Dirty Dozen #8
“There is no more miserable human being than one in
whom nothing is habitual but indecision.” – William James
I don’t believe any of us wake up in the morning and say “Today, I’m going to make a really bad decision, one that will end my career, ruin my relationships, and make my life miserable.” Fearing any of those bad outcomes will happen causes us to be indecisive.
Making decisions, whether in the corporate world or our own personal world, is challenging for many people. It is a skill you can develop that is key to feeling in control of your life instead of living in limbo land filled with self-created uncertainty. Here are 5 steps you can take to overcome indecisiveness.
Step1: Prioritize: You may be feeling overwhelmed by the number of decisions you think you have to make. Prioritizing will help you determine which decision must be made now and which can wait. Asking what will happen if you don’t make this decision helps you identify what is and isn’t critical. Often making one decision will eliminate the need for other decisions.
Step 2: Determine Ownership: If you’re lacking confidence in your ability to make the best decision you will turn an individual decision into a group decision by asking others what they think you should do. How many different answers will you hear? How much more confused will you be, and will you make matters worse by thinking you should follow their advice? There’s nothing wrong with asking for input, just remember that their recommendations are influenced by the way they see the world and the image they have of you based on how you are now, and not on your vision of the person you want to be or the life you want to live.
Step 3: Define Desired Outcome: Have you really thought through what you want to accomplish by making this decision? Have you defined what a successful outcome looks like? How will your life to be better, less stressful, more enjoyable? If you haven’t thought through what success looks like you won’t be able to establish criteria to evaluate your options and increase the probability of making the best decision.
Step 4: Assess Your Risk Tolerance: What are you willing to risk losing? What’s the worst outcome if this ends up being a bad decision and what can you do to minimize the risk of that happening? What risks did you take in the past that brought you to where you are today? What did you do to lessen fear and increase courage required to move out of your comfort zone? Don’t let fear of failure stop you.
Step 5: Look Backward to Move Forward: What advice would you give the person you were 10 years ago about decisions you were struggling with then from the perspective you have today? Now project yourself 10 years into the future. Will you regret not taking the risk implied in this decision? What advice do you think your future self would give to your current self about the decisions you are struggling to make today?
Someone once told me that the best way to decide is to flip a coin. You assign one choice to heads and another to tails. If the coin comes up heads and your first thought is “I’ll do two out of three,” you’ll know that the choice you assigned to tails is what you really want. You don’t need to determine what you want to do; you already know that. Your challenge is to determine how you will do it.
I can’t completely disagree with this approach. I think we have more clarity about what we want and don’t want than we think we do. Deciding isn’t the problem. The fear of making the wrong decision is. As long as you’re indecisive, you’re safe. But the reality is that not deciding is actually deciding.
As a child you lived with the consequences of decisions adults made for you. Once you become an adult, you are free to make your own. Have you developed the habit of letting others decide what’s best for you instead of taking responsibility for creating the life you want?
Something to think about.
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