Making good decisions may be the key to living your best life. Sometimes a need for certainty can make it seem more important to feel right, than to be right. Certainty is the confidence triggered when the uncomfortable tension of not knowing is replaced by the calm feeling of knowing. The need to be certain can sometimes get in the way of accuracy when it comes to problems that require exploration before it’s safe to draw a conclusion.
Take note of these six tips to feel more confident in your decision-making skills:
- Take time to consider your confidence level. Overconfidence in the first satisfying answer may be closing our minds to better solutions.
- Frame the question differently to see other perspectives.
- Sleep on it. If struggling with a decision, stop overthinking it.
- Acknowledge your biases to become a little more objective.
- Notice how you are feeling, label your emotions, and consider how your state of mind may be influencing your decision.
- Consider you might be wrong. It takes more evidence to change a belief than is does to create a belief. The best way to challenge your beliefs is to argue the opposite.
It’s impossible to be 100% certain about complex problems. There may be no specific solution and complex decision making requires deferring the feeling of being right, by tolerating the tension if not knowing.
"Good decisions come from experience, and experience comes from bad decisions." Anonymous