Your best decision-making machine

Make decisions and be at peace with each one. You want to foster the habit of making good, unbiased, and objective decisions.

Decision-making is an essential process in our daily lives, whether we are aware of it or not. From simple decisions like what to wear or what to eat, to complex decisions like choosing a career or buying a house, the decisions we make have a significant impact on our lives. Therefore, it is crucial to have a structured decision-making process to make informed and rational choices.

As Yuval Noah Harari describes in his book “Sapiens”, we inherited many habits from our ancestors and engrafted these into our brains through the genes that were passed on to us. Some habits like eating, drinking, sleeping, running, or fighting, are habits that the brain performs on autopilot. We make these decisions daily without ever giving any thought to them. However, they are still decisions. We decide to eat, to sleep. Each of these actions that we take daily, believe it or not, was processed through a series of procedures and helped our brain quickly decide what option best keeps us alive. It is fascinating to me how our brain does this on autopilot without even evoking our conscience mind.

Accordingly, to neuroscientists, each time we perform activities or are faced with a difficult task, our brain fires neurons. Once we figured out a good solution for the task at hand, our brain records these neurons’ patterns to help us remember what to do, would the same situation presents itself in the future. Therefore, the more action or decision is repeated, the stronger that path gets and the easier it gets to just recall and do. Hence, we eat, sleep, and do most of our repeatable daily actions without breaking a sweat. Although, we still think, only that it no longer takes us time to react because we have seen it before. Hence, our brain is good with optimization, each task that it can free from the conscious mind and put on autopilot, it will offload to the subconscious, all in the hope to allow the conscious brain to do more difficult tasks or decisions. I’m sure you can relate already as you recall the first time you tried something new. It was daunting but your next try was a bit more effortless.

So, there is no surprise that we become unsettled and totally in distress when we are faced with any situation we have not encountered before. Our brain goes into chaos, it has no known procedure on what to do, how to behave, or what decision can keep us alive. According to science, our ancestors only left us with a brain that is very good at keeping us alive by feeding us or telling us to fight or flee for our lives or staying in the community for survival. As we adapt to modern life and food became abundant on most continents and our lives were no longer a constant matter of life or death, our brains needed to figure out the best path to sustain us. Since modern society is completely different from what our ancestors have seen, we are left with an old brain that struggles to process modern-day information to make the best decisions. As a result, the decision-making process can be overwhelming for most of us, and some people may avoid it as often as they can, but it does not need to be a stressful moment. Science taught us that the brain improves and responds faster to any repeated action. If we follow what science prescribes, the way to make us better decision-makers is through repetition and practice. The following are a few things that I’ve tried and that work for me so far. I divided my decision process into several steps, each of which plays a crucial role in making a well-informed decision.

When faced with a problem or decision time, the first step for me is to remove myself from the impact zone. This may sound very weird. English speakers would say that I put myself in the back seat or see myself in a third-person view. However, this is a scientific hack to enable oneself to see clearer. It is easy to miss a point when we are in the middle of the affected audience. We human beings are easy to take things personally, and with emotions when we are directly affected. Think of a time when it was so easy for you to see from afar the mistakes someone else was making. When you switch roles and are in the position of the player then you would find yourself making the exact same silly mistakes and, in most cases, you can provide the best excuses to back up how it was not a mistake. Funny right? By removing oneself from the affected population, we are free of this bias. We can effectively hack into our logical brains to better define the problem. The intent is to have a clear definition of the problem, so we don’t get cut up into trying to fix or solve the wrong problem or make excuses. By the way, another thing that our brain is so great at doing is protecting us from uncomfortable feelings. When we are wrong, it will make up all types of excuses to convince us that we are good.

Once you accurately identify and define what the issue is, gather information. Ask yourself what you know and seek to even identify what you don’t know yet. Determine if the items that you are missing are critical to making an informed decision in this case or not. If you require additional information that is not within your knowledge base, then seek advice. This could involve talking to someone that you value as knowledgeable in the matter. Once you identified such a person, make sure to provide him or her with enough information or data points, so they can accurately add value to you. Avoid biasing this individual by telling them what someone else said or what you think. Just provide all required information and don’t supply any of your opinion or someone else to this person. The aim is to gather as much relevant information as possible to make your decision as reasonable as possible. I rely on books a lot for mentorship as well. Someone once said that whatever one is going through, there is someone, somewhere who has gone through the same thing and chances are they wrote about it. So, I seek knowledge from books for every aspect of my life. We are even luckier in this modern world, we no longer need to go to libraries or jump through hoops to find relevant information. A simple Google search will put the information you seek at your fingertip. Conversely, you no longer need to speak with a live person to get answers.

