Decisions

You’re making decisions every day. Most are trivial but some will have lasting implications in your life. Keep watching to see how decisions are broken down, what influences decisions, and learn techniques to evaluate scenarios to make the best decisions.

It's estimated the average adult makes 35000 decisions a day. Assuming you’re awake for 16 hours of the day, that’s an average of around 2187.5 decisions an hour, 36 decisions a minute, or a decision every 1.65 seconds. Through these decisions and the actions following these decisions, you carve out a path for your life.

When you think back, what were some of the toughest decisions you had to make? Was it about what job to take, which school to send your child to, or what home you chose to live in? Or was it about going through with a certain medical major medical procedure or figuring out what care home your elderly parent will live in?

You are solely responsible for your life’s choices and decisions. From your actions to your perspectives, taking full ownership of your decisions means that you are completely free to guide the course of your life. You can decide to rise above circumstances. You can decide to not be limited by your restrictions. You can decide to create the results you want. Now, the question is how.

Yes, there are tons of possibilities available. Yet making decisions doesn’t have to be a haphazard or debilitating process. Having a method to evaluate circumstances and make decisions based on fundamental principles is a huge advantage. Let’s take a more detailed look to better understand decisions and learn some techniques to help you make the best decisions.

What is a Decision?

The dictionary defines a decision as a conclusion or resolution reached after consideration. The world “resolution” provides a perfect context for what the goal of decision-making is. It means you’ve examined a particular situation or circumstance, taken into account different considerations, and made a choice as to what course of action to take.

Regardless of the situation, decisions are made to reach the desired goal. Even though there are principles to follow to make the best decisions, there isn’t a one size fits all solution for every scenario.

Different Types of Decisions

Desired or positive decisions will look and feel different in different situations.

Reactive vs Proactive Decisions

There is a big difference between making reactive decisions vs proactive decisions. When you make reactive decisions, you are reacting to events that have already happened. In making proactive decisions you are anticipating future events.

Which one do you think you have greater influence over? There is no way for you to go back in time and do things differently so when things have already happened, all you can do is make decisions to mitigate further undesirable results from occurring. In making proactive decisions, time is on your side as you have time to think and consider different outcomes. You have the luxury of identifying the results you want, making decisions, getting things in place, and making preparations to give you the greatest chance of achieving desired results.

Conscious vs Subconscious Decisions

Each individual operates from three different levels of mind; the conscious, subconscious, and unconscious mind. Decisions can be made from each of these levels of mind. Let’s define these three levels of mind first before we explore examples of decisions made in these places.

According to an article by Susanne Rice titled: Subconscious vs Unconscious: The Complete Comparison:

The conscious mind is defined by our thoughts, actions, and awareness.

The subconscious mind is defined by the actions and reactions we realize when we think about it.

The unconscious mind is defined by the deep recesses of our past and memories.

Let’s take a look at getting ready for a workout.

In the conscious mind, you make a decision to complete a certain set of exercises that target your legs. You do three sets of squats, three sets of deadlifts, and three sets of calf raises. The decisions are straightforward and you are aware that you’re making the decisions.

In the subconscious mind, you don’t realize you're tying your shoe without looking until you bring your awareness to the action. It’s completely automated and built into your muscle memory from the thousands of times you’d tied your shoes.

Let’s take a deeper look at subconscious decision-making. But before we do that, let me pose a question. Have your decisions been made for you already? I don’t mean this in a facetious or hypothetical way. I mean this in an actual sense:

You have grown up and gone through experiences in your life. There have been times when you’ve felt fear, anger, shame, guilt, or other negative emotions. These instances will often leave an indelible mark on your psyche and subsequently influence the way you make decisions. You will sometimes act based on certain decisions you’ve made but you don’t know why you make those decisions.

For instance, imagine you grew up in a household where your parents were always right, where you weren’t entitled to have your own opinion especially if it was different from the opinion of your parents. The times that you expressed your thoughts or opinions about not wanting to do something they suggested, they yelled at you, guilted you, and even threatened you.

