Decision Making Skills

“Malcolm Gladwell said, “Truly successful decision making relies on a balance between deliberate and instinctive thinking.”

From your personal to professional lives, decisions must be made in every aspect of life. When it comes to professional life, decision making is considered a skill, a talent that makes you a better leader. In this blog, we explore the best tricks and tips for inculcating decision-making skills in yourself.

In layman’s terms, decision making is the ability to select between two or more alternatives. During your career, you will encounter several dilemmas. Making the correct choice in the most crucial moments in your career can do wonders for your career. Especially if it is a pivotal decision, it can make or break you. A leader takes all the trivial as well as significant decisions for the team and hence, decision making is considered an essential skill in a leader.

Here is how you can make good decisions

• Research

Before taking any decision, it is very important to know the context and background. Understand the gravity of the decision that must be made. Accuracy in decision making comes from knowing what result is expected. A decision backed with valid research can hardly go wrong. The research can be done in many ways including approaching professionals, experienced people, talking to your peers and even taking help from the internet. Impulsive decisions made without researching can turn out to be devastating.

• Clarity

Being clear in your aim and goals can aid the decision-making process and make it easier. Listing things down and knowing your priorities right can give you clarity and help in taking the right decisions.

• Do not overthink it

Having a lot of time in your hand to decide between two alternatives can mess your head up. As humans, we tend to reconsider every decision we make and when we have more time than needed to conclude, there is a higher chance of your mind going haywire. The time available might not always be in our control but making up your mind and then detaching yourself from the topic is something one needs to learn. Once you have evaluated all parameters and the decision feels right, lock it in your mind and forget about it. Thinking about it continuously or at intervals can make you overthink and stray you from the right decision.

• Trusting your gut

All of us as humans are born with intuitions. The infamous sixth sense in our bodies holds a lot of importance in decision making. Quite often, all the research, probability and evaluation may lead to one alternative; but your gut might lean towards the other. At times like these, it is always preferred to go with your gut. Our mind and the universe work in unfathomable ways which are beyond human understanding. Trusting your gut can take you somewhere you did not imagine being, in a positive as well as a negative way. Make sure you go with intuition and not emotions. Our vision might get fogged with emotions as it is not always possible for us to be practical in every situation. Let your gut be your guide and not your heart.

• Experience

One needs to be bad at something to be good at it eventually. A person learning to swim, an introvert trying to socialize, a budding guitarist- all of them struggle in their initial learning days. They are terrible at what they are doing and by being consistent, they achieve mastery in their craft. Similarly, all the decisions you might take will not hit the bullseye; especially in your initial experiences. You will make bad decisions and may even regret them. The key is to learn from every bad decision, the process which lead you to make that decision and move forward with your life. A bad decision may not affect your life to the extent at which not learning from your mistakes and not moving on will. Many corporate giants- people who have made a name for them in their respective industries rely simply on their experience and gut feeling. Someone who has an experience of decades, be it leading teams or even working can make decisions faster and with accuracy. Such precision comes only with experience.

There you have it, the complete guide to make your decisions. As a corporate trainer based in Mumbai, I include guides like these backed with case studies and examples in my soft-skills training sessions. Let us connect if you would like to explore.

There you have it, Decision Making Skills all in one article. Stay tuned for more blogs like these. My name is Riti Kapoor Chopra, and I’m a Mumbai-based corporate trainer, speaker, and educator. For enquiries, contact me on 9819648070 or write to me at riti@ritikapoorchopra.com