Lately, I’ve been creating a lot of new decision-making tools and testing them out on patient friends (you know who you are). One of the things I’ve heard over and over is: “I don’t have any decisions to make.”
Really?
You make decisions constantly. Every minute.
For example, yesterday I met one of my friends at a local coffee house. We were talking about decisions, and she told me she couldn’t remember the last time she made a decision. Hmm…
Just 30 minutes earlier, when I texted her and told her I was in the area, she texted back and enthusiastically agreed to meet. Sounds like a decision to me. She drove to the coffee house and chose a place to park. Another decision. She grabbed her jacket before she left her car (yes, it is September, but it gets cold in the Bay Area in the evening). Yet another decision…
You make these types of decisions constantly, and most of them probably seem pretty small. But when you look at them as a whole, they create your life. They define what you accomplish, what you choose to pay attention to, who you spend your time with, and what you contribute. They determine whether your life or business is successful or not.
For example, what if my friend had decided not to grab her jacket? How would that have changed things? Your first response might be, “well, she would have been cold.” True. But my friend is extremely sensitive to cold temperatures. If she had been cold, she probably would have decided to leave earlier, which means we wouldn’t have had time to talk about ways we can tweak some tools to work better for her. We probably wouldn’t have decided to meet again next week to experiment with some more fun decision-making tools. And then we wouldn’t have come up with some cool ways to get other people involved in our fun.
The tools you use to make these “small” decisions are the same ones you use to make the big ones. The catch is that most of us just don’t pay attention.
Learning about how to make good decisions is another way of saying that you are learning how to create a good life or a good business. The way you create the life and business you want is by making millions of little decisions that take you in the right direction.
Filed under: Business, Coaching, Decision Making
