4 Secrets To Making The Right Decision Fast

Certain parts of your brain serve as guard rails to keep you safe and happy when it comes to making decisions. Your emotions and in particular, your amygdala plays a key role here. You may not realize it but you develop different emotional attachments to different things in your environment. Depending upon your experience of different people, places and events, you will (often unconsciously) ascribe an emotional evaluation to each of these stimuli.

Despite people telling you, they make their decisions based on facts, figures numbers there will be a threshold at which directs them to say ‘yes’ or ‘no’. Having this awareness about yourself is powerful. Knowing you’re accustomed to making choices a certain way where you need to make a fast decision, you can start asking yourself two new questions:

Your brain will always be looking for opportunities and conditions which serve you best. When you tread into foreign territory, good decision-making can become more difficult. You’re apt to revert to choosing what retains the status quo. Simply knowing that your emotions are playing a fundamental role can help you start breaking familiar choice patterns that either no longer serve you or widen your capacity to see opportunities that could serve you better.

Whether you’re pivoting around purchasing a property or deciding whether or not to accept a job offer that doesn’t fully satisfy your criteria, go back to your base values, principles and ethics and ask yourself if these are being honored.

With the job offer, have you evaluated what key activities, relationship dynamics, opportunities and degree of exercising your skills need to be present that will ensure you experience high levels of satisfaction and fulfillment? If the promotional opportunity requires you to travel interstate on a fortnightly basis for two to three days at a time, how does this satisfy your agreement you’re your partner of being home a reasonable each night to spend time with your two children under the age of five? What are your highest priorities and values?

To make decisions that help you forge toward hitting personal goals or those you set with other people, proactively examining what values must be honored is essential in every choice you make. By doing so, you dictate your terms rather than stumbling through life by default. Turning down the promotion with an attractive salary bonus will seem like a huge mistake to others. To you, it will never be. The joy of reading your children their favorite bedtime story…watching their eyes close to sleep… that is matchless.

In certain circumstances, making no decision is the best decision to make. Making decisions when you’re feeling fatigued, overwhelmed, angry, anxious is never optimal nor wise. Taking a pause, time out to rebalance and recalibrate by whatever means you can manage is the best precursor to then making your choice.

Beyond this, you need to be careful of situations that craft and position you to feel a certain way to lead you to make choices you would not normally make. There are two to be particularly wary of.

Attempts to convince you, you are emotionally vulnerable

You might be attending a weekend personal development conference that hosts a parade of speakers selling books, DVDs, CDs and courses to purchase. Or you don’t know if you can leave a volatile intimate relationship that you know is just as damaging to you physically, emotionally and mentally as it is passionate. In both situations, there is a form of manipulation feeding reinforcement to your vulnerability where ultimately you may make choices that don’t best serve you. You may buy a host of books and materials at the conference because you were ‘hyped-up’ and excited listening to the speakers or you can’t fathom living without that violent partner as much as you know he/she will continuously harm you.

Scarcity opportunities and high energy situations

It’s a classic opportunist tactic. There are only a limited number of free seats available to a weekend seminar where tickets are usually $497 but for a short time only, are free. The bonus is only available for the first twenty people to sign up to a course. You attended with the idea to expose yourself to learning, however, there is a surge of excitement and energy created by such offers posed to the audience.

The law of numbers predicts there will always be a ratio of those who jump out of their seats to sign up versus the large majority of those attendees who don’t. You experience the fear of missing out. The speakers have decoratively painted success story after success story of students who have completed their program. You want to be like them and a sudden emotional surge within you has you convinced you can be. “Six thousand dollars is a decent sum of money but look at the return on investment I could make!” you abnormally hear your inner dialogue shrieking.

Pause. Put your purse or wallet away. Step away, think and calm down. Get away from the energy and think more widely about it.

It’s essential to develop this habit when you’re on a path of growth taking you into unchartered waters. Develop resourcefulness to see opinions and counsel from those who have trodden the paths – successfully and unsuccessfully - you’re looking to venture down. All perspectives will accelerate and widen your capacity to make the right decision. Whatever you’re looking to do, there is a 99% chance someone else has already done it. Defy groupthink mentality and ask the questions no one else is asking. As much as you consider what could go right, deliberately ask what could go wrong. It’s not only foolish but dangerous to make important choices seeing the world only through rose-colored glasses.