How Do I Make
Good Decisions?

Good vs Bad

How do I make good decisions is not a good question. It's a great question! You make many, many decisions every day. What to have for breakfast, which shoes to put on, which shops to browse in, who to spend time with, what you do at work and so on...

You have made good and great decisions before, and you have made poor decisions. It is useful to compare and contrast these decisions so that you learn the difference.

More importantly, you learn how to use your intuition, you learn how to use what you have learnt from your past experiences, and combine that with logical reasoning so you use both of these strategies together so that more and more of your decisions give you the results that you want.

Read an overview of the decision making model here...

 

A Closer look...

There are times when you have made excellent decisions. Before the moment in which you formally took the decision you more or less knew what you were going to do. At the time of the decision making you knew it was a good decision. And when you look back on it you recognise that, yes, that was a good decision. And even now, it may still be a decision that you are acting upon.

There are also times when you made decisions that you felt uneasy about. Even if you asked yourself 'how do I make good decisions?', there still may have been a sense that there was something not quite right about your decision-making. And even when you think about it now, you recognize that at the time you realized it was a poor decision with the potential for negative consequences.

So when you think about how do I make good decisions with the above in mind, what do we know? We know that at the time of making the decision (or even before), you are aware of 'something' that lets you know whether it is a good or bad decision.

 

Telling the difference

When you learn what this 'something' is, then you'll be able to answer the question 'how do I make good decisions?'

Some people refer to it as a 'gut feeling' or a 'heart-felt' sense, some kind of sensation in the body. Others refer to hearing a voice giving them advice, or talking to themselves. And yet others talk about a flash of inspiration, or seeing the whole picture. A visual cue.

Whether it's a visual, sensory, or auditory signal that the person is aware of, this is simply the information that's available to them at the time.

Obviously if you have the information in all 3 perceptual systems available to you, all the better!

The fact is that each of us is using all our five senses all the time. Typically though, an individual may be aware of only one or maybe two of these at any one time. The other information will become available if you simply pay attention to it.

So how does this apply to your question of how do I make good decisions? Well, it's the awareness of this very information that actually lets you know whether it is a good decision or a bad decision.

How do I build awareness?

To know what to check for, to learn your own personal signals, read 'How do I make good decisions?' - Part - 2

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