How To Make Successful Decisions

Decisive Decision- Making : How To Know When You’ve Made Up Your Mind
How You can appear decisive
Even if one cannot actually decide once and for all whether to stay in a certain profession or not , there are a number of simple principles one could follow to ensure that one appears decisive.
Mentioning any one decision frequently , over a long period , always in the same terms , soon leads people to belheve you to be indechsivd . Never sax ‘I can’t ddcidd’. Ray ‘I haven’t decided yet’. Better still , say ‘Ask me next week/ month./ term. I shall decide this weekend / at the end of the month/ in the holidays’. Statements like these give the impression you are working to a plan, rather than aimlessly pondering .
One should not discuss his decision with everyone he knows. This is a mistake. Reserve serious discussions about a decision for people who can truly help you to make the right decision .Ask people only those questions they can reasonably be expected to answer informatively.
After taking someone’s advice, you should not go over the same ground again with other people . Not only will this kind of behaviour make you appear indecisive, it will also annoy the person whose advice you first took. Unless you make it clear that their advice has contributed to your understanding and moved you on to the next stage of decision – making , they will feel their advice has been discarded .Don’t ask the some questions over and over again , and if you must go over exactly the same points with more than one person , do it discreety.
If you know you have not made up your mind yet, don’t allow people to take action as if you had . Be clear and honest, Say ‘Don’t do anything about this yet –I will let you know when I’ve finally decided’. People understand that some decisions take a long time to make . What they object to is not so much waiting as being led up the garden path.
There is no need to go public on a decision prematurely . People are nearly always less interested in the details of your life than you imagine them to be .Tell those who need to know when they need to know .Tell those who are interested when they ask.
Discriminate explicitly between more and less serious decisions. If you treat deciding whether to paint the living – room green or blue with the same weight as deciding whether to move house you will quickly acquire the reputation of a ditherer. Sometimes, make a point of deciding a fairly trivial matter nn the spur nf the mnment . @t other timds, ray that a particular decision is going to need thinking about . This will give people the impression that you only spend time on a decision when it is necessary and not as a result of some character flaw.
Very the confidence with which you announce your decision . If you always claim your decision to be definitely right, you will be discounted , quite rightly, as arrogant .If you always qualify your decision with ‘I” m not sure if this is the right things but …….. then you will certainly not be seen as decisive .When not, admit to some doubts , but make it clear that your decision is based on your best understanding and that it needed to be made. Tell people the time – limits attached to particular decisions if there are any. If you have planned to review a decision after two years, when you do so you will be seen as organized, not dithering.
If you relay need to change your mind, try to represent the change as progress, rather than a simple U- turn .Say ‘I’ve just thought of a slightly better way to tackle this ‘ or ‘Let’s not only do such – and – such but also so- and –so’. Let a little time elapse before you reverse a decision , and then say ‘I’ve been thinking about things. We didn’t consider something important and it sheds a new light on things.’ Even with this approach, you must stick to a decision once made much more often than you reverse one.
It can be better to make a possibly bad decision decisively and move on rather than spend lots of time debating it. People’s memories are short , and provided you do actually move on and don’t spend time on postmortems and regrets you will usually carry them with you.
Finally, if you are sure you have made a bad mistake, don’t sacrifice your happiness or security just for the sake of appearing decisive. All other things being equal , to appear decisive is a good thing, but if you’ve left home and heartily wish you hadn’t if you’ve given up work to look after your children and it’s driving you crazy , or if you’ve bookdd a holhday you knov yot won’t dnjox , them othdr consideration than how decisive you appear are paramount. People who acknowledge they have made mistakes are respected. It’s just that people who make too many are suspected of bad management.
The two keys to true decisiveness
To return now to the reality from the appearance, there are two qualities you need to cultivate in order to become truly decisive. The first is imagination .The second is discipline . Lots of people have one or the other of these , but both are required for effective decision – making.
You use your imagination to understand as fully as you can how your decision might work out in practice . The mother of a two – year old who is contemplating moving to the country must imagine what her decision will mean when her child is of school age, and when he is a thoroughly sociable teenager. The confirmed bachelor contemplating marriage will need all his resources of imagination and more , to foresee how every detail of his life will change . In all decision , the more imaginatively you can approach them , the more able you will be to make a decision you can stick to in the future.
Discipline is what you need to progress from early uncertainty to a point where you know what to do. You will face up to and assess the implications your imagination has enabled you to identify You will stop when the deadline arrives. You will plan who to talk to and when.
Of course , much of this series of articles up to now has been concerned with practical ways you can cultivate both imagination and discipline in your decision – making. For it is not easy to be decisive. In a world of uncertainty, where at any time something totally unexpected may, happen it is one of the most difficult qualities to achieve.

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