Every single day, individuals make at least 70 decisions, according to a study from Columbia University. From the simple decisions such as what to eat for dinner, to the more complicated and life-changing decisions like deciding whether or not to move to a new city. With so many decisions bogging us down each day, it is imperative that we prioritize them in order to become more efficient, successful and even happy.
Dr. Travis Bradberry, co-author of Emotional Intelligence 2.0 and president at TalentSmart, shares some strategies observed from some very successful people to guide us into becoming better decision makers!
Turn small decisions into routines: Successful people have mastered the art of freeing up their mind by eliminating smaller decisions and focusing on the big ones. How do they eliminate decision fatigue? By making them routine activities.
Make big decisions in the morning: Capitalize on the freshness of your morning-mind. Use this freshness for new perspective and to avoid the clutter of everyday routine.
Pay attention to your emotions: Find ways of understanding yourself; your emotions and their impact on your decisions. When you know how to objectively look at your emotions, you can find ways to rationalize your decisions while keeping your emotions away from your decision making process.
Evaluate your options objectively: When faced with the situation of choosing amongst multiple options, successful people use multiple lists and match their options against pre-set criteria. This brings more structure to the process and makes it simpler to arrive at better decisions without being caught up in an analysis paralysis.
Lean on your moral compass: Successful people stick to their morals when faced with conflicting decisions. Having a moral compass can bring direction and purpose and help make big decisions.
Seeking outside counsel can also help you to make better decisions and can help you to avoid bias and prejudice by seeking opinions and advice from outside experts. This will also help to outweigh subjective or irrational tendencies when faced with making a tough decision. And of course, you can always learn from the past. Mark Twain once said that “Good decisions come from experience, but experience comes from making bad decisions.” Be aware of the lessons you learned from past decisions and use them to benefit from that experience.
For the full story, visit: https://www.themuse.com/advice/this-is-how-successful-people-make-smart-decisions-all-day-long
Thanks for reading and until next time… stay WISE!