Making Better Choices

November 12, 2006 7:43 AM

How do you make good decisions/choices when you obviously have feelings (your own or others) that want to drive you in one direction?

I find that I am able to convince myself with what seems like sound evidence to make the choice I seem to want at the time, then, down the road, I realize I allowed my judgment to be clouded by a number of things. 1: My feelings 2: The pressure of others whose job is to CONVINCE people to do things their way (my agents) 3: Guilt.

I am unhappy with the choices I have been talked into or talked myself into that have really made my career, personal and financial success less than spectacular. Don’t get me wrong, I am successful, I am financially okay, and I am creatively happy, however, I could have been SO MUCH MORE. I have made a number of poor choices that have made my success only middlin’.

I am tired of making decisions/choices in the middle of emotions that seem like they are worth considering.

I can get talked into stuff fairly easily and I’m tired of that. I don’t think it has really helped me. I have a two year window of opportunity before I might have to leave my business due to my age, and I want to MAXIMIZE my potential. Currently, I am exercising, have changed my diet to a much healthier one, I am getting better sleep, losing weight, and finally dealing with chronic health problems that I have ignored. I also am in therapy and have made tremendous strides emotionally and mentally. I realized that all these things would need to be done in order to function at a higher level and give me a shot at more significant personal and professional success. There is just one part left:

DECISION MAKING SKILLS. How does one go about REALLY understanding the difference between feelings and fact? And, in the midst of feelings (like fear, guilt, wants) how does one go about understanding how important they really are, or how much weight they should have in making a decision? And how do you seperate them from genuine "gut feelings"?

Does anyone have a PROTOCOL for good decision making, are there questions I can ask myself when faced with these things and HOW DO I RESIST BEING PRESSURED? This is a business (I’m a TV writer) where that’s basically what the people I work with do, and they are much better at it than I am. How do I KNOW when to stand strong and when to acquiesce? How do I stop feeling guilty, anxious in the moment and make clear, strong choices, EVEN if I am characterized as being difficult?

posted by generic230 to human relations (8 comments total)

Learn from the Scientific Method. A scientist may have a really strong feeling that, say, Cancer is caused by a virus, but in his discipline, that strong feeling is worthless -- except in one way: in Science, you are allowed to use guy feelings as a basis for forming questions (forming hypothesis): IS Cancer caused by a virus? But that's as far as you are allowed to let your guy take you. Follow this rule, and you can't go wrong.

Furthermore, you could try the following: make a rule for yourself that step two, after forming a gut-feeling hypothesis, is to try to prove it wrong. The stronger you feel about it, the more carefully and diligently you must attempt to refute it. Only after exploring all the cons -- if your hypothesis is still standing -- can you let yourself explore the pros. Was it Aristotle who believed that you can only find truth through this sort of internal debate? Thesis and antithesis leads to synthesis.

Feel like investing your money in what feels like a sound investment? What's unsound about it? (Don't just ask yourself this question. Actively research the answer!) Feel like praying? How do you know there's a God? Feel like taking that job? Why would that be a bad career move? (I'm not suggesting you should be negative about everything. The next step is to investigate why it would be a GOOD career move. But from your history, it sounds like you should lead with the con and only worry about the pro when the con is exhausted.)

Life is about making decisions. Evolution has endowed us humans with two great tools to do so. Instinct and Reason. Both are useful. Instinct is useful in that it helps us ask questions and make quick decisions, when we don't have time to use reason (the Lion is about the pounce on me). It's also useful when we're forced to make decisions without enough data for reasoning. In all other cases, Reason is your friend.

If your reasoning skills are weak, study Logic.
posted by grumblebee at 8:23 AM on November 12, 2006 [2 favorites has favorites]

First, focus on your good decisions, and learn what you did right, so you can repeat it. Second, analyse your decision making process. If you have made poor decisions in the past because you were too hasty; learn to slow down, etc. Third, feelings are as valid as facts; the key is weighing them all carefully. Try to project long term consequences.

