These eight decision-making tactics from David Lahey’s book, Predicting Success, are helpful to me and hopefully useful to you as well:
- Deep breathing, to clear your mind.
- Researching, to feel confident that you have all the information in front of you.
- Listing your options, in either verbal or written form, to keep the whole picture front of mind.
- Following through on the possible outcomes, complete with likely predictions and acknowledgement of whether they’re negative or positive (or design yourself a decision tree, that lays out every possible consequence visually).
- Testing your intuition, by imagining a committed decision and then gauging the corresponding feeling it inspires in your gut.
- Taking the time you need, so long as it doesn’t become an overly indulgent distraction.
- Evaluating your decision, an after-the-fact exercise that engages a conscious inventory of the lessons learned.
- Coming to terms with your pick, always cognizant of the reality that no decision is going to lead to a perfectly ideal outcome, and that being at peace with your choice is worth lots.
