How to make the best decision for yourself essay

Some decisions are so simple that you're barely aware you're making them, while others are time consuming, high risk, and can leave you feeling anxious.

Decisions can make or break a project or an entire business. And they often involve complex and unpredictable interpersonal issues, too.

In this article and video, we explore a seven-step approach for improving the quality of your decision making, and for boosting your chances of a successful outcome.

Click here to access a transcript of this video.

A 7-Step Decision-Making Strategy

To avoid making a bad decision, you need to bring a range of decision-making skills together in a logical and ordered process. We recommend the following seven steps:

1. Investigate the situation in detail.
2. Create a constructive environment.
3. Generate good alternatives.
4. Explore your options.
5. Select the best solution.
6. Evaluate your plan.
7. Communicate your decision, and take action.

This process will ensure that you make a good decision in a complex situation, but it may be unnecessarily complicated for small or simple decisions. In these cases, jump to Step 5.

If you need to make a quick decision under pressure, see our articles, OODA Loops and The TDODAR Decision Model.

Let's look at each of these steps in detail. Each step features a list of related Mind Tools resources to help you further.

Step 1: Investigate the Situation in Detail

Decisions often fail because key factors are missed or ignored from the outset. So, before you can begin to make a decision, you need to fully understand your situation.

Start by considering the decision in the context of the problem it is intended to address. You need to determine whether the stated problem is the real issue, or just a symptom of something deeper.

Look beyond the obvious. It may be that your objective can be approached in isolation, but it's more likely that there are a number of interrelated factors to consider. Changes made in one department, for example, could have knock-on effects elsewhere, making the change counterproductive.

Step 2: Create a Constructive Environment for Your Decision

Can you give your decision the attention it needs? Spend some time preparing yourself before diving in to the facts and figures.

Remember that most decisions will affect other people too, so it helps to create a constructive environment in which to explore the situation together and gain support.

This is especially true when you have to rely on other people to implement a decision that you're responsible for. You'll need to identify who to include in the process and who will be part of any final decision-making group, which will ideally comprise just five to seven people.

Enable people to contribute to the discussions without any fear of the other participants rejecting them and their ideas. Make sure that everyone recognizes that the objective is to make the best decision possible in the circumstances, without blame.

Step 3: Generate Good Alternatives to Decide Between

The wider the options you explore, the better your final decision is likely to be. Generating a number of different options may seem to make your decision more complicated at first, but the act of coming up with alternatives forces you to dig deeper and to look at the problem from different angles.

This is when it can be helpful to employ a variety of creative thinking techniques. These can help you to step outside your normal patterns of thinking and come up with some truly innovative solutions.

Brainstorming is probably the most popular method of generating ideas, but for more tips on how to examine your situation from new perspectives, and how to organize ideas into manageable themes and groups, see the Mind Tools resources in the box, below.

Step 4: Explore Your Options

When you're satisfied that you have a good selection of realistic alternatives, it's time to evaluate the feasibility, risks and implications of each one.

Almost every decision involves some degree of risk. You'll need a structured approach for assessing threats and evaluating the probability of adverse events occurring – and what they might cost to manage. You'll also want to examine the ethical impact of each option, and how that might sit with your personal and organizational values.

The resources highlighted below offer tried-and-true models to help you.

Step 5: Select the Best Solution

Once you've evaluated the alternatives, the next step is to make your decision!

If you have various criteria to consider, use Decision Matrix Analysis to compare them reliably and rigorously. Or, if you want to determine which ones should carry most weight in your decision, conduct a Paired Comparison Analysis.

If your decision is being made within a group, techniques such as multi-voting and the Modified Borda Count can help your team reach an agreement.

When anonymity is important, decision-makers dislike one another, or there is a tendency for certain individuals to dominate the process, use the Delphi Technique to reach a fair and impartial decision. This uses cycles of anonymous, written discussion and argument, managed by a facilitator. Participants do not meet, and sometimes they don't even know who else is involved.

If you're working with an established team, Hartnett's Consensus-Oriented Decision-Making Model is useful for encouraging everyone to participate in making the decision. Or, if you're working with several different teams, or a particularly large group, assign responsibility for each stage of the decision-making process with Bain's RAPID Framework, so that everyone understands their responsibilities and any potential in-fighting can be avoided.

Step 6: Evaluate Your Plan

After all the effort and hard work you've invested in evaluating and selecting alternatives, it can be tempting to forge ahead at this stage. But now, more than ever, is the time to "sense check" your decision. After all, hindsight is great for identifying why things have gone wrong, but it's far better to prevent mistakes from happening in the first place!

Before you start to implement your decision, take a long, dispassionate look at it to be sure that you have been thorough, and that common errors haven't crept into the process.