Last, focus on the future and not on beating yourself up over what might have been.
posted by theora55 at 8:28 AM on November 12, 2006 [1 favorite has favorites]

It's an interesting question, because for most decisions I think your emotions and feelings are inseparable from the "logical" part of the decision, and most of the time just as important. (If you were choosing between two jobs, for example, the one you feel emotionally drawn to is probably the one you want, even if the other is logically more sensible (higher salary, whatever.)

Letting others talk you into things is really the problem, I think. Best way to deal with that is time: if someone's trying to talk you into something, hear them out, but don't make the decision right away -- wait until their verbal influence wears off. If possible, talk to someone who might hold the opposite view, see if you can get both sides.

Another part of the problem seems to be that you're dwelling on past mistakes. No form of decision-making can guarantee that you'll make the "right" choice (and there's also no guarantee for any past choice you've made that the other choice would actually have been better in the long run.)

The way I make important decisions -- this is weird and unusual, but it works for me -- is to pick one at random and firmly say to myself "I'm going to do that." But I don't tell anyone about that choice, and I don't act on it yet. Then I let that sit for a while, go through a few days with the expectation that that decision is going to stand, and see how I feel about it. If I start to feel regrets, I try the same thing the other way. But still in my head. Sort of making the decision before making the real decision -- it gives me a chance to peek into the future, in a way, and see how I'm going to feel having made a particular choice. It's slow, and requires a little suspension of disbelief... but really important decisions rarely have to be made on the spot, anyway. And it's still no real guarantee, but nothing is.
posted by ook at 9:01 AM on November 12, 2006 [2 favorites has favorites]

The first thing to understand is that for most life decisions, there is no one best method for making a decision. The second thing to understand is that most life decisions have several aspects, i.e. emotional, financial, past resolutions/future consequences, etc.

With those two understandings in mind, let me offer the following.

1) Some decisions, or some aspects of complex decisions can reasonably be reduced to a number. Financial decisions are generally of this ilk, in that doing something will have certian costs and certian benefits, which can be reduced to positive and negative cash flows, and then summed up and brought back to a number in today's dollars that is either positive, zero, or negative (net present value [NPV] calculation). In those cases, choosing the higher number is the best result, if the associated risks are the same. But therein lies the rub: how can you reasonably assess risk? It usually works out that even financial decisions, which should easily be the most numerical (and therefore 'dispassionate') kinds of decisions, have an element of judgement in the face of the unknown. The only thing financial decisions can do is to provide you with a 'zero risk' alternative (money in a guaranteed investment like FDIC insured savings account) as a comparison. Because we don't otherwise often get a 'no risk' alternative in real life. So, the lesson here is to let 'the numbers' inform your decisions when the methods that produce 'the numbers' are applicable, but don't kid yourself that you can make all decisions on 'the numbers,' because you can't.

When you are faced with a decision that isn't going to be purely financial (or otherwise numbers based), you have to find other decision methods that respect the decision. If you're trying to decide which activity you like most, numbers aren't the way to do that, and you'll never trust a decision you try to make on the basis of assigning some arbitrary numerical score to various aspects of different activities, because deep down, your heart and mind know when you are bull shitting yourself. So, if your heart is the thing it is most important to satisfy in a particular decision, look for a method that respects your heart. That might be meditation, or sharing with friends, or throwing the I Ching, but it won't be numbers.

2) Good decision makers learn to use advice effectively. That seems to be your problem, in a nutshell. You don't know how to consult and use advisors well. I find that there are a couple of important points in doing this.

First, classify and categorize your advisors by expertise and relationship. Advisors that are at arms length (have no personal or financial interests in the outcome) to the decision facing you, friends (people that may have no specific expertise to offer, but who know you and want the best for you), professionals (people like lawyers, accountants, doctors, and others you pay for expert advice, who are legally bound to consider your interests in advising you), experts (people who hold themselves out as subject matter specialists, whom you have reason to believe are knowledgeable), and hoi polloi (average folks whose opinions you might assume to be 'average' but whose interests you can't really know or verify).

