Do you also find decision making difficult?

Whenever you get stuck in a decision-making situation, does it happen to you that “I don’t understand anything”, “I don’t know what to do”. These thoughts looks like this in Hindi: “मुझे कुछ समझ नहीं आ रहा”, “मुझे नहीं पता क्या करें”.

This thinking is common for confused personality people. Those people have these thoughts even in their daily routine for example while deciding food to eat, clothes to wear, movies to watch and so on. And if they go out with their friends in a restaurant to eat, they used to be the last giving the order. They used to crib a lot about every single thing in life.

It happens because of their confused personality, lack of power of analysing things, lack of focus, lack of self confidence, handling too many things at the same time and a lot other psychological reasons. Eventually it becomes their habit to say such phrases in every situation.

According to psychologists, meditation is the best medicine for such people. Believe me, meditation helps in increasing concentration power. It helps us to remain calm and patient in tricky situations which eventually helps in decision making.

This behaviour is very normal when we get stuck in a very tricky or difficult decision-making situation. For example, while deciding college for further education, deciding to change job, deciding on marriage, deciding on children’s education and the list is never-ending.

What is the reason for getting stuck while taking such decisions? The reason is having a number of options/solutions to a single problem. If there was only one option or solution, there would be no need to decide. In that case we will have only one path to follow.

So for making a decision, the only strategy is to eliminate the alternatives and choose the most suitable one. Now the question reduces to how to eliminate the alternatives. You cant just eliminate them randomly. Following is the small sequence of steps that I usually follow to eliminate the options:

1. Choose the best place, time and environment so that you can concentrate on the issue without any distraction. For example: you can choose the time in morning after getting done with yoga or meditation.
2. Start analysing each and every option.
3. Write down all the uncertainties and unknowns involved in each of them. There can be some unknowns involved with some of them. Write those out and research about them to make it a known fact.
4. Write pros and cons associated with each option.
5. Figure out things that are going to remain constant forever about an option. There can be some facts which can not be changed about an option. For example, let’s say there is an option of getting admission in a college which is very far from your hometown. So this is a fact about that college, you cant bring that particular college near to your hometown.
6. Then figure out things that can be adjusted about them. For example, some parents are not at all comfortable in sending their child to hostel in order to get admission to a college. In that case, parents can think about shifting to that city with their child so that their child can stay with them. So this is the thing which can be adjusted here.
7. Then, uncheck all the options whose constant facts are unacceptable to you.
8. Then, uncheck those for which you will not be comfortable in adjusting things involved.
9. Check options whose cons are acceptable to you.
10. At last, you must be having a less number of options or only a single option.

This simple strategy definitely helps in eliminating alternatives and arrive to a single solution to a problem.

Also, whenever you are done with your decision and moved forward, then you should always keep in mind that it was your decision to take that option. You are the only one who was responsible for that. You cant blame anyone else if things go wrong unfortunately. You should take responsibility of that. Many times if something goes wrong, we blame some other person who was involved in decision making with us. It may be possible that some person or fact goes wrong but overall it was your decision. You must not regret about that. Things are not always in your hands, they can go wrong but you must not waste time in regretting. You must go ahead and think how to correct it.

Happy decision making.