Importance of Decision Making
Why decision-making skill is life changing
Our life is shaped by the series of decisions we make throughout our life either big or small all of them have a significant effect on our well-being.
In this article, I will share with you how you can make healthy decisions in your life to live a life of fulfillment with having no regret.
Good decisions come from experience. Experience comes from making bad decisions.
-Mark twain
What Is Decision-Making
In short it is a process of choosing one option out of other available options.
How We Make Decisions
So the important question arises how we make most of our decision in our life, according to me in most cases we decide by influencing from others.
Because it is easy, it doesn’t require much effort from your side. We try to resist complex problems and seek shortcuts to get the answers of them.
Usually, decisions are made based on intuitions, reasoning, emotions, and memory.
They are further categorized into rational and irrational decisions.
Intuitive Decisions
According to one estimates, we make 35000 decisions in a day and everyone knows they can’t go into a rational mode of thinking to make those choices that’s why evolution gave us the ability to make quick decisions based on available information.
We do it by using mental shortcuts know as heuristics. It helps us to solve complex choices with the least mental effort.
They are helpful in many situations, but they can also lead to cognitive biases.
We need to understand how we make intuitive decisions. Intuition is a quick understanding of something without thinking a lot about it.
It is something about our feelings and emotions, it’s is a quick mental process accompanied by your emotions.
We make intuitive decisions based on the gathered knowledge of the subject, which we acquire consciously and unconsciously through our experiences or reading about it.
It reduces our mental effort by turning complex decisions into simpler ones by making quick conclusions about the problems.
But it’s a great functionality of our brain it automatically optimizes our cognitive processes so that once we become good at something by acquiring expertise over it.
We can use that skill to perform our tasks more effectively & use our cognitive resources on other important attention demanding tasks.
In short when you are making intuitive decisions about something then you should aware of the fact that you have expertise over the matter.
Rational Decisions
Rational decisions are those decisions that we make by using our capacity to reason, by using our knowledge & considering all the important facts about the subject and by weighing down all the pros and cons.
Then we choose the best possible option to achieve the desired goal.
It is time-consuming and we can’t make our all daily decisions based on this thinking. It is our slow analytic part of the brain
The idea of intuitive and rational decisions making is popularized by Daniel Kahneman in his book Thinking fast and slow.
We make decisions based on how it will make our life better, but everyone has his definition of a better life, that’s why each individual makes different decisions in the same circumstances.
But as a human, we are prone to make decisions which are beneficial in short term, in comparison of long term benefits.
But it’s all not as simple as it sounds after all we are complex animals. We are still learning about our behavior through multiple scientific fields.
Irrational Decisions
Irrational decisions are those decisions that are not based on reality or facts but on or feelings or emotions (I like it or I don’t) and deviated from rationality.
Here heuristics come into play but the downside of heuristics is that they come with cognitive biases that make our decisions irrational.
Skills You Need to Make a Good Decision
Decision-making is a skill, and like any other skill you need to practice it for a long time to become good at it, there is no other shortcut.
These are the key mental tools you need to make better decisions in your life.
- Critical thinking
- Imagination
- Awareness of your cognitive biases
- Courage to experiment with calculated risk
- Measuring your outcomes
- Data analysis
- Time management
- The ability to accept mistakes is an important part of learning anything new
- Humility
- Life long learning mindset
Why Decision-Making Skill is Important
Your life is what you choose it to be, you can make your life decisions by yourself or by the influence of people or culture around you.
I would suggest you to make your decisions on your own because it’ll help you to learn quickly through mistakes.
I want to add one important thing here, don’t try to be perfect while making decisions, there is no such is a correct decision, no matter how hard you try to make the best decision.
But due to the uncertainty of life (that’s the beauty of it) things can go in the opposite direction, but still you can give your focus on things you can control and move ahead in your life.
It’s always best to make informed decisions than making judgments based on irrational beliefs.
And according to me, effective decision-making is a part of lots of mistakes which we do by ourselves and not repeating the same mistakes again and again.
So friends explore life according to your inclinations but analyze your action consequences, before submitting yourself to any activity go through the informed decision-making process.
Steps for Rational Decision Making
Don’t Assume
Assumption is a story we make based on what we see to rationalize our irrational behavior. For example, if I met someone who dressed well and nice with the people around him then I immediately make a conclusion based on this limited data that overall he is a nice person. And align my future behavior with him by taking reference from this conclusion.
This is beautifully described by Daniel Kahneman and termed as What you see is all there is (WYSATI).
Know Your Why
Ask yourself why you’re doing what you’re doing, having a clear goal is important it’ll help you to remove what is not important and allow you to focus on what is important.
Bring Together All Available Alternatives
Then work on how you can achieve your goal, by considering all the available alternatives.
Give a Deadline
This technologically revolutionized world has infinite information and lots of distractions to hook our attention so being specific is a difficult task for many of us.
Give yourself a deadline and try to decide in that time, otherwise, too much information can lead to analysis paralysis.
Take Action
Decide and act upon it, it is of no use if you keep things at thinking level because to make change happen you need to act, make a clear action plan and act upon it ASAP.
Putting your plan into action is the most important thing.
As Buddha said-
It is of no use if you just listen or gather the knowledge and not act upon it.
Conclusion
In the end, you have nothing to lose in this school of life, if it works for you then continue on your path if not learn from it and keep moving. Because it is better to try than not to try at all. Remember one thing always make decisions that prioritize your inner peace.
