Decision making is one of the critical skills that virtually all of us could do some improvement. It’s because we make decisions every day, whether it’s about business, family, or personal matters, we are always faced with choices and moments that demand our attention and decision. With the wide array of options presented to us each day, we are often overwhelmed with indecisiveness and regret over opportunity costs that are caused by our wrong decisions.
If you’re someone who always finds it difficult to make decisions or you notice that you are indecisive most of the time, then we are here to help you. Today, we are giving you different ways on how you can improve your decision-making skill.
1. Learn from Personal Experiences
If you want to be a good decision-maker, then you need to treat decision-making as a science. Try to record your decisions and the way you made them. After that, follow up with notes about how your decisions turned out. You should occasionally take time to reflect on recent decisions you’ve made so that you will be able to learn from them. You need to give equal attention to those decisions that turned out well and as well as those that did not.
Therefore, whenever you need to make a new decision, always see if there’s something you can learn from your past experiences. However, you should also remember that there are times that similar situations are different in one significant way.
2. Find Your Inner Calm
Sometimes stress can also affect our decision making. It’s because emotional stress can interfere with how you process the information in your surroundings. It means that whenever you’re stressed or panicking, your intuitive and intellectual bits of intelligence are also impaired. This results in your emotions overthrowing your decision-making, which will make you end up in damage-control mode. In the end, you will just try to fix the negative consequences of poorly conceived decisions. Therefore, if you want to improve your decision-making, you need to regulate your emotions.
3. Be Open-Minded
Another thing you can do to improve your decision making skill is to always be open-minded. It’s because keeping an open mind will allow you to incorporate instead of rejecting new information just because it’s unfamiliar or seems irrelevant. If you are open to new information, then it will allow you to stay current and make better decisions because you are not ignoring how other people feel or need.
4. Do a Cost-Benefit Analysis
Before making a decision, weigh first the pros and the cons. This will help you ensure that you are making the best decision. Do a cost-benefit analysis where you will examine the outcome to every possible choice you make, including both positive and negative. By doing this, you will be able to see the opportunity costs or the things you miss out when one decision is preferred over another.
5. Evaluate the Importance
When making a decision, it’s important to evaluate how important that decision is. The time you should spend deciding depends on what’s at stake. If you want to minimize agonizing indecision, then you need to determine the importance of a decision. Think about how great of an impact it will have on your life and how much it will cost you. After evaluating, you will be able to set a deadline for decision making accordingly.
6. Don’t Get Stressed Over the Small Stuff
If you’re deciding on small things, like where to eat for lunch or what show to watch on TV, then you can keep your timeframe for decisions to a minimum. Just like evaluating the importance of a decision, if your decision won’t affect you or other people greatly, then don’t waste a lot of time choosing among your options.
7. Try to Narrow Your Options
It’s true that the more choices are presented to us, the greater the difficulty in making a final decision. Also, more choices can lead to more regret because we tend to consider all of the missed possibilities and worry whether we could have chosen one of the many other options that were available. Narrowing your options will lead you to have greater peace of mind.
8. Do Some Research
When it comes to making major decisions, for example, buying a new phone, laptop, or car, you need to put in the time and effort to fully inform yourself about your approaching purchase. Before deciding, do some research first about the product that you aim to purchase. This way, you will be able to decide which among the options available will best suit your needs.
9. Always Plan Ahead
There are times that we also need to make decisions for a certain group we belong to. When you have a group decision to make, it’s better to decide the details in advance to avoid conflict among the members of the group. For example, if you have an upcoming movie night or dinner party, it’s better to decide ahead of time about the details. This will improve the decision-making skills of everyone in the group and will likely decrease the arguing amongst the group.
10. Take Charge
In decision making, there’s always time to give in and time to be confident. If for example in a group, there’s no one taking a firm stance on a decision, then you can take charge. If you don’t, you might lose precious time trying to decide on something when you could have been out being productive or having fun.
11. Decide Slowly to Gain a Better Perspective
There are times that we are so fast at making decisions and it happens both in our professional and personal lives. However, sometimes, faster is not better and it’s not more productive either. If you identify or notice what’s happening, then maybe it’s smart to slow down a bit to a more sustainable pace as this will enable you to maximize your decision-making ability. Deciding slowly but surely on matters will help you make faster progress compared to making urgent decisions that you might later regret.
These are the different ways you can do to improve your decision-making skill. Remember that it is a critical skill that applies to almost everything we do in our lives. We make decisions from our business or professional life to our health and relationships, therefore, it’s important to take some time to improve our decision-making ability. If you want more self-improvement tips, you can visit here for more information.