Do you want to be more determined and decisive?

Decisions Decisions

One of the most difficult aspects of daily life that many of us have to deal with is making decisions and an even harder aspect is making good decisions.

The process of decision making can often be clear cut and the choices are obvious, but when that isn't the case and we are faced with difficult choices, we get stressed. Perhaps you have found that friends, collegues and family get frustrated with you when you can't make up your mind, or maybe you avoid them because their frustration makes an already difficult situation worse?

Balancing the options and arriving at good decisions comes naturally for some people, but if that isn't you then you can learn. The following is a basic guide to assist you in making decisions, preferably good ones, but it must be remembered that your intelligence and common sense are your most important assets in good decision making.

Think of the following information as a kind of toolbox, select from it the most appropriate method or combination of methods to suit you as an individual and the situation in which the decision is needed.

The toolbox contains; intuition, instinct, common sense and analysis.

Intuition

There are many views and discussions on what constitutes intuition, but for me intuition is the mind subconsciously extracting information from all around, digesting the data and spitting out an answer, often in a quiet subtle way. Some think it is far more spiritual than that, but whatever you believe you should consider it as a resource, one that isn’t used to its full potential.

Intuition can be thought of as your inner self is trying to communicate with you, maybe to send you a message which might manifest as an inkling or feeling and are easily missed, but your intuition is often persistent and it will try its best to make you listen.

So how can you improve your reception towards receiving intuitive messages?

Be quiet
Take time out to experience silence, ideally on a daily basis. Calm your mind and relax your need to think or analyse everything, if you know how to meditate then that will help. Your intuition works best when you are relaxed.

Ask questions
Ask yourself questions like, “What do I do now or what happens if”. Questioning will help bring a degree of clarity to a situation.

Trust yourself
Learn to trust yourself. The answer is probably already in you and all you need to do is listen and believe in yourself.

How does this help with decision making? Very often that, “gut feeling” or that, “first thought” is your intuition giving you help, but you have to become aware of it and listen for it. Sometimes your intuition will make itself known as a strong feeling shout out loud, banging a drum and presenting the answer in a blaze of neon lights and that “eureka” moment just can’t be ignored and as I said before intuition is likely to be subtle and quiet.

Instinct

While intuition will help with making a decision, it is often quiet and gentle in its approach, perhaps just a whisper or a feeling and there will be times you need to decide instantly and I believe that comes from instinct.

“Get out of the road a bus is coming!!!”.

This is decision making at the front line, where perhaps your peripheral vision relays an image to your inner mind your instinct that takes the decision to make you jump out of the way.

Instinct is built-in and we might consider it as the action centre of decision making. But instinct also works at a less, “in your face” way by giving you a natural ability to make a decision.

Intuition and instinct work closely together to enable us to decide a course of action, but what if the action is counter to everything we believe in or trust? That's where common sense lends a hand.

So with these built in tools we all make decisions naturally and we do every miniute of every day, but what happens when the problems or situations are complex and call for more considered decisions, what can help us decide?

Analysis

People with a natural ability towards decision making combine experience and an in built analytical instinct, for the rest of us there are tools we can use.

This section is the more practical of the tools in the box. There are many different methods of analysing a problem prior to making a decision and these can be mixed and matched and when coupled with intuition and instinct, you have at your disposal a powerful set of tools.

To keep this article brief, I will cover 3 of the simplest and most practical.

Pareto Analysis or 80/20

Pareto analysis is a statistical technique that helps you choose from a number of tasks the optimum solution with maximum effect and minimum effort. Pareto analysis uses the Pareto principle - an idea suggested by Joseph M. Juran that states that, for many events, 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes.

In practical terms consider a situation where you need to make some important changes and the decision you have to make is to evaluate what you change and what you don’t.

Begin by making a list of all the changes you could make. Divide the list into related groups if you have a lot of changes to make.
Give each of the items in your list a value or score. The value would depend on the problem you are solving, e.g. it could be a monetary value, a quantity value or a simple 0 to 10 rating.
Look at your list and put it into order of value, highest to lowest. This will enable you to narrow the challenge because the highest scored items are likely to be those that will give the greatest benefit and these are where you should focus most of your effort.

Generally the lowest scored items can be ignored because they are likely to produce a minimal impact on the overall outcome and the effort might not be worth it, or they might be put aside for later fine tuning of the decision.

