Being Decisive

In any moment of decision, the best thing you can do is the right thing, and the worst thing you can do is nothing.

Theodore Roosevelt

Imagine walking on a lonely street on a scorching day of summer with a can of coke in hand when you see an older senior man across the street faint due to what looked like a heat stroke.

What do you do next?

As you read it, you must already have a decision for this situation in your mind. But if you are yet to come up with a reaction or are still evaluating the outcomes for all the possible actions you can take, you struggle with “Being Decisive.”

Being decisive means having or showing the ability to make decisions quickly and effectively. While your knowledge, wisdom, and presence of mind help you to make the “right” decision, your good faith in deciding upon something irrespective of the consequences is still better than not deciding at all.

Decision-making is a part of our everyday routine. From waking up to going to bed, every action throughout the day results from an effortful or effortless decision-making process. As the world is becoming increasingly complex, both psychologically and materialistically, our skills to be decisive are also being challenged.

For example, in the early 1900s, the car buying process was less complicated because there were fewer options. Now the process takes an incredible amount of research, careful evaluation, and thoughtful budgeting consideration based on your income. Another example is the simple task of writing a caption for an Instagram post. Our fear of how others will judge our Instagram post cripples us into becoming indecisive and eventually losing interest in sharing.

Not making a decision is actually a decision. It’s the decision to stay the same.

Lysa Terkeurst

Regardless of the source of indecision, it can hold adverse effects in our daily lives. It costs us

• Mental Peace, morale, and self-confidence by not executing a plan, idea, or emotionally invested thought.

• Time, money, and resources that went into planning for something we eventually don't execute.

• Relationships and personal equations with the family members, friends, and colleagues who are affected and irked by our indecisive nature.

There are several reasons for indecisiveness:

1. Fear of Consequences: No one has seen the future, and we can only anticipate the outcome of a decision by careful analysis before execution. Despite that, the fear of failure overpowers the joys driven by a good decision.

2. Inability to Take Risks: “Higher the risk, higher the return.” This common phrase in investment teaches us to take risks and be decisive, but it takes a great deal of self-belief to make a crucial decision.

3. Fear of Judgement: We often worry about what people will think about us if we come out with a decision. For example, an intern might fear before presenting a new idea to his mentor, undermining his creativity over his mentor’s experience.

4. Perfectionism: The path to perfectionism is obstructed by several instances when one has to decide before moving ahead. Thus meeting indecisiveness on the way to perfectionism is not an uncommon thing.

Having the ability to make a good decision and be decisive is a critical element of leadership success and personal well-being, and the key to being decisive is “CONFIDENCE.”

Here are ways to improve confidence in your decision-making ability :

• Map out why, how, and what.

  1. Understand the root cause of your hesitation

  2. Break down decisions into smaller pieces

  3. Evaluate the best and worst that can happen, and then look back to improve and not regret

• Eliminate small decisions from your life.

  1. Think big and stop doubting yourself

  2. Good faith matters irrespective of the perceived outcome

  3. Own your choices and avoid looking for validations

• Sometimes good enough is perfect.

  1. Be gentle with yourself and drive contentment in doing 

  2. Improve as you learn

“Not making a decision is the worst thing you can do. So long as you feel you made the right decision based on the information you had at that time, there’s no need to fret about it. If it fails, you’ll know what to do next time.”

— Bo Schembechler

To value yourself more, start with being decisive.