It even got to the point where they would reprimand you in front of your teachers, coaches, or even relatives, simply because you weren’t “an adult” and they were. After having this happen time and again over many years, it becomes deeply ingrained that having an opinion different from what an older person or authority figure expressed would be met by a barrage of verbal attacks on your person.

There was never any sort of conscious thought of how this was affecting you or shaped how you interacted in the world. To you, it was simply the way you grew up, the way your parents were. The deepest access or awareness you had to the impact of these experiences growing up is that whenever it happened to you, it didn’t make you feel very good. Over time, you were just numb to it and chalked it up to your parents’ personalities.

Now, as an adult, whether it be at work, in hobbies, or in any sort of social interaction, you find yourself gravitating toward very outspoken, opinionated people. Even when you feel you’re being treated unfairly, taken advantage of, or even abused, you will keep your mouth shut and not say anything.

When you’ve been the one that’s doing the most work on a project, you stay quiet and let someone else take the credit. When you’re up for a raise and you’ve done significant work that’s helped the business, you don’t even receive a 1% raise because your outspoken boss says that you don’t really exhibit leadership skills.

In this example, your subconscious decision to not say anything is causing you to constantly get the short end of the stick in your life. Yet somehow, this feels “right” to you. Sometimes, you make subconscious decisions that may not be the right fit for a particular situation because you’re simply falling back on how life has trained you.

No one intentionally makes a wrong decision. Decisions are often made for them already and they don’t know why they’re making them, even though the decisions could be detrimental.

The good news is, that you can be deliberate about your decisions. Even the subconscious ones. However, it first takes awareness that a dynamic exists, and it takes a very intentional training regimen to create a new decision-making algorithm.

For instance, when you were growing up, you just loved to eat. As a matter of fact, your closest friends would have challenges to see who could eat the most in the shortest amount of time. Over time, these led to certain health issues.

Your subconscious decision would be to overconsume whenever food was available. Now, for fear of making your health conditions worse, you’re forced to evaluate your decisions before you subconsciously decide to finish everything available. Over time, training yourself to practice restraint will allow you to catch yourself, resulting in decisions and actions that lead to better health.

Conditioned Stimulus vs Conditioned Response

In the example of classical conditioning with Pavlov’s dog. The story goes that Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov observed that his dogs would salivate whenever they tasted meat.  He also began to notice that his dogs would salivate when they saw his lab assistant’s white coat. To further investigate, he also blew a whistle each time the lab assistant brought meat in for the dogs. Eventually, the dogs formed an association that when they heard the whistle, they would salivate.

In this scenario, the unconditioned stimulus is the food and the unconditioned response is the salivation. The conditioned stimulus would be the whistle and the conditioned response would be the salivation. The dogs were trained to salivate when they heard a whistle.

Decisions can be conditioned as well. Let’s say a college student had a good thought and she felt happy. Then she started to carry a clicker with her and she’d click it every time she felt happy. Eventually, an association would form where clicking the clicker would make her feel happy. She was conditioned in a way where whenever she wanted to feel happy, she would click the clicker.

What Underlying Factors Influence Your Decisions?

As you can see, there are different types of decisions characterized by what sort of mental space you’re in. Another aspect to consider is what underlying factors influence your decisions. If there is an ideal goal to be reached, and decisions are being made according to that goal, then the question is, “What makes this goal ideal for you or for another person?"

Language is a fundamental factor in how decisions are made. If you speak English, there are pronouns for men and women. However, in Chinese, there are no pronouns for gender. When an English-speaking person is making a decision, there is an aspect of gender taken into consideration when decisions are being made.

Even though there may not be gender pronouns in Chinese, there are so many different terms for members of your family. For instance, you would address your maternal grandparents with different terms than your paternal grandparents. Your father’s mom would be Nainai, and your father’s dad would be Yeye. Your mother’s mom would be Walpole and your mother’s dad would be waipo.

Because of distinctions made in language, this also influences cultures and culture can influence decisions as well. In Chinese culture, for a very long time, boys were favored over girls when a family has a child. This is because if a family had a boy, they would be able to carry on the family name whereas girls would not be able to. The sad truth is that in the past and even today, although much less prevalent compared to before, there would be a practice of aborting the pregnancy or killing the baby if it was a girl. This was culturally accepted and understood by everyone.