The Decision Matrix
Supposing you have to make a decision where all of the contributory factors are good or important and there are a lot of them, how do you do it?
The decision matrix is essentially a grid that compares the strengths and weaknesses of each factor with regard to multiple objectives of interest to you the decision maker. The name given to this technique is, “Multi-Attribute Utility Theory” or MAUT.

This method is best explained by example, so consider that you are planning a family holiday and you have to consider several different aspects of that holiday, for example, your options could be:
Beach holiday
Activity holiday
Health spar holiday
Family centre holiday (Centre parks, Butlins etc.)

The criteria you might consider are:
Cost
Relaxing for the adults
Fun for everyone
Good weather
Spar treatments
Swimming
Good food

Begin by drawing up a grid with the criteria as the column headings and the options as the row headings. (See below). Insert a row named “Weight”.
Score each option by how well it meets your criteria from 0 to 3 where 0 is poor and 3 very good. You can use the same value more than once.



In the weight row, give a rating for criteria based on the importance of the criteria, in this example the importance to your family. Since this grid has 7 criteria, weight the columns from 1 to 7. Now multiply each of your cell values by the weight values. This will give them the correct overall weight in your decision. Finally total up each row.



Well, it looks like it’s the family centre holiday this year with the beach holiday a close second.

The last analysis tool I will show you can be used with the decision matrix and that is, Paired Choice Analysis.

Paired Choice Analysis

With paired choice analysis, you compare a range of options and score them. The overall winner is given by the result of the scores.

This method is useful with the decision matrix, described previously, in deciding the values used as weighting factors for each of the options, therefore I will continue this explanation with that example. Begin by drawing up a grid with each option forming both the column and row headings, e.g. Cost, Relaxing for the adults, Fun for everyone, Good weather, Spar treatments, Swimming and Good food. Give each option a letter.
Draw a diagonal line across the grid from top left to bottom right and shade out the bottom left portion. These are duplicate cells comparisons. Start to compare each option with each other option deciding which of the two is most important to you or which is more or least different. Having decided which is more important write down the letter of the more important option in the cell and give it a score from 0 (no difference) to 3 (major difference).



Finally add up the totals of all the option values.



For this analysis I have assigned the same seven weighting values used with the decision matrix, i.e. the criteria with the highest total being given the highest weighting. If you need to present the results as percentages, convert the values into a percentage of the total score as shown.

Making Decisions

You can make good decisions by employing common sense, intuition, instinct and various analytical tools, some of which I have covered here. If you lack confidence begin with small decisions and practice your skills and as you become more confident move on to larger and more important decisions. You will make a mistake, that’s human, but in time you will be seen as a positive decision maker.

One final thought, a good decision maker will know when to decide and when to take advice.

How do you make an ambition a reality?

Having an ambition is a normal thing, it might be to make a career change or to lose weight, but how do you make an ambition a reality?

The first step towards making your ambition a reality is to make it real, give it substance something that you can focus on. Write it down in a broad outline because at this stage you don’t want to get bogged down in detail, for example it could be something as broad as, “get promoted” or “lose weight”.

The next step is to work out how and when you want to achieve the ambition and for the more complicated ambitions I would recommend using a “mind map” to explore the possible “how” options and I would also recommend setting goals to break down the “how” into achievable pieces.

Mind Map

A mind map is a compact way of consolidating information in a non formal way that encourages creative thinking and of course, creative solutions.

There are many ways of doing mind maps and a quick search on the Internet will throw up a good selection of methods.

I like to mix and match different methods, but if you look at the examples shown on the “Mindtools” website, http://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/newISS_01.htm and on the “illumine training ltd” website,
http://www.mind-mapping.co.uk/assets/Makeamindmap/MakeaMindMap.pdf you will get an idea of what style I use.

Choose a method that you are comfortable with, but whichever method you decide on it is well worth asking a few friends or colleagues to help, because they will certainly come up with ideas you don’t and you need to consider that every possibility, however diverse, is an opportunity.

Before starting on your mind map, make sure that you follow a few simple rules:-
1. No idea is too stupid or too wild not to be considered.
2. All ideas get put onto the map, especially the stupid and wild ones.
3. Have fun with the map, relax and treat it as a game.

As the map evolves and you get involved in the fun of creating the map, so your mind will begin to work in a less restrained way enabling you to be more creative and effective with your ideas.


Begin your Mind Map

Get a large sheet of paper and lots of coloured pencils. Note down your ambition in the centre of the sheet then draw a circle around it. Make sure this is a very brief statement no more than a few words.