Your final decision is only as good as the facts and research you used to make it. Make sure that your information is trustworthy, and that you've done your best not to "cherry pick" data. This will help you avoid confirmation bias, a common psychological bias in decision making.

Discuss your preliminary conclusions with important stakeholders to enable them to spot flaws, make recommendations, and support your conclusions. Listen to your own intuition, too, and quietly and methodically test assumptions and decisions against your own experience. BRAIN BRAN BRAND is a useful tool for this. If you have any doubts, examine them thoroughly to work out what's troubling you.

Use Blindspot Analysis to review whether you've fallen prey to problems like over-confidence, escalating commitment, or groupthink. And consider checking the logical structure of your process with the Ladder of Inference, to make sure that a well-founded and consistent decision emerges at the end.

Step 7: Communicate Your Decision, and Take Action

Once you've made your decision, you need to communicate it to everyone affected by it in an engaging, informative and inspiring way.

Get them involved in implementing the solution by discussing how and why you arrived at your decision. The more information you provide about risks and projected benefits, the more likely people will be to support it.

If people point out a flaw in your process as a result, have the humility to welcome their input and review your plans appropriately – it's much better to do this now, cheaply, than having to do it expensively (and embarrassingly) if your plans have failed.

Systematically combining a range of decision-making tools can help you make highly effective decisions, either individually or as part of a group. The seven-step strategy is:

1. Investigate the situation in detail.
2. Create a constructive environment.
3. Generate good alternatives.
4. Explore your options.
5. Select the best solution.
6. Evaluate your plan.
7. Communicate your decision, and take action.

Take our How Good is Your Decision-Making? quiz to find out how well you're doing now!

James Anderson Making good choices Making right choices is crucial for the direction that you want to go in in life, but sometimes it can be very hard to choose the right thing. Sometimes you do not make the right choice and there are consequences for those actions. Before you make a decision about doing something ask yourself a couple of questions. Would I tell my closest friend or relative about it? Will it have consequences? Will it cause harm? Think about what you are doing, before you do it. Whether it is about a relationship, personal issues with family, or even what you are going to have for lunch today.

Do not do anything rash without thinking about the results, and planning how you will deal with the results. Some consequences can be severe, but sometimes it's worth it, that's what you have to decide for yourself. Avoid rash decisions. Don't do something out of feelings in the moment, take some time to be sure about what you want, and wait to calm down and relax before you make the final decision and do something about it. It's a good idea to confide in someone and get some opinions on what you could do (ex. Your brother/sister, your bestfriend). Do not over-think everything.

Don't get nervous at small things, that requires small decisions, that will not affect your life further. You should know what is important enough to be thinking well about it. Over-thinking everything can cause stress, which is very bad for you Trust yourself. Go with your gut, but always think any big and Hucrucial decision through. Have faith in yourself and in your instincts. After all, the only person you can trust to want the best for you is yourself. The choices we make throughout our lives determine our futures but the problem is, that we are not always wise enough now to make the choices we should for the people we want to become.

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When we are young and need to make important choices for our financial future, such as which subjects we should study and how to get good grades, we are not sufficiently wise to realise that a little pain now gives great gain in the future. We also want the pleasure that comes from eating forbidden fruit, from pigging out on confectionery or trying the adult pleasures that can ruin our health for life. We see adults smoking or consuming alcohol and saying that they enjoy it or get pleasure from it or need it to overcome the stress of the day.

We are not wise enough to know that what adults say gives them pleasure also causes future ill health problems or that advertising is not reminding us to make healthy choices but trying to put money in other people's pockets. When we become adults, we will know what choices we should have made and will wish that we had made them long ago, when we were young. But the only way in which we will then be able to make good choices, will be to help and educate our own children to make the choices that we wish we had made when we were their age. Why good choices? Why not?

Haven’t you ever heard that if you’re going to do something, you might as well do it right? Well, it’s the same thing with choices. We’re not talking about preparing a meal or making a dress. This is your LIFE! You have the right to make your own choices, but you don’t have the right to choose the consequences. You may decide to stick your hand in the fire, but you’re probably going to get burned. We’ve all had the opportunity to make choices. Some of them were not so good. We’ve allowed other people to influence our lives, and sometimes what seemed like a good idea in the moment, turned out to be a huge mistake.

As a teenager did you ever borrow the family car without permission? What did your parents do? They probably took the keys away from you and sent you to your room. Maybe you were grounded. Maybe that meant missing the prom or something else that was important to you. If so, you probably learned a lesson that has stuck with you. Other choices turn out to be much more serious. In fact, they may be serious enough that they will affect you for the rest of your life. What if you’re that teenager who borrowed the family car and wrecked it? Were you drinking? Texting? Talking on the phone?

