Raise your hand if you haven’t made a difficult decision in your life! From choosing between a strawberry or chocolate ice cream to a decision that will mark a before and after in a professional career.
Sometimes we have to choose between two good options to prioritize, and other times we have to make a tough decision that will negatively affect one metric in order to improve another.
Last week I was reading a very interesting article on LinkedIn about Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. In 2016, he created a simple framework to understand the decision-making process and tells us that there are 2 types:
- Type 1: Irreversible decisions, which we must be very careful in making.
- Type 2: Decisions such as “going through a door”, if you don’t like them you can always change them without problems.
And that’s what I thought…
Then I kept thinking… even if I make a decision and then change it because it is reversible, does this make me a good decision maker?Or does this only apply when I made irreversible decisions and have a favorable result?If someone wants to share their hypotheses with me, they are more than welcome to send me an email because I really don’t know the answer for sure.
However, what I do know is that to facilitate this process we must develop intuition and a keen eye, I do not mean putting on a white coat and meditating all day.If not to be more aware of what prevents us from being connected with ourselves such as multitasking.
This is because it gives very fast neuronal jumps that waste the energy of the brain or thoughts in a loop that do not end cause us to produce cortisol and adrenaline, translating into stress.
So, the corpus callosum whose functionality by being a bridge between 2 hemispheres (the right and left) and integrating our logical side with the creative one allows us to have more connection with ourselves. And, therefore, our intuition is empowered to make better decisions and serve others.
There are no magic recipes
Additionally, it is also important to obtain data and information, not just at the point of “heart”. Or in this case we have already seen that we must decide from the brain, but that the facts are also vital to make decisions where you feel calm, respected and cared for.
A practical exercise
So to close I want to share with you an exercise for those decisions in which you have a little time to make due: if you have doubt between A and B where both excite you, take it up for 3 days and imagine option A.It is important that you feel it, live it as if you had already taken it and choose option B for 3 days. And then on the seventh day see which one feels best for you.This will help reduce cognitive dissonance, which is when we begin to see the attributes of the paths we did not choose and this causes us to feel overwhelmed.
As you will see, there is no magic formula or matrix that guarantees what decision to make so that this is “the best”.However, living in peace with decisions is one of the most expansive sensations for the human being and it is up to you to improve it.
