- How often have you attempted to make a decision and found yourself stuck or at an impasse?
- Have you attempted to change a negative behavior, or worked hard to achieve a specific personal or career goal? Did you make it? Did you fully succeed?
Decision-making: A critical, essential skill for success
Most of us do not see “leader” in the mirror in the morning. Fact: If you have responsibilities, if others look to you for advice and support, if you invest your time in the well-being of others, you are a leader. We see it every day. If you look like you know where you’re going, right or wrong, people will follow you. People watch each other and seek inspiration. Although the source of confidence may not always be ideal, leaders emerge, and people follow.
The critical nature of indecision is inaction. We can become intellectually stuck. The reality, it is unlikely that you will achieve your full potential and success in all facets of your life and work, if you cannot effectively steer yourself. Fundamental decision-making and strategic-thinking skills, help us to be more confident, self-reliant, and in control. Ultimately, we become better self-leaders, and effective leaders in other areas of our lives.
In our society, every day we see the products of indecision. We perceive, right or wrong, that a person has the ability to be a good leader because they appear to be decisive. When in fact, many leaders have created more difficulty and lost trust of their followers because they failed to, or did not know how to, use an effective decision making process. Essentially, when we can confidently decide, we become better equipped for adversity—When challenges make it difficult to defog, effective decision-making skills give us the capability to quickly determine our circumstances and move forward to change-up the situation, address and resolve problems, or rebound from hardships.
Our Habits of Thinking
Our attitudes, our habits of thinking, fuel our behaviors. Procrastination, the most pure form of indecision, is a behavior of inaction. Procrastination is typically not about time management or planning. Procrastination is a habit of thinking. Dr. Joseph Ferrari, associate professor of psychology at De Paul University in Chicago, commented in an article published in Psychology Today, “Procrastinators are not different in their ability to estimate time, although they are more optimistic than others. Telling someone who procrastinates to buy a weekly planner is like telling someone with chronic depression to just cheer up.”
As a rule, major decisions are really a series of smaller decisions.Large or small, the ability to be successfully decisive has little to do with personality, but more to do with our ability to analyze a situation and plan actionable ways to approach each piece or step of the challenge.
Another aspect of decisiveness is the combination of our logic and the emotional facets of our personality. This combination, our intuition, will influence our best made decisions. Intuition, some call it our sixth sense, can serve us well as we apply our personal experiences & daily applications of formal learning to a scenario, and yet, intuition is sometimes elusive. We simply cannot always sense the right outcome.
For the stuck among us, develop your skills to help you develop autopilot tools when times get tough or when conflicts and priorities distort the facts and obscure the right, or best, path for you. The Attribute Index assessment tool is designed to help people identify how they make decisions in hi-velocity situations, when intuition drives the process. Debriefing conversations with a skilled coach, always helps to reveal the strengths and challenges for people when the pressure is on. The Attribute Index is a valuable starting point to design a program that helps people and organizational teams to develop highly effective decision-making skills.
To find out more about the Attribute Index and how you can benefit from this free assessment, contact Dr. Deborah Frey, certified Innermetrix specialist, at freyworks@gmail.com.