Just simply not paying attention? Was anyone else harmed, or even killed? If so, then that changes everything. Instead of being sent to your room, you were judged according to the laws of the land. You were probably taken to jail, and maybe even sent to prison, but even that won’t take away the consequences of knowing you injured or ended a life. People get married without a guide book and children don’t come with directions. Parents do the best they can but sometimes they just don’t provide the guidance a child needs. It’s not generally that they’re bad people.

It’s just that they really just don’t know what a particular child needs. Sometimes parents have enough problems of their own and just simply don’t have what it takes to be good role models. As an example, I had parents who were good people. Charming, attractive, full of charisma. My birth was the event of the century for our family. I was the first child, and the first grandchild for my father’s parents. I remember everyone thinking I was pretty wonderful. When I look back at this time in my early childhood, I seem to settle on the happiness and security I felt at about age three.

After that, things started going haywire. Alcohol played a huge part in the unhappiness of my parents and they decided they just couldn’t stay married. They still loved each other, but pride had gotten in the way and neither of them were willing (or able) to make the necessary changes to keep us all together. By the time I was seven, my parents officially divorced, and my sister and I, along with our father, went to live with our paternal grandparents. Thank goodness for grandparents who are willing to step in when there is a need. They became the parents to all three of us! Life was good with our grandparents.

In fact, I’m sure my sister would agree that the three years with them were the most secure years of our childhood. At the end of those three years, our father remarried and expected a new “mother” to raise us. Our own mother had moved away, believing that we would be better off without her. Had she asked me what I thought about that, I would have begged her to stay. Things weren’t better without her. This new woman we now lived with didn’t want to raise someone else’s children and she made that pretty clear. For me, reading was a way to escape. I was a good student and didn’t do anything to cause problems.

Being the peacemaker, I smiled on the outside, but inside, I was terribly unhappy. I dreamed about running away and never coming back. When I was seventeen, that’s just what I did. I got married, graduated from high school, and had my first baby in the same year. Did I know what I was doing? Heck no! Do I wish I’d have made better choices? Absolutely! That marriage was short-lived and only added to my trials. Not only do I have regrets, but I’ve also suffered with the “what might have been. ” The best thing about it is the daughter who came from it all. She was always my strength and my reason for living.

The worst thing is what I went through to get to where I am today. On the outside, I look like a pretty normal person. There are scars on the inside but they’re barely visible anymore. They say time heals all wounds, but without love and forgiveness, they will just continue to fester and bleed. You can apply bandages but until you heal the wound from the inside, it will only continue to cause pain. A few things have helped me on my road to freedom. 1. Good friends. If you only have one person you can count on in life, consider yourself blessed. Two childhood friends appeared when I needed them most and I credit them ith my ability to live through the worst time of my life. 2. Learning the meaning of the Atonement of Jesus Christ in my life. He suffered not only for my sins (and my lack of good choices) but He also suffered my pain. Too many times I think we think only of the crucifixion and not the precious gift He offered in the Garden of Gesthemane. When times get hard, I realize that He truly understands my pain because He has suffered it not only for all mankind, but just for ME. 3. Making the decision to forgive. I haven’t forgotten, but I have forgiven. The memories help me remember how important it is to make the right choices in life.

If I didn’t have them, what would stop me from continuing to make them? Forgiveness helps remove the pain. It’s part of the Atonement of Jesus Christ. He forgave. If I am unwilling to forgive those who have hurt me, then I am bringing my own condemnation. Christ will be the one, in the end, to judge. 3. Journaling. Early on, I knew I had to write my story. The process of recording it had a few benefits. Therapy for me. A record for mchildren It’s the story of a young girl with a good heart who got sucked into a life that forced her to grow up faster than she wanted.

She learned she couldn’t trust the people who were supposed to love her. You just have to read it to learn more about her and determine for yourself whether or not she succeeded. I don’t know what lead you to this website, but I do know that everyone on this beautiful planet we call Mother Earth has made some choices they regret. You don’t have to live with a life of pain. The past does not determine who you are today. When you make good choices and decisions, you reap the rewards. When you make poor choices and decisions, you suffer the consequences. In high school, you have more freedom and more independence than you’ve ever had before.

Of course, with this greater freedom and independence comes greater responsibility. Learning to accept responsibility for your actions and for the choices that you make is an important part of growing up. You will have many decisions to make in high school. It is therefore important that you have good decisions-making skills. Try following these steps whenever you have a decision to make: -determine your options write down the positive and negative aspects of each option make sure that you have all the information you need to make an informed decision carefully consider the positive and negative aspects of each option make your decion

Remember that whatever you do, it's not the end of the world, there's always a solution for everything. Make your own decisions, it's okay to know someone's opinion, but the decision is yours to make. Always consider the good things and the bad things about your decision, and the results of it. It's natural to take the wrong decision sometimes. We learn from our mistakes, don't get too upset about it.