Begin a brainstorming process where you and those with you throw out ideas about how you might get from now, to seeing your ambition as a reality. Show these ideas on the map branching from the circle at the centre of the page where each branch is labelled with the key idea, a little like chapters in a book or landmarks on a map.

As a particular idea spawns related ideas or thoughts, show these as side shoots off the original branch and label them too. The more ideas you can come up with the more branches and side shoots will be drawn.

If you get stuck with where to start, draw 3 initial branches and label them; Who, What and Where and begin thinking about, who will help you, what needs to be done and where do you need to be to start the process. This should help you get started.

Where branches or side shoots created by one idea are closely related to another, you can connect these, use colour if you like. If a word resonates with you, highlight it or draw a box around it to make it stand out. Same for branches, if something leaps out and grabs your attention, make it bold and visible.

When you have exhausted the brainstorming process, look at the map and you should see lots of radiating branches and side shoots representing all possible (and some impossible) ideas. You should see highlighted key words and branches of special focus, but most of all you should start to see possible solutions to achieving your ambition.

The next step is to use the ideas revealed by the mind map to create a series of steps or goals that will enable you to meet your target ambition.

Goals

No, not the football variety, but a name given to the steps leading from where you are now, to where you want to be.

Having completed your mind map and looked at how you are going to achieve your ambition you are ready to begin to make a note of the steps needed to go from where you are now, to realising your ambition.

Take the example I mentioned earlier, “Get promoted”. If it is simply a case of going to your boss the next day and saying, I want a promotion” and the boss saying “OK, and how much of a raise would you like”, then you probably don’t need a mind map and your goal would be, “go and see the boss tomorrow in his office and ask for a promotion”, but in most cases the step from now to finally achieving your ambition will need to be broken down into manageable chunks. There are 2 main reasons for this. One big step could be daunting, where with smaller steps you can achieve lots of small successes and see genuine progress towards your result.

Think of setting goals like climbing stairs, the more steps you try and miss out, the harder the climb and if you try and step too far, you could find yourself falling down.

SMART Goals

When you set your goals, they have to be SMART. This is a method of setting goals where you can see progress and where you can check that they are achievable. Smart means that you avoid vague goals like, “I will lose weight”, instead a smart goal would look like, “I will lose 10 pounds in 1 month by going to the gym 3 times a week”. How does this break down:-

SMART stands for:
S = Specific
M = Measurable
A = Achievable
R = Realistic
T = Timely

You will need to write the goals down and keep them visible.

Specific

Your goals should be straightforward and should highlight what you want to happen. Therefore goals need to be specific because specific goals will clearly define what you are doing and it will give you focus.

Specific is the, Who, What and Where of the goal.
Who is involved in making it happen. Perhaps you need to involve other people to achieve the goal, note down who they are.
What needs to be done to achieve it. Use action words to describe what needs to be achieved, e.g. organise, coordinate, plan, develop etc.
Where do you hope to achieve the goal. Perhaps you need to be at a certain place to make the goal happen, make sure it is available when you need it.

Measurable

To see how you are progressing, your goal needs to be measurable, that is to say it has to have a value that marks the completion of the goal. This measure might be quantity, quality or time. For example to achieve this goal, you might need to meet with someone on a specific date, therefore your measure would be the date.


Achievable

It is of little value to you if you set goals that are impossible to achieve or unlikely to be achieved in the timescale you set.

If when you set a goal you have in your mind, “I’m never going to achieve that”, then you probably won’t and you are quite likely to fail, therefore you need to make sure that you can achieve the goal with the resources you have, in the timescale you set.

Realistic

This doesn’t mean easy it means attainable. Your goals must be attainable, but to maintain momentum they must have a degree of challenge in them. You might feel uncomfortable with the goal you set but ask yourself, “can it be done?” and if the answer is yes then it’s realistic.

If the goals you set are too easy then you are not giving yourself enough of a challenge to move forward, this is probably just as bad as setting goals that are too hard. So be realistic and give yourself stretched targets that you can achieve and want to achieve because they will keep you motivated, committed and focused.

If a goal seems to be unrealistic, consider breaking it into smaller goals, this often changes the perspective and makes the end result realistic.

Timely

Set a timeframe for your goal but keep in mind the other attributes, “Achievable” and “Realistic”, make sure your timescale meets with them. Also consider the attribute, “Specific” and set definite times for your goal, avoid scales like, “in the near future”.

