Making difficult decisions can be paralyzing. The ability to make these types of decisions is what makes someone into a leader. Being decisive, even if that decision ends up being wrong, is still a better course of action than indecision. Making a definitive decision, but then also being open to the idea that the decision may have been wrong when presented with evidence makes great leaders great. Using emotional control and making decisions with logic and reason is the best way to go about handling problems and overcoming adversity. You might make mistakes along the way, but these are all learning experiences. The most important thing you can do is simply make a decision.
Emotional control
The first and most important thing to do when faced with a decision is to establish emotional control over that situation. Emotions can and will dominate us if we let them, and never is it a good idea to make a decision purely off of an emotional reaction. Have you ever gotten into a fight with a significant other, or maybe a coworker, or a friend, and said something off the cuff that you later regretted? This is because you reacted emotionally to the situation and let those emotions fuel your immediate feedback to that situation. You’ll then need to exhaust more energy trying to diffuse and backtrack what was said rather than working on an appropriate solution to the issue. Emotions create more problems, and rarely, if ever do they resolve them. Having and feeling emotions is what makes us human, and we should be appreciative of that fact. However, when making decisions, using them as the driving force to reach a prudent resolution is almost never the answer.
Any decision over indecision
Under any scenario, especially the most pressure packed ones, indecision is the worst decision you can make. Not being able to use your reasoning abilities to effectively make a definitive decision will handcuff you from making any sort of progress. Indecision and inaction tend to only make problems worse than they already are. Indecision stems from the fear of making the wrong decision, so to turn this belief on its head. Establish right off the bat that indecision is the wrong decision. Don’t allow it to paralyze you with fear! When you make a decision for the right reasons using logic and reason, any sort of decision you could have made is going to be better than indecision. Also, making a decision doesn’t always mean taking an action on something. A decision can be to do nothing. For example, in real estate, I am faced with the decision of whether to pursue an opportunity or not based on the material facts I have in front of me. Choosing to not pursue an opportunity is something that I will take 99 out of 100 times. I am actively vetting every opportunity, seeing if it fits what I am looking for, and choosing not to pursue it if it doesn’t fit my needs. This can sometimes get confused as indecision, however, that assertion is entirely false. Indecision means being paralyzed with fear so much so that you can’t make any decision at all. Making a conscious decision to say no to something is far from that.
Weighing pros and cons
To make things simple, you can break up decisions that need to be made into a list of pros and cons. You can extrapolate reasons why something may be favorable or not, process it using reason and logic, and see which side outweighs the other. There is no secret to making prudent and well-informed decisions. It’s all about your ability to process information objectively and being able to figure out which side outweighs the other when judging pros and cons. To reiterate, this won’t absolve you from making mistakes. Mistakes will come and you may have to pivot, but the lessons that you can learn from these experiences far outweigh the negative effects in the long run. Being objective, having emotional control, and simply making a decision over being indecisive is what allows for leaders to make seemingly impossible decisions on a regular basis with conviction.