Making Decisions With Confidence
February 15, 2020
When your decisions lead to undesirable outcomes, how do you react? Are you overly critical of yourself? Is your brain hijacked by repetitive thoughts about what you should or could have done differently? Is your internal voice expressing frustration, anger, or regret to yourself?
The process with which you make decisions influences the responses you have to the outcomes. You may be critical of yourself (not advised) or, better yet, welcome a mindset of objectivity and positivity.
It's not uncommon to feel a sense of uneasiness when making decisions. You may be, for example, contemplating ending a committed relationship, addressing a health concern, pivoting your career, or bringing someone new onto your team. In each case, there is no way of knowing if your decisions made today will lead to desired outcomes tomorrow. Yet you do have the opportunity, however, of knowing tomorrow that you strategically and thoughtfully made decisions today.
This process begins when presented with a challenge and options for resolution. Whether big or small, good or bad, the DECIDE framework provides you with six-steps for confidently making decisions:
Develop a comprehensive understanding of the challenge and your desired outcome.
Explore all details related to this challenge: identify what contributes to its existence and the impact it will have on you and others.
Consider your options for resolution: include consideration of your responsibilities, interests, needs, and the potential impact it could have on you and others.
Identify the option that you think will best help achieve your desired outcome.
Decide how you will implement this decision: break it down into steps and anticipate the potential impact your decision will have on you, both practically and emotionally.
Evaluate your overall experience: include your process of making a decision, the outcome, and your reaction to it.
This final step, Evaluate, is instrumental to becoming a more confident person. If the outcomes of your decisions determine how you feel about yourself, then you are either good or bad, thus, limiting the possibility of increasing confidence. But when your focus is on the process of making a decision, your range of evaluation becomes more expansive and provides more opportunities for objectivity and positivity. You'll likely see how contributing factors, such as context (i.e., your responsibilities and capacity to accept more, impact on others, available resources), influence how you make decisions and your confidence when doing so.
The goal of the DECIDE framework is two-fold. First, to help you confidently make decisions today. Second, let your future self know that you made today's decisions with a confident, deliberate, and strategic mindset. As you repeat these six steps (again and again), notice how the combination of your critical inner voice reducing and your emotional capacity increasing leads to an increased ability for making decisions with confidence.