The Art of Making Better Decisions: A No-BS Guide to Getting Out of Your Own Way
How do you make the decisions you make? What gets in your way? What slows you down, or paralyzes you? You know the frameworks, you know your processes, and still you waver. What's the secret sauce to making confident decisions?
We make decisions all the time—35,000 decisions every day apparently, each influenced by our perceptions and biases. Whether you're choosing between opportunities, deciding on a strategic direction, or simply figuring out how to structure your day—poor decisions compound into stress and overwhelm.
Sometimes we know exactly what to do, cause and effect are obvious, the answer is clear. We announce it quickly with confidence and determination.
Sometimes our expert knowledge helps us to muster that same confidence when the situation is more complicated. If you’re anything like me, when another layer of complexity adds on, patterns only emerge in hindsight (sigh).
And then there are the moments of chaos, when immediate action is required—no time to ponder and mull over options—or when there is total disorder and lack of clarity.
Context, types of decision, level of complexity, required speed of action, who's involved, possible outcomes—these elements all impact our decision making. As do our own thought patterns, limiting beliefs, and emotions. The latter are a potent, pervasive, predictable, sometimes harmful and sometimes beneficial drivers of decision making.
Where Leaders Get Stuck in Decision Making
I talk to a lot of professionals in my coaching practice who are making impactful decisions constantly. Once they step out of a myopic, operations-related overwhelm, the question of confidence in their decisions often arises. This takes the form of sleepless nights mulling over their choices. "I know all the frameworks, the who, the what, the scope, and still I second-guess every major choice."
It's not lack of knowledge that trips us up, it's our relationship with decision-making itself. How closely we tie our identity to our role, how acutely aware we are of the consequences, what we see and don't see all cloud a greater awareness of the process of decision making.
Here is where I see leaders getting stuck:
The confidence trap. Many leaders fall into the trap of being overly confident in their intuitions. The reality is that we're terrible at distinguishing between correct and incorrect intuitions—we're about 50/50 at best.
The speed vs. quality dilemma. While thorough analysis—beware of analysis paralysis—is important for major decisions, obsessing over every small choice drains your energy. The rate of improvement in decision quality tends to flatten out with additional time spent deliberating. Sometimes we need to value speed over precision. Our ease in doing so depends on the reversibility and magnitude of the decision.
Micromanaging decisions. Drives to stay in control clog decision making processes. Leaders truly benefit from distributing decision making—yes, making fewer decisions personally—and empowering others.
Narrow vision. Staying too close to the knowns makes for one-dimensional decisions. Curiosity helps to broaden perspectives in both space and time. Additionally, not all leaders are cognizant enough of their role, which involves interfacing both down and up—managing, protecting and growing team, and also growing business and managing up.
Emotional override. We're all necessarily emotional beings. The key isn't to suppress emotions but to recognize when they're relevant to the decision at hand versus when they're clouding our judgment.
Wanting to be liked. In positions of responsibility, it's hard to make the tough calls when we are too worried about what others think.
Lack of awareness. Our minds are full of cognitive biases (confirmation bias, sunk-cost fallacy, overconfidence bias, and oh so many others) that need to be considered. Humility is a great remedy here—and developing awareness.
Lack of attentive listening. Making good decisions also relies on recognizing the knowledge and inputs of those around you.
How to Make Better Decisions
There may be no guarantee that you'll always make the right decision, however, we can improve our decision making by using structured frameworks over informal processes, understanding how we think and feel, and knowing when your own particular form of intuition actually comes in handy (sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't. We usually know).
Here are some ways to improve decisions:
Always reduce your cognitive load. A 2024 study in Nature Neuroscience examined how cognitive load affects decision-making quality, finding that high mental workload can reduce decision accuracy by up to 35%.
Categorize the decision. Not all decisions deserve equal mental energy. Consider reversibility (How easily can this decision be undone?) and magnitude (What's the potential impact?). High-stakes decisions require a different approach than lower-stake decisions.
Know your context before making significant decisions. Gather relevant information, think systemically about how broader forces interact. Seek diverse perspectives, especially from those who disagree. Document thought processes and assumptions.
Get teams involved with formal processes. Research published in Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes (late 2023) showed that diverse teams using structured decision frameworks made 28% better strategic choices than homogeneous groups or those using informal processes.
Create scenarios to work through potential outcomes. Assign probabilities, identify potential failure points, get diverse perspectives and switch sides in debates. This forces you to think more systematically about possibilities rather than just going with your gut. A study in Strategic Management Journal (2023) found that leadership teams using pre-mortems reduced major strategic errors by 24% compared to traditional planning approaches.
In decision making, and in life in general, preparation matters, but don’t overdo it—80% plans will do because reality always messes up plans.
When the complexity escalates, it helps to stay grounded by being clear on purpose, principles and priorities. Breathing with extended exhales will keep your prefrontal cortex online. Use the OODA loop—observe, orient, decide, act—to react in real time.
Know that you will learn from mistakes—document your decisions and learn from what happens.
The goal isn't perfect decisions—it's better decisions made with appropriate speed and energy investment. The energy you save by streamlining routine decisions can be reinvested in the truly consequential choices that shape your future. The key is matching your decision-making approach to the stakes at hand.
Your decisions shape your reality moment by moment. Make them count—but don't let them drain you.