In America, where values are different, aborting a pregnancy just because of the sex of the fetus would be considered inhumane and abhorrent. Right now, there is a big conversation in the United States regarding the legal standing of abortions and this is also based on religious beliefs as well.

Past experiences will also influence decisions. For instance, if you’ve started a business in the past, you put all your savings into it and it ended up failing, you might be averse to starting another business again based on the response of the world and those around you. However, if your support system around you didn’t make you wrong for failing and encouraged you to take your lessons and try again, then you may not be so averse to starting another business.

The physical location you’re making your decisions also matters. If you’re in a loud crowded place where distractions are happening or a place where every two minutes someone is trying to get your attention, that would affect your decision-making. With distractions around you, you wouldn’t be able to think clearly enough to take into consideration the possible outcomes or consequences of your actions.

A perfect example of this is deciding whether to drive after having a few drinks at a party. If you’ve been having a good time at a gathering and after a night of drinks and socializing, it may not be the best time to make any decisions. The first decision that should not be made is whether or not to drive. Of course, the answer is to not drive, for the safety of yourself and others. However, the alcohol has put you in a not clear, inebriated state. In this scenario, even deciding whether or not to drive is an important life decision.

Whenever you’re making decisions, especially decisions that could have long-term implications for you, people you care about, and even your organization, it would be best to take a moment, in a quiet, undisturbed, non-emotional state, not under the influence of any substances, to consider how these factors may be influencing your decision and the eventual outcome of your decision.

Survival Mode

Another scenario where you don’t want to make decisions is when you’re in survival mode. It could be any situation that could trigger a fight or flight response in you. For example, if you have bills due, if you’re suddenly attacked or mugged by someone on the street, or if you’re in a heated argument with someone, it will trigger a fight or flight response in you where you’re just trying to survive a situation.

This is not a healthy place to be and definitely not a healthy place to make decisions. When all of your physical and mental faculties are being dedicated to surviving a situation, making big decisions is not the ideal thing to be worried about. You wouldn’t be in a clear state of mind to choose a job, decide whether you want to marry someone, buy a home, or make any decision that will affect your personal well-being.

If you’re not prepared for a situation if at all possible, the first thing to do is step back and think. If this is not possible, then you have to do whatever it takes to survive the situation first before making any sort of decision.

The proactive decision would be to undergo training. In simulated scenarios where you’re put into life-threatening situations, enough repetition would cause the fight or flight response to go away and allow you to think clearly and make good decisions. This is what’s known as stress inoculation.

For instance, if an armed attacker came to your office, you’d be scared for your life! You would want to run away or hide so you won’t get shot. If that option wasn’t available, you would have to try and fight the attacker and incapacitate him somehow.

This is why offices will make you go through training so that you’re aware of what to do in this sort of scenario. Another example of being proactive is soldiers training for war. In a life and death situation where you’re being fired at by enemy forces, you can’t freeze up and not be able to make the right choices that will preserve the lives of fellow soldiers and allow you to protect whatever you're trying to protect.

No Method Leads to Reactiveness

Aside from understanding the different types of decisions, there are possible factors that may influence your decisions, you see how important planning and being proactive is when it comes to making decisions. It literally could make the difference between life and death.

By having a strategy or method to fall back on when you are making decisions, and practicing this strategy to the point of being stress inoculated, you set yourself up for desired outcomes through your good decision-making.

Some fundamental principles to keep in mind in your decision-making practice would be to take care of the most important things first, begin with the end in mind, and look to understand the situation and others before trying to get others to understand you.

A method used in the military to decide and take action is something called the OODA Loop.

Developed by the United States Air Force Colonel John Boyd, the OODA loop was created to give military personnel in the field a way to successfully decide what needed to be done and take action.

OODA is an acronym that stands for Observe, Orientate, Decide, Act. When out in the field in a combat situation, the first thing to do is:

Observe what is happening. What directions are attacks coming from, what is the condition of your battalion and what is the condition of opposing forces? Basically, you’re gathering as much information as possible from which you will make your decisions and actions.

