We make roughly thirty-five-thousand decisions daily. That works out to about one decision every two seconds. The vast amount of news and media we are exposed to forces us to constantly make decisions and about what we believe and how we will respond to the people and situations around us. Our decisions impact and shape who we are, making how we arrive at those decisions vitally important.
What can we do improve our decision-making skills?
This podcast talks about how cognitive biases, humility, and intuition play crucial roles in our decision-making skills. By identifying how susceptible we are to certain logical biases, we can generate a score of our decision-making competence. This competency predicts our ability to avoid negative decision outcomes in life, completely independent from our level of intelligence. Our susceptibility to conspiracy theories and fake news is a function of our decision-making competence.
Here are three action steps that you can take:
- Foster humility. This involves coming to an accurate awareness of your strengths and weakness without needing to inflate, deny, or conceal them. How willing we are to admit we’re wrong and acknowledge the limits of our knowledge significantly impacts the quality of our decisions. The key is to step back and stop believing that we’ve got all of the answers.
- Get curious about your intuition and gut feelings. Emotion and intuition serve as a crucial subliminal guide to decision making. Often, we think that emotion and rationality are oppositional. In truth they are simply different ways of gathering and assessing information. Intuition analyzes information more quickly than our conscious brain can, and thus aids us in making decision under pressure.
- Practice talking through difficult situations in the third person. This helps to slow down your reactivity so that you can engage with the situation. Using this technique helps you give yourself advice like you would a friend.