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Decision-making is an essential activity in all spheres of life. From routine decisions like choosing what to wear to important ones like meeting a client, we make decisions every day.
How To Make Decisions
No matter how many decisions you take or how confident you are about the decisions taken, there is never a guaranteed method to unfailingly make the right decisions.
However, there are ways and processes that guide you on how to make decisions and improve your ability to make a decision that can prove beneficial for you and your organization in the long-run.
Let’s look at some approaches that will help you make better decisions:
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Fearless
Our biggest failures are caused by our fear of consequences.
You want to take a break from work, but are apprehensive about how your boss would react to such a request, especially in times like these.
You continue feeling demoralized and unhappy due to your inability to fulfill your wish. Eventually, the unhappiness affects your behavior and productivity. Such things pile up and you become depressed.
Compare this to the scenario where you took a break and came back rejuvenated. You joined work and performed so well that everyone appreciated your abilities.
Where would you want to be?
Being fearless and focusing on doing things that work well for you is an ideal way to make a decision.
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Listen To Your Heart
There is no doubt that adopting a systematic approach and evaluating the available options is recommended while taking a decision. But that doesn’t mean that spontaneous or instinctive decisions can’t be the best decisions.
As you focus on learning how to make decisions, you must also learn to rely on your instincts.
Let’s say you wanted to buy a car and loved a particular model, but somehow your intuition warned you against buying it.
A week later, you find out that there were some engine flaws in that vehicle and the company recalled the cars.
The bottom line is that while processes are good, sometimes the right decisions can be made by simply following your gut feelings. So do listen to your heart before making a decision. (chronofhorse.com)
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Stay Focused
If you want to learn how to make decisions, a critical step is to stay focused on your goals.
While driving a car on the highway, you might be greeted by pretty sights on the roadside. If you wish to reach safely though, your focus needs to remain on the road.
It is easy to get distracted by advice, opinions, numbers, and past facts.
For instance, you might want to order food from Restaurant A, but just because it didn’t have a website and wasn’t listed on your favorite food delivery app, you choose an outlet that was on online listings.
However, the food turns out to be much worse than the restaurant that didn’t have an online presence.
Sometimes, it is better to remain focused on what you know to be true and not to get distracted by fancy advertising.
If you want to learn the tips related to making decisions then you must learn to stay focused.
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Minimize Your Choices
Have you ever been in a situation where you went online to buy a product and found hundreds of listings under a category?
If you go on evaluating all the product listings that appear, you are likely to get overwhelmed and might not be able to make a decision.
If you want to know how to make a decision, you must understand the importance of minimizing the choices. Take a look at the top few products with good reviews and buy the one that meets your needs and budget, instead of continuing to scroll through other products in the hope of a better deal.
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Change The Perspective
One of the best ways to learn how to make a decision is to understand the impact a perspective can make on the decision-making process.
Sometimes we look at a problem or a decision from a particular perspective and are not able to get clarity on how to make a decision. In that scenario, we must change our perspective.
Putting yourself into someone else’s shoes or detaching yourself emotionally with the decision can help you make the right decisions.
Conclusion
Learning how to make decisions is an art that takes some learning. That is why Harappa Education runs an online course titled Making Decisions that focuses on all aspects of decision-making. It has a section on The Uncertainty Toolkit framework which guides you through any factors that can cause uncertainty in your decision-making and helps you make smart decisions.
Explore topics such as Decision Making, Steps of Decision Making, Problem Solving and Decision Making at Workplace & Decision Making Methods from our Harappa Diaries blog section and develop your skills.