Next is:

Orientate yourself. Once you’ve observed and gathered the information you needed, you need to see how this information is significant and how it will come into play.

Then:

Decide. Make a decision on what needs to happen and what actions need to happen to achieve your aim.

Finally:

Act. Take action based on your observations and decisions.

These steps are repeated as many times as necessary to achieve your goal.

Although originally developed for military use, this method of observing and taking action can be applied to non-military situations as well. The interesting point is that in the same way you’re going through your OODA Loop, the people you’re interacting with or engaged with are also going through their OODA Loops. It is this interaction that plays out to decide who will have achieved a successful outcome.

Steps to Making the Best Decisions

The OODA Loop is a useful methodology, especially when decisions have to be made quickly in stressful, live situations. However, when it comes to making non life or death decisions, having a series of steps to refer to will help you make the best decision and set you up for subsequent steps to achieve your goals.

The first step to accomplish before any decision-making can happen is clearly identifying the goal to be achieved. Knowing this overarching goal provides the reference point through which you will filter your decisions. After all, you’re not making decisions just for the sake of making decisions. You’re making decisions along the process of achieving or accomplishing something.

Once you’ve identified your goal, a great mnemonic to help you remember the steps to make the best decisions is RADAR.

R - Research

Research is considered the information-gathering stage of making your decision. You want to have as much relevant information as possible. Sometimes, you may not be the subject matter expert in a specific area of consideration but you can still go out and talk to people and see how different parts will come together to achieve your goal. Site examples of what types of data to gather and how to gather them.

Examples of specific data to be gathered include quantitative data and qualitative data.

Quantitative data could include revenue and costs, money amounts. Ratings, Prices, Quantities, and measurements that use time. They are definite measures and can give a clear picture of what happens in a numeric or quantitative way.

Qualitative data include reviews, comments, opinions, observations, features, or ratings.

There are many methods available to gather this sort of data. Various tools and apps are available online and range in price from free to a price determined by how in-depth of an answer or information you're looking for.

Depending on what your goal is, it may simply be observing people, observing yourself, or simply even engaging in conversation with someone to get feedback on the information you’re interested in.

It will be your goal that determines what sort of information to gather and the method you’ll use to gather this information.

A - Analyze

After gathering relevant information, you’ll move on to the analysis stage of the RADAR decision-making method.

At this stage, you’ll want to identify your choices. In most scenarios, you will have more than one option to choose from when moving towards your aims. It’s important to know what those choices are. By being as specific as possible, you will have a better grasp of what options are available to you.

When you are proactive and you plan, you have time during your analysis stage to consider how a decision will affect you. What are the benefits of making one choice versus others? What are the drawbacks or detriments or choosing one option and not the next?

It’s important to know what you will absolutely not compromise on. Whether it’s something you won’t give up or action you won’t take, you have to know where you stand and what line you will not cross on your path to achieving your goal.

You also want to be certain about what you’re making a decision on. For example, let’s say you’re a fine cutlery vendor, selecting a restaurant to have an important lunch meeting with a potential client. The food at a hole-in-the-wall restaurant in a sketchy part of town is incredible. However, if you're trying to make an impression and showcase the kind of establishment that your cutlery is used in, it wouldn’t be the best decision to go to the hole-in-a-wall restaurant. In this example, you’re deciding on whether you want to build a good relationship on a more personal level or whether you’re trying to make a good impression on a new client on a business level.

SMART-C to Qualify Your Decisions

By now, it should be clear that not every decision is one that is worthy of being chosen and acted upon. Before making any decision, it should be evaluated and qualified. Does it check off all the boxes of SMART-C?

SMART-C is a way to qualify and evaluate decisions, actions, and goals. As was covered in our last series of videos, SMART-C is an acronym that stands for Specific, Measurable, Actionable, Relevant, Timely, and Consistent.

By filtering your decisions using SMART-C, you determine whether a decision will At each step, are you being specific? Can you measure outcomes so you can track your progress? Is your decision actionable? Is it something you can act on or will it be an ideal that remains in your head? Are your options relevant and realistic to your overall goals? Are there timelines associated with your decisions? Is there an element of consistency between what you decide and what you’re looking to accomplish?

