How do you make good decisions? Every day you are tasked with the responsibility of making choices; some end up good, and others end up with consequences. Some people’s life is in a bad shape because of one wrong decision they made some time back.
Whether you are choosing food from the restaurant menu or deciding whether to make babies or not, in this article, we will show you how you can unconventionally make good decisions!
Trust your gut
You need to start trusting your gut and stop overthinking. Also known as intuition, hunch, deeper knowing, or sixth sense, your gut can sometimes supersede intellect. Sometimes, it can help you avoid unhealthy situations in your life. But, the problem is that your intellectual side of you always interferes with your gut feeling. It prevents you from following your gut feeling by weighing in excess thoughts in your decision-making.
Some giants or great leaders have been known to trust their gut at some point to make good decisions. They won eventually.
However, the downside of this is your gut may not always be right. But, if you’re ever faced with a life and death scenario and you have no time to think the situation through or where information overload may be a problem, follow your gut!
Factor in your emotions
Funny, right? You have always been taught that emotion is the enemy of good thinking and analytical skills. However, what you don’t know is your emotions are the results of evolution. Our emotions evolved to help us make good and quick decisions that may threaten our survival. For example, research shows that people who had the emotional parts of their brain damaged were unable to make even simple life decisions.
This goes on to show that in the neurobiology of choice, our brain relies on our emotions and other factors when making informed decisions. Funny enough, sad people have been shown to make the best decisions as they took time in considering the pros and cons before arriving at one decision.
However, don’t make all your decisions under the influence of emotions. It’s best you make minor decisions that have no real-life consequences under the influence of emotions.
Play the devil’s advocate sometimes
Imagine making a decision and bringing all the pieces of evidence against why it will not work. This is what playing the devil’s advocate entails. This is because we think we make good choices when in the actual sense it’s just confirmation bias.
People tend to make decisions that favor their beliefs or values which sometimes turn out to be tragic mistakes. Thing is, confirmation bias is very difficult to overcome. But with practice, that is, when you consistently play the devil’s advocate, you will dislodge your confirmation bias.
While playing the devil’s advocate, always rely on facts and statistics to overcome the urge to reaffirm what your mind already preconceives to be true. This is one way to make good decisions.
We hope you learned a thing or two on how to make good decisions. Tell us by using the comment box!
