Each day, we are consciously and unconsciously taking hundreds if not thousands of decisions. There are big decisions in life such as if we want to study, what we want to work or for which job we want to apply. But there are also small decisions such as if we greet our colleagues in the morning or what we have for breakfast. Interestingly enough, as we make many more small decisions than big decisions, the importance of all the small decisions could potentially outweigh and have a bigger long-term impact in terms of reputation, success, health, prosperity, happiness, and personal fulfillment than the big decisions.
Moreover, decision-making is not a linear process, and every decision is interwoven with all other decisions. Not only your decisions, but also the decisions from your company, your superior, your family and from your government have an undeniable effect on your life. This interactive process makes life somehow exciting, always leaving room for unexpected surprises. Since our mind always wants to be in control, one reaction to this insecurity is to play out different future scenarios and somehow trying to force the future into a certain form. A busy mind can feel like a constant fight against the circumstances, which can be quite exhausting over time.
Through globalization we have now access to an almost unmanageable variety of offers. Moreover, we are bombarded every day with advertisement and temptations through numerous marketing channels. With this complexity and variety, it is almost impossible to know whether we’ve made the right purchasing decision. The homo oeconomicus in us always wants to win and optimize our overall situation. This could potentially leave us with a sense of loss control and the feeling that we haven’t made the right decisions and the mind will react in the same way as mentioned in the last section. The problem is that a busy obsessed mind can sometimes impair our focus, concentration and consequently also our work performance and good decision-making.
Another aggravating factor which makes it hard for good decision-making processes to take place, are social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and Linkedin. They all have the same underlying mechanism. We are bombarded with many sensations, and we scroll through many posts and offers. Every post wants to gain our attention and it teaches our mind to quickly switch from one thing to another, potentially impairing our ability to focus and to stick to a certain subject. There are several studies showing that social media can impair our cognitive ability.
Certainly, there are many more obstacles to good decision-making in our modern society, but we would rather share a few things we’ve learned about good decision-making and maybe it also helps you to take clever decisions:
Learning 1: Never stop a running horse! Only change what really doesn’t work. If something has worked for quite some time, it can’t be that false. The risk that you tap into the switching trap is very high. So don’t get distracted by the huge range of alternatives. If you are happy with a supplier stick with him. The grass in the neighbor’s yard will always look greener and the new partner will promise you pie in the sky benefits if you switch to their solution. Reality often quickly catches up with these high promises. At etronics we are very aware that once we have the order we must perform. We try never to overpromise, but rather to overdeliver. We never want our clients to be disappointed or at least reduce this risk to a minimum.
Learning 2: Don’t worry about the future! Don’t keep your mind busy with what might happen in the future based on the past. It is a waste of time. You can’t solve unknown future problems in this present moment. We’ve gained a lot of time by always asking ourselves: What is important right now?
Learning 3: Trust yourself! If you have a bad feeling about something, listen to it. Many studies show that often your gut-feeling makes the better decisions than your brain. In psychology this phenomenon is called somatic marker (somatische Marker). At etronics, we take decisions by weighing up pros and cons, but if our gut-instinct tells a different story, we tend to listen to it. In the past we’ve learned that we can trust our instincts. But of course, the instincts only work well, if you are mentally and physically in a healthy and balanced state.
Learning 4: Fear is never a good advisor in decision-making processes! Never take decisions if you are in a fearful and worrisome state of mind. Fear and negative feelings in general are quite a powerful distorter and narrow down the number of possible solutions you can think of, and it undermines creative solutions. Therefore, if you have an important decision to take, your first task is to take good care of yourself and become physically and mentally balanced. For example, you might be fearful that you can’t find someone suitable for a certain job. If you run a job interview in this state, you will be seduced to hire someone even though you don’t have a good gut feeling or this person doesn’t really fit the job description, which brings us back to learning number 3.
Learning 5: Only postpone decisions consciously! Your mind doesn’t like indecisiveness in a way that it will keep you busy and constantly weigh up pros and cons in your head until you’ve actually taken the decision. Doing this for a very long time, will only reinforce your indecisiveness because you constantly feed your head with uncertainty. So, if you can’t or don’t want to take a decision right now, take a conscious decision when you will reevaluate the situation and want to take time to actually take the decision. Otherwise, you will waste a lot of brain capacity, which can be used for more meaningful activities.
Learning 6: Be aware, that it is not possible to take no decision, taking no decision is already a decision as much as you can not not communicate, which leads us back to learning Nr. 5.
Learning 7: Make a status-quo meeting with yourself every now and then. Ask yourself many questions: Where am I? I am happy with the status quo? What is it that I like? What is it that I don’t like? Where do I want to be heading? Am I on the right track? After the review take the actions necessary in your life.
Learning 8: Try to minimize social media consumption or at least try to schedule your social media consumption for a specific time slot. If you distribute your social media consumption to many time slots throughout the day it will distract your head with non-sense, it makes you nervous and therefore impair your ability to focus and take good decisions.
Learning 9: Always try to be the best version of yourself and accept that this is all you can do! Life will always have its surprises in our society. Realizing that you can’t control everything and letting go of things that aren’t important, will give you peace of mind and thereby unleash your creative potential, which can be used for better work performance and to come up with better decisions.
Maybe you asked yourself why we are writing about decision-making excellence? Last year I, Carmen Ruckli, as owner of this company took, based on the learnings above, the big decision to engage Roland Jungen as new managing director. I have every confidence in his abilities, so this was not only the best decision for etronics, but it allows me to reorient and prove myself in a completely new field.
In the next blog we will talk about a decision that we’ve made 30 years ago and we haven’t regretted since then, so keep posted…
