Are you good at making decisions?
The skill is natural for some people while others struggle to make even the most basic decisions.
While personality types can play a role in your ability to make decisions, it’s also a skill that can be learned. And it is especially important for professionals like us to develop proficiency with this skill.
One reason people don’t like to make decisions is they don’t want to be held responsible for the outcomes. This reluctance is a defence mechanism as others may criticise us if we don’t choose wisely or our credibility or even our career may suffer.
Making a poor decision can erode the confidence others have in you. However, you can take steps to reduce it from happening.
One of the main factors in decision making is confidence. Therefore, building confidence will help you make decisions. Others will also follow your lead as they will respect your confidence. When you make decisions with confidence, they have no choice but to recognise your authority.
Decision making requires finding out the right information. You won’t get far if you start making decisions without information to back them up. You need to be informed when making your decisions which means you have a bit of detective work to do. You should get as many of the facts as you can before making most decisions.
Often, you won’t get all the facts you need for one reason or another. In this case, you will need to take a leap of faith and rely on your confidence when making decisions. That’s an unfortunate part of the process and one that makes people choose wrong directions sometimes. But, as long as you decide using the information you have available, you will be able to defend your choice.
As part of the decision-making process, consider coming up with alternatives. List out all possible alternatives based on the current information. You can rate the alternatives to help you when making a decision on a scale, such as using a 1–5 Likert scale or other similar rating system.
Another technique people like to use is to list out the pros and cons. List out the pros and the cons and use this to guide you with your decision. Try not to make this process too mechanical as the list may contain several subjective items.
Learn to make good decisions as it is an important skill for every professional.
Make Smarter & Faster Decisions
– learn tactics that you can apply to your professional practice.
– learn how to master your mindset and
– apply seven decision making strategies.
Get your free eBook: Make Smarter & Faster Decisions
Originally published at https://professionalpractice.academy.