SMART means that you know what you are going to achieve, how you are going to achieve it and when you are going to achieve it.
SMART goals are measurable and trackable so you can see if you are on target and if not, you can see clearly why and what you need to do.

When

At the beginning I said that we can “work out how and when you want to achieve the ambition”. The “how” has been achieved using a combination of mind map and SMART goal setting, so what about when?

Use the SMART goals to create a timeline showing when each goal should start and when it should be completed, the result should give you the When.

Confidence

The final step in making your ambitions a reality is to have confidence in your own ability to achieve them, because having confidence in yourself will give you the strength and determination you need to succeed.

If you are feeling a little light in the confidence department at the moment then contact us and find out how we can help.

Making time for you.

Have you ever indulged yourself only to feel guilty afterwards?

One on the many things that I have noticed as a life coach is that we are not giving ourselves the time and space to call our own, time just for us, what I like to call "ME" time. I think we find it difficult to take time for ourselves because we don’t want to be seen as selfish.

It becomes such an issue with some people that they find it easier to give up more of their time for others than it is to find time for there own needs. Each day becomes loaded with one stressful moment followed by another and they are bouncing around in an uncontrolled way from all that life throws at them.

If this is you then STOP.

Time is valuable

During an average day, how much time do you spend on you, doing what you want? My guess is that if you are working, have a family or both, then the answer is probably not very much.

“Would you like to have more time for yourself and not feel selfish?”

Yes?

Great, then go for it.

If only it was that simple, but I’m certain that in answering yes it brings with it a whole raft of caveats. For example, “Yes, but I must not neglect my (wife) (husband) (partner) (mother) (father) (dog) (cat) (job)”, delete as appropriate. Whatever the caveat, you can be assured that there are always many more good reasons why you can’t find the time than reasons why you should.

My guess is that the negative reasons given for not taking more personal time are rooted partly in the fear of change and that of being seen as selfish, either by ourselves or by what we perceive others will think. Maybe this assumption is a bit of a leap, after all, everyone is different, but I maintain that in most cases time spent just on yourself will be seen by you as indulgent and we don’t want that, do we, remember the guilt?

Sit back, relax and think about the last time you were indulgent, how did it feel, before the guilt set in?


Being selfish

So how can you indulge yourself with more time and not feel selfish about it?

Let’s first consider the word selfish, what does it mean?
The Oxford English dictionary defines the word selfish as;

“adjective, concerned chiefly with one’s own personal profit or pleasure at the expense of consideration for others.”.

If you want to spend more time on yourself, would that be selfish? By this definition I’m sorry to say, yes it is. You would probably be doing it at the expense of consideration for others, you would be trying to get more pleasure from your life and you would definitely profit from having more time just for you.

Don’t despair.

Get some perspective

One feature of the Co-Active coaching model involves viewing an issue from a variety of different perspectives. All to often our focus on an issue becomes fixed and we quickly lose perspective, it becomes difficult to see a resolution that works. So let’s look at this again but from a different perspective?

If you take time away from your other responsibilities and spend it on yourself, doing what you want, just for you, how will that make you feel?
Happier, more relaxed, less stressed, suitably indulged?
As a result would that make you easier to get along with, more able to deal with problems, better able to cope with stress and perhaps more efficient in other aspects of your life?

So, who profits now?

Everyone profits from a better balanced you, provided you can do it, because making changes in your life usually requires support and encouragement.

Can you do it?
To know the answer to this you need to know yourself and to be comfortable with your motives and your values, to be aware of your strengths and weaknesses, to become self aware.

The question was,
“Would you like to have more time for yourself and not feel selfish?”

What do you value?

If the answer is yes, then as a first step take a 30 minute break from what you are doing and list what you consider your top ten values.
Obvious values are; honesty, integrity etc., but I want you to really explore what you truly value, be descriptive if it helps.
Then schedule a further 30 minutes to look at your list and make an honest assessment of how well you are honouring each of your values, it will be quite revealing.

Self awareness

Getting familiar with your values and how your life is directed by them is a big step towards making positive changes in your life and perhaps in analysing your values, you will become more, self aware.

“noun, conscious knowledge of one’s own character, feelings, motives, and desires.”.

So you can give yourself more time and you don’t have to feel selfish because from a new perspective you will be more balanced, happier and more able and from that place everyone will benefit.

John Berry
Future You