How can make decision

Include your email address to get a message when this question is answered. No scenario is perfect. Once you have made a decision, carry it out wholeheartedly as best as you can without regrets and without worrying about the other alternatives you did not pick.

Helpful 4 Not Helpful 0. Consider that all your options may be about equally good if you have thought about the decision for a very long time. In that case, all the options may have great advantages and great disadvantages. You would've already made the decision if one of the options could be proven to be significantly better than the previous ones. Helpful 3 Not Helpful 0.

Remember that you may not have enough information to make a good decision. Do more research if you're having trouble narrowing down your options. Also realize that the information you need may not be available to you. After reviewing all the information you have, you may have to go ahead and make a decision. Helpful 2 Not Helpful 0. After your decision is made, new major information may come to light suggesting alterations to or the wholesale reversal of your original decision.

Be willing to go through the decision-making process again if this happens. Flexibility is an excellent skill. Give yourself a time limit if you have to make the decision soon or if the decision is relatively unimportant.

The risk of "paralysis by analysis" is real. If you are trying to decide what movie to rent this weekend, don't spend an hour writing down titles. Avoid getting too hung up on keeping your options open. Researchers have found that our aversion to letting doors close, so to speak, results in poor decisions. Make a list of pros and cons! You can also make a list of options, and narrow it down until you have only two possibilities.

Then, discuss it with others to come to a final decision. Remember that at some point, indecision becomes a decision to do nothing, which might be the worst decision of all. Treat all experiences as learning experiences. By making important decisions, you will always learn to face the consequences and use even setbacks as learning experiences from which you can grow and adapt. Stay away from people who make it seem as though they want what's best for you, but assume they know what that is and you don't.

Their suggestions might be right, but if they refuse to account for your feelings and concerns, they might be very, very wrong as well. Also stay away from people who shoot down your beliefs. Helpful Not Helpful Avoid stressing yourself out too much. That will only make things worse. Helpful 1 Not Helpful 0. Related wikiHows How to. How to. More References About This Article.

Co-authored by:. Co-authors: Updated: May 6, Categories: Featured Articles Decision Making. Article Summary X To make good decisions, wait until you're calm and clear-headed so you're not letting your emotions control your decision making, whether they're positive or negative.

In other languages Italiano: Prendere una Decisione. Deutsch: Entscheidungen treffen. Nederlands: Beslissingen nemen. Bahasa Indonesia: Membuat Keputusan. Thanks to all authors for creating a page that has been read 1,, times.

I decided to stay, because my friends at both high schools understood, and I made a decision that was good for me. I was originally going to transfer out of guilt, but it's all okay. More reader stories Hide reader stories. Did this article help you? Cookies make wikiHow better. By continuing to use our site, you agree to our cookie policy. Josh Crites Jan 14, Paula Ivanoskos Jan 26, I'm a nurse who is having trouble deciding to go out on disability due to some physical issues or looking into jobs that are less physical, and work about 20 hours a week.

Lisa Johnson Jun 4, I will take a few deep breaths - and weigh pro and cons. Thank you for your advice, my friends at wikiHow. Surya May 10, It's important to make better decisions for many reasons including having a greater sense of self, learning from experiences, standing out from your coworkers, increasing your confidence and showcasing yourself as a professional.

Here are 12 things you can do to make better decisions:. Every decision should come with some thinking as you weigh the pros, cons, consequences and all the available options, but overthinking can keep you from being able to make a final decision. It's important to be able to come to a conclusion without too much time spent evaluating everything.

Overthinking can cause you to make a decision you might not normally have made and cause you undue stress at the same time. The more you overthink, the more likely you are to bring doubt into your decision-making process, which can become a pattern and affect future decisions you have to make.

If you're struggling with your decision, take a step away from it and return when your mind feels more clear. Your sleep and water intake can affect your mental clarity and focus and impact your decision-making capabilities. Aim for seven to nine hours of quality sleep per night.

To achieve this, try to stop using electronics right before bed and consider a white noise machine to help lull you to sleep and keep you there. During the day, drink eight glasses of water. You may find it easier to drink if you keep a water bottle next to you at all times. If you struggle with drinking water, try to put fruit in your water to make it more enjoyable.

