How Do I Make a Good Decision?
Six takeaways:
Life will never fail to confront us with difficult decisions. Here, ethicist Daniel Wyzynski offers six steps drawn from ethical decision-making frameworks to help you address life’s hardest choices from a place of clarity, understanding, and assuredness.
When faced with a hard decision, you should:
- Frame the Question and Define the Conflict: Clarify the issue at hand. Do not confuse being involved in a decision with being accountable. Take emotion or personal dynamics out of the equation to reach the most exact line of thought on the decision at hand.
- Explore All Options, Especially the Uncomfortable Ones: Map out all plausible avenues. Listing all of them– even those that seem far fetched– allows for the most informed ability to select the best route forward.
- Gather the Information You Need: Try to understand both what you know and what you don’t know about a decision. Lean into reliable, verifiable facts to do so. Identifying and addressing information gaps is key to making an assured decision.
- Surface Values and Principles: Every decision you make reflects a set of values, consciously or not. SO: understand your bedrock values. Naming them gives structure to your reasoning. It helps you self-articulate not only the choice itself, but why you felt right in making it.
- Seek Out Other Perspectives: Pursue the knowledge & experience of others. Be honest with yourself about your blind spots or biases that may influence your decision-making process, and go to those that you think may help overcome those gaps.
- Deliberate and Justify Your Choice: Reflect, build lists, and make a deliberative decision: one you can explain, stand behind, and live with. This is what will allow you to make decisions with intention.
From Daniel Wyzynski HEC-C, MHSc for Psychology Today
Read the whole story.
This site may contain links to articles or other information that may be contained on a third-party website. Advisory Services Network, LLC and MAP Strategic Wealth Advisors are not responsible for and do not control, adopt, or endorse any content contained on any third party website. The information and material contained in linked articles is of a general nature and is intended for educational purposes only. Links to articles do not constitute a recommendation or a solicitation or offer of the purchase or sale of securities.