The 6 Best Strategies for Decision Making
In a world filled with uncertainty, division, and endless options, making decisions is more complicated than ever. Many of my clients struggle with decision-making, spanning from something as minute as what lunchbox to purchase for their kids, to bigger questions such as whether to end a relationship or what career path to take.
Decision-making requires us to confront our humanity and build self-agency, which can present us with challenges and fears of failure or regret. Whether you have been struggling with day-to-day decisions or long-term life choices, here are some tools to help reshape your relationship to decision-making and overcome decision-making distress.
1) Take Response-Ability
Let’s break down the word responsibility as our ability to respond. This perspective allows us to feel more empowered and in control of how we respond to circumstances in our lives. How does this apply to decision-making? In essence: ‘Can you show up?’. When you look at decisions and varying choices, ask yourself: “Can I show up to each outcome of each decision?” Play out the best-case and worst-case scenarios of each choice and visualize how you would respond to each outcome. Which choice do you feel most able to show up to no matter the outcome? This practice gives you the opportunity to acknowledge which choice is more optimal for you.
2) Look at Unique Outcomes
Taking stock of past experiences where you made decisions that turned out well empowers you to take control of your own narrative. As Brené Brown says: “The only decision we get to make is what role we’ll play in our own lives: Do we want to write the story or do we want to hand that power over to someone else?”. Maybe you’ve been limiting yourself by telling yourself that you’re “not good at making decisions” or have allowed others to perpetuate this view of yourself. Identifying evidence of your past successes decreases the potency of the mental filter that only focuses on your current struggle with decision-making.
3) Write it Out
Writing is a profound tool that allows us to visually process our thoughts. If you prefer a more organized writing approach to decision-making, start with a pros-and-cons list! Remember to acknowledge the weight of all the items you write down, instead of solely noting the quantity of items on each side of the list. Another helpful tool is to write down a myriad of choices in separate columns and explore the facts, emotions, and potential outcomes of each choice. After that, you can begin to eliminate choices until you find the one you feel most aligned with.
4) Build Up Self-Trust and Connect to Your Intuition
Building up self-trust and connection to our “gut feeling” is foundational to making decisions that have great impact on our lives. Connecting to your intuition involves integrating the mind and body. Our body and mind speak two different languages, and so learning how to bridge their communication builds our ability to be in tune with our intuition. Listen to what your body tells you when you visualize each decision—does your stomach tense up; do you feel more at ease with one choice over the other? I like to think of the flipping a coin analogy in terms of intuition: If you flip a coin to make a decision, you tend to know where you want it to land while it’s still in the air. When we connect to our gut instinct, we can more easily work with the logistical elements of decisions.
5) Find Meaning in Whichever Choice You Make
Creating purpose and meaning in our decisions allows us to approach decision-making with a sense of security. Instead of viewing making a choice as sacrificing another choice, you can see it as an opportunity to learn and grow. When it comes to life decisions, each path can branch out into endless paths. We can never fully know where these paths will lead us, but we can know that not making one will keep us in our current state. Trust that you will show up fully for each decision, and by doing so, you will create a life of meaning, no matter the direction.
6) Not Making a Decision is a Decision
In actuality, we are always making decisions, even when we avoid making decisions. An avoidance behavior is not the absence of a behavior. With the understanding that you are always making decisions, you can relieve some of the pressure of feeling like you’re “struggling” to make a choice. Look into why you choose to avoid making a decision—it may be stemmed in anxiety. When we enter the cycle of anxiety, we temporarily relieve ourselves of anxiety through avoidance. If you utilize the tools above to start to understand the underlying root of decision-making distress, you can confront the decisions from a different approach and reduce the anxiety in the long term.
With all this information, I implore you, as always, to approach this process with curiosity and self-compassion. If you’d like to explore this topic more with myself or another therapist, contact our Client Care Coordinator today.
With Gratitude,