Then, identify alternatives or what-if scenarios based on what you know so far. After gathering information and you feel that you have enough information, start to generate as many ranges of possibilities to potential decisions and potential outcomes as possible. This involves brainstorming activities to get your brain energized. However, be careful not to over-process. Some call this event an analysis paralysis. Yes, don’t overload your brain with brain-eating aliens’ possibility or zombie apocalypse. Stick with reality and don’t overthink.

Next, evaluate each one of the possible scenarios. Rate them from high consequential impact, both positive and negative impacts. This involves weighing the pros and cons of each option and assessing their potential outcomes. For example, if you don’t go to a party on Saturday night with your best friend, she will hate you for one month, but you will be able to have additional time to study for your exam and get the certification that can land you a higher paying job. The choice is clear here. Stay put, let your friend get over her feeling, and get your certification.

In another scenario, you stood your friend and fail the certification anyway. The outcome, your friend will get over her feeling and you’ve learned a better way to study to retake the certification and pass. Your friend may have the I told you so moment here because you fail, but if she was a good friend, she would instead tell you that failure is a good teacher and that you didn’t fail but learned something new. However, you would not care too much about what your friend thinks. Remember, we cannot control others’ behaviors, just ours. Choose the best option that has the most positive impact on your long-term goals or life and continue to move forward.

Once you’ve selected a path, go full speed ahead into the implementation phase of your decision. This means putting the decision into action and monitoring its progress. Sometimes, we easily fall prey to other people’s influence in our life. We’ve decided and knew what was best for us, yet we allow others to tell us otherwise and sell us cheap strategies that are not in our best interest and make us doubt ourselves. I hope the brainstorming activities performed above will save you from falling into these temptations. The intent of the scenario generation activity was to see these sorts of possibilities from afar before they can even formulate and plan a response in case these possible external factors see the light of day.

Now what? After you’ve made a decision, whether it was the perfect outcome that you expected, or even a better one, or the worse possible scenario that came to reality, your task does not stop here. The final step in the decision-making process is to evaluate the entire process and adjust and be ready for the next decision. We are not a perfect human being, so we always make mistakes and needs to learn, adapt and improve. Remember that we are a being who improves through repetition and practice. As a result, we are to assess every decision process to evaluate if it was effective in achieving the desired outcome and identify any lessons learned for future decision-making. The evaluation process is to hone your decision skill, so here don’t focus too much on the outcome itself, but rather on how you arrived at the outcome. Improve the process then the positive outcomes will come more often, and you will always be true to yourself because you would know that you have a system and that you don’t just act haphazardly. You would become doubtless, and external factors will affect you less because you will be mostly always ready.

It is worth noting that the decision-making process can be influenced by several factors, including personal biases, emotions, and external pressures. Therefore, it is essential to be aware of these factors and take steps to mitigate their impact on the decision-making process.

Ultimately, remember that each of your decision has consequences. No one will endure consequences on your behalf or with you. Therefore, there is no point in focusing so much on what others may think or say about your decisions. However, you want to make a decision that you can live with. Freely decide once you have accessed all the available data to you at the time of your deciding moment. If you need to seek advice before making the decision, then ensure that whoever you rely on for advice has all the information he or she needs to give you impartial advice. Don’t offer more information about what you think you should do or even offer what others have suggested to you.

Decide and be at peace. How you get peace of mind with each decision is by educating yourself and never stopping learning. The world is constantly evolving. The knowledge that you had yesterday may be obsolete a month from now, so you want to stay ahead. Also, be kind to yourself. It is obvious that you will not always make the right decisions every time, however, knowing that you evaluated all the available data to you, followed your system and that you objectively assessed all the information available at the time of your decision is how you get peace of mind even in hindsight.

I know my process reads as if it is overly simplified and that is exactly the point. Simplify your decision-making process. Your brain is just like a muscle and just like any other muscle, the more your practice, the better it gets.