If you want to be a better decision-maker, it can be helpful to allow yourself to be an outside observer of the situation.

When you do, you're more likely to think about all your other options and even be more open to considering compromises, which can be especially helpful when your decision impacts others. Sometimes there are a lot of emotions involved in the decision process, and removing yourself from the situation for even a short period of time can help you refocus and look at the facts of what's in front of you. One of the best ways to make better decisions is by facing your mistakes and learning from them.

Making mistakes isn't necessarily a negative thing, as they can give you more confidence in your abilities to make decisions in the future based on your experiences. Although you are required to prove that if there is a D on one side, there is a 5 on the other, the statement says nothing about what letters might be on the reverse of a 5. So the 5 card is irrelevant. Instead of trying to confirm the theory, the way to test it is to try to disprove it.

The confirmation bias is a problem if we believe we are making a decision by rationally weighing up alternatives, when in fact we already have a favoured option that we simply want to justify. If you want to make good choices, you need to do more than latch on to facts and figures that support the option you already suspect is the best. Admittedly, actively searching for evidence that could prove you wrong is a painful process, and requires self-discipline.

That may be too much to ask of many people much of the time. Our decisions and judgements have a strange and disconcerting habit of becoming attached to arbitrary or irrelevant facts and figures. Unknown to the subjects, the wheel was rigged to stop at either 10 or On average, participants presented with a 10 on the wheel gave an estimate of 25 per cent, while the figure for those who got 65 was 45 per cent.

It seems they had taken their cue from the spin of a wheel. Anchoring is likely to kick in whenever we are required to make a decision based on very limited information. With little to go on, we seem more prone to latch onto irrelevancies and let them sway our judgement.

It can also take a more concrete form, however. What should you do if you think you are succumbing to the anchoring effect? One strategy might be to create your own counterbalancing anchors, but even this has its problems.

Does this sound familiar? You know you should leave the rest of your dessert, but you feel compelled to polish it off despite a growing sense of nausea. Or what about this? At the back of your wardrobe lurks an ill-fitting and outdated item of clothing. It is taking up precious space but you cannot bring yourself to throw it away because you spent a fortune on it and you have hardly worn it. The force behind both these bad decisions is called the sunk cost fallacy.

Only after shelling out for both trips were the students told that they were on the same weekend. What would they do? Surprisingly, most opted for the less appealing but more expensive trip because of the greater cost already invested in it. The reason behind this is the more we invest in something, the more commitment we feel towards it.

Nobody is immune to the sunk cost fallacy. In the s, the British and French governments fell for it when they continued investing heavily in the Concorde project well past the point when it became clear that developing the aircraft was not economically justifiable. Even stock-market traders are susceptible, often waiting far too long to ditch shares that are plummeting in price. We all hate to make a loss, but sometimes the wise option is to stop throwing good money after bad.

Consider this hypothetical situation. Your home town faces an outbreak of a disease that will kill people if nothing is done. To combat it you can choose either programme A, which will save people, or programme B, which has a one in three chance of saving people but also a two in three chance of saving nobody. Which do you choose? Now consider this situation. You are faced with the same disease and the same number of fatalities, but this time programme A will result in the certain death of people, whereas programme B has a one in three chance of zero deaths and a two in three chance of deaths.

You probably noticed that both situations are the same, and in terms of probability the outcome is identical whatever you pick. Yet most people instinctively go for A in the first scenario and B in the second. In particular, we have a strong bias towards options that seem to involve gains, and an aversion to ones that seem to involve losses.

That is why programme A appears better in the first scenario and programme B in the second. Annu Rev Psychol. Lemire F. Can Fam Physician. Estimating the relationship between skill and overconfidence.

Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics. When it pays to persist less: Self-enhancement and belief perseverance. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. Peoples intuitions about intuitive insight and intuitive choice. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Your Privacy Rights. To change or withdraw your consent choices for VerywellMind. At any time, you can update your settings through the "EU Privacy" link at the bottom of any page.

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