How do I make good decisions and can I do it each and every time?

How Do I Make
Good Decisions?

If you knew...
what would you do?

How do I make good decisions is not a good question. It's a great question! You make many, many decisions every day. What you have for breakfast, which shoes to put on, which shops to browse in, who to spend

time with, and sometimes even what you do at work.

Some decisions are one off's, for example, do you go to the party tonight, or not? Other decisions you make once, and they carry forward in time. For example you decide that you like a particular TV series and you plan to watch it every week. And it's not that you decide every week that you going to watch it. You decide only once, and every week you carry out the result of that decision.

If you haven't read the overview of the model, it may be useful to do so now before continuing with 'how do I make good decisions?'

Good vs Bad

There are times when you have made excellent decisions. You knew coming up to it more or less what you were going to decide. At the time of the decision making you knew it was a good decision. And when you look back on it you recognise that, yes, that was a good decision. And even now you still think it is a good decision and it holds true even today.

There are also times when you made decisions that you felt uneasy about. Even if you asked yourself how do I make good decisions, there still may have been a sense that there was something not quite right about your decision-making. And even when you look back on it you recognize that at the time you realised it was a poor decision with the associated negative consequences.

So when you think about how do make good decisions with the above in mind, what do we know? We know that there is some information present in the system at the time of making the decision that lets you know whether it is a good or bad decision. This information is also available when you think back to the time of making the division.

Telling the difference

If you knew what this information was, then you'd be able to answer the question 'how do I make good decisions?'

Some people refer to a 'gut feeling' or a 'heart-felt' sense, some kind of sensation in the body. Others refer to hearing a voice giving them advice or talking to themselves. And yet others talk about a flash of inspiration, or seeing the whole picture. A visual cue.

Whether it's a visual, sensory, or auditory signal that the person is aware of, this is simply the information that's available to them at the time. Each of us is using all our five senses on an ongoing basis. Typically though, an individual may be aware of only one or maybe two of these at any one time. The other information will become available if you simply put your attention on it.

So how does this apply to your question of how do I make good decisions? Well, it's the awareness of this very information in the system that actually lets you know whether it is a good decision or a bad decision.