COACHED WITHOUT LIMITS

Dr. Eric Frazer, PSY.D.

Chapter 41: Objective Decision Making

When making important decisions, we instinctively rely on our hunches and intuitions. However, these are flawed by a number of factors including, but not limited to: Our biases, and our emotional response to prior experiences and it’s subsequent neurochemical imprinting that triggers similar emotional responses, and the possibility of biased or irrational thoughts generated by those memories. Imagine you’re in a team meeting and one of your co-workers reminds you of a bully from earlier years in school. This memory compromises (or holds the potential to without sufficient self-awareness) your objective decision-making in that context.

We are the sum value of our life experiences and all of these factors diminish objective, rational, and logical thinking. I like using frameworks for big decisions because it increases objectivity about reality. One evergreen framework that I found useful for myself and my clients is a simple decision balance. Pros on one side, cons on the other. Just list them out in a journal entry, and spend a few days reflecting on them to determine if you want to change any of them around. The other framework I like using comes from structured professional judgement (SPJ) research in the previous chapter. This is a process of using fact-based or in some instances research-informed (but not causally proven) information to guide the understanding of the presence, partial presence, or absence of a particular behavior, character trait, or skill. The method can be applied to leadership skills very appropriately, and in this example for objective decisions. Here are some useful examples:

Should I seek a promotion/salary increase now?

Should I quit this job?

Should I go back to school for an advanced degree?

Should I take a sabbatical?

Should I turn my “side hustle” into a full-time business & become an entrepreneur?

The Exercise:

A few years ago I caught myself arriving at inaccurate conclusions in a particular area of my personal life based on “hunches.” I was fortunate to realize that my impressions were probably inaccurate, but I had to really make it black and white to see how unobjective my thinking could be. I would write down in my journal my predicted conclusion, and a few days later ‘ta-da,’ I was completely wrong. In fact, I wanted to be wrong, but needed the exercise to prove it and ultimately undo this bad habit that led me to arrive at false conclusions. We occasionally become blind to our blind spots at times, and I encourage you to take the challenge and test to see how good you are at predicting the future based on hunches or instincts instead of a structured methodology using objectivity.