By using SMART-C to qualify your steps, you ensure that your decisions and actions will actually move you forward instead of just living in your head and not being implemented.

7 Deadly Sins to Qualify Decisions

In addition to using SMART-C to qualify your decisions, utilizing the 7 deadly sins, yes, those 7 deadly sins, are also a great way to filter to qualify your decisions. When you’re making a decision, you should ask yourself if playing into one of these sins is serving you in making your decisions.

The 7 Deadly sins come from Roman Catholic Theology and are considered by the faith to cause other sins and immoral behavior.

The 7 Sins are:

Pride

Greed

Lust

Envy

Gluttony

Wrath

Sloth

If your decisions are driven by any of these sins, you’ll want to question whether proceeding with this decision is helpful for your development and progress towards reaching your goal.

One useful way to utilize SMART-C and the 7 Deadly Sins as a way to analyze a decision is to think of SMART-C as the angel or voice of reason on one shoulder and the 7 Deadly Sins as the devil or voice of unreasonable temptation, on your other shoulder.

For example, you meet your friends at a bar and they start buying girls drinks, trying to impress them with how much money they can spend on drinks. You contemplate throwing your hat into this game because your pride is causing you to feel inadequate because you aren’t spending as much money buying these people's drinks. This is an example of how even just one of the 7 sins can influence your decisions and the motivations behind your decisions. Another example might be wrath manifesting itself in the form of rage, or greed in the form of hoarding buying and hoarding sneakers. You should be aware of these innate behaviors that reside within us and the positive and negative effects they could produce.

D - Decide

Once you’ve weighed all your options you’ll want to commit to a decision. By making a decision, you're able to focus your resources and efforts. You’re coming into this step knowing that you’ve done all your due diligence, considered benefits and drawbacks with the relevant information available to you, and committed to a choice.

A - Act

Execute your Choice. After making your decision, take action on your decision to move you toward your goal. Of course, when taking action, you don’t want to simply take action in any sort of haphazard way.

You want to have very definite steps to execute your plan. If you have a specific goal, have measurable milestones to meet along the way to achieving your goal. This allows you to not only reverse engineer the steps you need to happen but you also have clearly defined metrics to track your progress towards that goal.

R- Review

Evaluate Outcomes. See what sort of outcomes resulted from your decision and subsequent action. Be able to have specific metrics to compare your results.

It is a rare occurrence when decisions and actions go exactly according to plan. As a matter of fact, failure happens more often than success does. Despite the fact that it never feels good to fail, failure is life’s greatest teacher if you can take lessons away from the experience.

When you make a decision and it causes you to fail, the first thing you want to do is revisit the goal that you set for yourself. What results did your efforts produce and how close were you to the original goals? Or did you only later realize that the goal was a little too far-reaching or it wasn’t specific enough or relevant enough.

If you accomplished the first few steps of RADAR, you can’t have failed that severely. Even if you did, you’ll want to review both what went well and what didn’t go so well. Of the things that didn’t go well, what was in your control and what wasn’t within your control? The outcomes that didn’t go well that were in your control are the items you want to take your lessons from.

It is from this set of outcomes that you’ll want to focus your efforts on correcting and improving. By learning these lessons, you’ll be better prepared and equipped for decisions you have to make in the future.

Decision is Not Action

At the end of the day, decisions are important not just by themselves. They’re only valuable if you put action into your decisions.

There’s a fun riddle that illustrates this. There are three frogs sitting on a log. One of them decides to jump in the water. How many frogs are on the log? You might initially say the answer is 2. However, the answer is 3 frogs. Just because the frog decided to jump in the water doesn’t mean he actually did it.

Conclusion

Today, we defined what decisions are. We also went over different types of decisions as well and what factors might influence your decisions. We also discussed the importance of having a plan or method to making decisions by introducing the RADAR method, and how decisions don’t have any value if there is no action behind them.

You will be making decisions for the rest of your life. Be sure to keep practicing being proactive in making your decisions and reflecting on them so that you can make better and better ones as life goes on.

Thanks for joining us today and we’ll see you next time on the Modern Wisdom Guide.