Second, be sure you can state the problem concisely but completely, when consulting advisors. You waste your own time, and those of your advisors when you can't lay out the issues you need advice about consistently, completely, and concisely. And so you'll get bad advice, until you can. Some people need to run through a problem a few times with others, to get the story 'straight,' and if you are one of those who 'think out loud' you're going to have to back off on seeking advice, by starting your consultations with a few 'issue formation consultations' to get the story laid out so you can tell it to your real advisors. Otherwise, if you're like most of us who can organize our own thoughts with a little time and work, you may find that just jotting down your thoughts, and working them into an outline of the situation, before seeking out advice, will be tremendously useful.

Third, with your advisors categorized, and your problem clearly and succinctly defined, think about the best sources of advice for that problem, and seek those out first. It won't do you any good to ask friends who don't know your financial situation for money advice, and you shouldn't ask your accountant for tips on romance. But a lot of people do just that, because they don't want to pay an accountant for professional time, or think their friends are 'financial wizards.'

3) Learn to terminate your decision tree. You can't change the past, or perfectly anticipate the future. You really seem to be kicking yourself unduly about the past, and are fearful about your future. Even the wisest people have far better hindsight than foresight, and no matter how much you've learned from your mistakes, you still only human, and you'll be quite able to make brand new mistakes, right up until your dying day. So, you have to quit wasting time on reviewing the past, or unduly planning tomorrow, and focus on the here and now. Sure, it's good to remember your mistakes, and have an idea about what you want in life, but unless you are a saint smiling beautifically in a cold cell about Heaven's promised glory, it's today that matters. So, cut things down to what you can do in the next 24, 48 and 96 hours, and be sure to get those things done. Do those things well, with the fullness of the experience you can bring to them, and tomorrow will take care of itself.

Failing to take decisions in a timely fashion is just pushing the decisions you should be making on to others. Don't do that to yourself.

4) You can improve your decision making by reflection. It's useful to spend a little time on a regularly scheduled basis reflecting your life, as you would reflect on any study or learning in which you have an investment, and want to fully master. I find a few minutes of thought in the evening, usually right after dinner, is a good time for daily reflection, and I try to do this with myself for five minutes, just to put in clear thought the best answer to "What did I learn today?" I also try to have some monthly and some annual reflection, in a few key areas, including financial and spirtual, in which I review goals against outcomes, and try to extract patterns. I discover things about myself doing this, and it's a principal way of discovering when I'm working against myself, or trying to push down things I'd rather not think about.

Learning to reflect is key to learning.
posted by paulsc at 9:20 AM on November 12, 2006

For important (big) decisions, I highly recommend Russo and Schoemaker's Decision Traps, which I think has been rewritten as Winning Decisions.
posted by LeisureGuy at 11:43 AM on November 12, 2006

Sorry. Clicked "Post Comment" Before I was done. Decision Traps breaks decision-making into a four-step process and points out the common errors at each step. (Much like Roger Fisher and William Ury broke negotiation into a step-by-step process in Getting to Yes.)

Once you know the common errors in each step, you can avoid them, and you end up with a sound process which will favor better decisions.

I haven't reading Winning Decisions, but based on Decision Traps, I imagine it's equally good.
posted by LeisureGuy at 11:46 AM on November 12, 2006

Could you find a trusted friend or consultant who doesn't have a vested interest in the outcome, and run all your decisions by them? I find I need an external perspective to sift through the conflicts I feel sometimes.
posted by jasper411 at 3:10 PM on November 12, 2006

This may sound superstitious or evangelical, but: some of the greatest minds (and people) in history have asked for guidance from the Invisible Powers That Be - in other words, prayer. (You may want to pray to, say, the God of Lincoln, not G W Bush...!) It could be combined with the methods others have suggested; they're not mutually exclusive. And it's free and not time-consuming. Also, there are all sorts of different types of meditation, which may be more or less the same thing. I think both of those things can help one tune into one's truest, least superficial or momentary feelings, which is partly what it sounds like you've had some trouble doing in the past. And they can be of help if intellectualizing a decision has you confused. Good luck.
posted by MaudB at 12:13 AM on November 13, 2006