🏋🏽Exercise: Make better decisions faster
I have been coaching a senior executive recently.
Her goal is to better understand how she makes decisions.
This goal is important to her because she wants to continue making high quality decisions quickly.
We did a short exercise together to help her audit her decision making capability - and to ultimately help her understand how she makes decisions.
I'm sharing it here in case you want to try it yourself.
Let me know if you get any insights from doing this exercise or you want to share your output with me.
Good luck!
Steps:
List down the biggest 10 decisions you have ever made in your life on a piece of paper. Biggest = changed the trajectory of your life in a significant way.
For each decision, list as many input factors that contributed to your decision
For each decision, score the quality of your decision making out of 10
For each decision, assess whether you would make that same decision today with the benefit of hindsight and the additional experience you have gained over the years
Take a look through your 10 decisions and look for any patterns. Do your inputs into each decision tend to be similar. Do you rate your decision making quality to be high or low? Have you been right a lot or wrong a lot in hindsight? What patterns do you notice?
A Worked Example of the Exercise:
“I moved to Mongolia when I was 20 to teach English”
Can I learn a new language and skills? Can I meet new people? Can I travel to many countries? Can I make money? Will I miss my family and friends? Will there be natural disasters?
8/10. I was young and didn't know how to think these things though. But the good thing is that I didn't overthink the risks and I followed my longing for adventure and excitement.
I would definitely make the same decision again. It was a critical learning experience for me.
I tend to make decisions based on my desire to learn new things and experience new environments and cultures.