The more you love your decisions, the less you need others to love them.
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Sometimes you just don’t have time to get reassurance from others. Getting advice can be helpful, but you also need the ability to make your own decisions and like them enough to stick to them.
Reflect on a business decision you made recently. What were the inputs you used to make this decision? What were the quality of those inputs?
The better your inputs, the more likely you are to feel great about your decision and follow through on it.
Being decisive and taking action are key success factors in business and will help you to be a stronger leader (whether for yourself or your team).
5 Factors Affect the Quality of Your Decisions
You can improve the success of your decisions starting today by identifying your decision-making inputs.
As you analyze and improve the inputs in your decision-making process, you’ll find yourself believing more in the decisions you make, sticking to your plans, and leading more effectively.
1. Quality of Mentors
Are you making decisions without advice?
A good sounding board helps you break down complex issues, stay objective, and think strategically. Experienced advisors and coaches can ask revealing questions, spark creative insights, and prevent you from overlooking important information.
2. Quality of Knowledge
What do you read or study before making an important decision? Are you unconsciously making some decisions that you don’t even realize, and consequently not dedicating time to expand your knowledge related to the decisions?
Books, conferences, online courses, blogs, podcasts, and other resources help you absorb the wisdom that others spent decades earning the hard way.
Your education helps you determine what to focus on and what not to focus on. When you need to think on your feet, instead of relying on your own experience, you’ll have a huge reservoir of knowledge to draw from.
3. Quality of Guiding Beliefs
Are you clear about where your business is going (aside form your financial goals) as well as what principles you’ll follow to get there?
A guiding vision and belief system serves as a compass for your personal life and business.
Decision making can be intuitive or a process of elimination. Nothing making intuition easier than a clear vision, and nothing makes eliminating options easier than a set of values that you’ve already taken time to define.
4. Quality of Questions
How many questions do you ask before making a decision? What is your process for asking questions, brainstorming answers, and evaluating your thoughts?
Questions probe cause and effect relationships. Understanding these relationships helps you to project the probability of your desired outcomes and make decisions based on these probabilities.
Questions also help you discover the information you’re missing, giving you a more comprehensive understanding of any situation you face.
5. Quality of Actions
Do you take action immediately after making a decision?
When you take action swiftly, you give yourself time to conduct preliminary tests and adjust your strategy if needed.
Your decisions should start with he outcome you want to achieve. Once you know the outcome, you can pivot the strategy you use to reach it when new information appears.
How Can You Improve?
Look back on a consequential decision you made recently, perhaps one where you haven’t followed through as well as you need to.
How can you improve each of these 5 inputs?
Were there any inputs completely missing?
Make a commitment to raise the bar on your inputs, and you’ll find your level of commitment to your decisions will also increase.
As you make more decisions, you’ll get better at anticipating business patterns and finding opportunities in pressure situations. You’ll also become more confident in your instincts, enabling you to move faster as a leader.