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Decisions, decisions...

barbara bates • Aug 14, 2020
Life is full of choices and decisions, especially in these very difficult days of Covid -19. So how can you make good ones? 
 
Perhaps paradoxically, emotion is very closely involved in decision making, often at an unconscious level. Our brain seeks immediate gratification over long term gain and it can be hard to over-rule that. I was fascinated to read recently about the case of a person who had lost all emotion due to a brain injury and was then simply unable to make even the smallest decision, like what to wear. Considering that we make about a hundred each day, that's really tough. 

So how to do it? 

Clearly if you are responsible for huge budgets and enormous projects at work you're going to need tested models and strategies, and you can find out about some of this here. But what about personal decisions, of all shapes and sizes,
  • What shall I wear today? 
  • Shall I look for another job?
  • Shall I take the opportunity of a relationship with this person?
  • Should I move house?

You can try to work out the pros and cons of each, and it's often helpful to enlist another person in this undertaking, but in the end you need to feel you have done the right thing. 
 
One helpful technique is to force the decision and say, If I had to decide right now, what would I do? Or flip a coin and say that will make the decision. The interesting thing here is that you will have a feeling about the result - if it's a strong 'gut' reaction either way then that tells you something about the rightness of that decision.

So it seems that emotion is important in decision making. What do you think? Have you made a difficult decision, where your gut feeling was right? Or not?
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