make that gut feeling, the better we'll become.
Now, think about the last time you hesitated to make a decision. Would those two tactics help? I'm curious to learn if you use other methods, so please drop a line at hello@upnextwithus.com, and let's chat!
