The COVID-19 pandemic has made it more difficult because we want to avoid making wrong decisions while adapting to the new abnormal situation. However, it's not about the time you spend making an important decision but about the decision-making process and whether you use effective methods. Using appropriate methods will ensure that you do not fall back due to decision fatigue when the quality of your choices declines after spending a long period making decisions.
Should You Listen to Your Intuition?
Whether you are making a personal or professional decision, the most important decisions are life-changing and must be handled carefully. Unfortunately, most people rely on their intuition in the decision-making process. Intuitive reactions are magical, either through hard-earned experience or possessed by a few experts.
However, research in cognitive neuroscience and behavioural economics shows that unbiased methods, not intuition-based ones, improve one's decision-making ability. In our digital age, we have many tools to help us make decisions.
Intuition is a bad way to make decisions because we might make serious mistakes when making judgments resulting from how our minds are programmed. These mistakes are what behavioural economists and cognitive neuroscientists refer to as cognitive biases.
It is good that recent studies in these areas have shown how you can use realistic strategies to identify these mistakes and protect yourself from them.
8 Effective Ways to Make Difficult Decisions Easier
Whether you're about to make a personal or professional decision, you can follow data- and research-based methods to make difficult decisions easier. Effective decision-making does not depend on innate talent or hard-earned personal experience; rather, it depends on effective methods that can be taught and learned.
Moving to a new city, asking for a promotion, pursuing a graduate degree, deciding on a relationship, and many others are all important. You can certainly undo those decisions if you make mistakes while changing your life.
However, questioning those decisions can lead to bad disruptions that can be completely avoided if you follow these eight effective methods:
1. Determining decision-making needs
Identifying decision-making needs is very important because it draws your attention even if there is no external problem, indicating that you need to make a difficult decision or when you initially feel that you need to make a simple decision. Do not forget that relying on intuition might also make it uncomfortable to admit that a hard decision must be made.
Keep in mind that the best decision-makers are quick to recognise the need to decide before they are faced with a full-blown crisis. They also do not allow their gut reactions to influence their decisions.
Asking the right questions will help you make the most of this method. It is common to waste much time analysing the problem by heading directly to data and hasty conclusions. Focusing on good questions will help you avoid this.
2. Getting right information from a diverse group of informed people
You can get information from a friend, co-worker, mentor, or even someone you do not know, as long as they are well-informed about the issue. Furthermore, basing your data gathering on informed viewpoints will prevent you from overusing unnecessary data.
Be careful not to ignore viewpoints you don't like. Opposing viewpoints help you avoid relying on your intuition and allow you to see any potential biases.
3. Determining the goals you want to achieve
Using the appropriate information you have gathered, define the goals you want to achieve and visualise the desired outcome of the decision-making process.
Identifying when a seemingly one-off decision indicates an underlying problem is important. So, make dealing with these deep issues part of your ultimate goal. This method will help you simplify the decision-making process because it helps you clearly define your goals, making you avoid dealing with too much information.
4. Setting criteria for the decision-making process
Setting criteria for your decision-making process helps you assess the different ways in which you want to achieve your desired results. Define the criteria before you look at your options, if possible.
Remember that intuition influences the decision-making process by pushing us to achieve results that match our instincts, leading to worse results if you don't set the right criteria before examining your options.
5. Listing potential options that can help you achieve your goal
It is very common to have an insufficient number of options when dealing with difficult decisions, especially when addressing underlying issues. The best way to address this is to provide more options that seem intuitive to you. Set five appealing options, at least.
Remember that this method is similar to brainstorming, so you should avoid judging the options even if they seem strange. When we think about people who have had difficulty making difficult decisions in their lives, we will notice that the best choices usually involve elements that came from innovative options.
6. Examining the options and selecting the best one
Avoid settling for the first choices when assessing options. Do your best to thoroughly study your preferred option and assess each option based on your opinion of the person who suggested it. This will reduce the influence of internal politics and relationships on the decision itself.
When examining your options, avoid automatically choosing your original preferences. Look at your preferred option rigorously and from many perspectives. Do your best to assess each option separately from your opinion of the person who suggested it. This will reduce the influence of relationships and internal politics on the decision itself.
7. Implementing the option you have selected
Implementation requires careful brainstorming and imagination. You also need to limit risks and enhance gains because the goal is to reach the best possible decision.
To do so, imagine that your option failed and think about why it failed. Think of a way to solve this problem, integrate the solutions, and set a plan to implement it.
The second step in this method is to imagine that your decision succeeded. After that, think about the factors that caused its success and brainstorm to help you apply these reasons in life, including what you came up with to implement those decisions.
8. Assessing the implementation of the decision and reviewing or refining it as needed
Set clear standards for success that you can use during the implementation process. Always ensure that your implementation meets or exceeds the standards. If it does not meet them, review the implementation process. You might need to review the original decision in some cases, which is not bad. Go back to the method you need to reexamine and start again.
In broader terms, you might reconsider these eight methods. This is just part of the decision-making process and does not mean that there is a problem with the process.
For example, if you are at the option-selecting stage and you need to add relevant new data, you might need to go back and change your goals and criteria.
These methods are proven, and you can add to them most of the time. After using these methods several times, you will get used to dealing with every difficult decision with a practical and realistic mindset, and it will eventually become easier for you to decide.
In Conclusion
Do not use your intuition when making difficult decisions, and remember that your automatic reactions are not a good way to assess the things that will change your life. Instead, apply the previous data- and research-based methods to overcome difficult variables in your personal and professional lives.
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