We all have to live with our decisions, which is why our decision-making has a significant effect on our lives. As someone who has had difficulty making important choices in the past, I’ve learnt a lot over the years about why it is essential to be a good decision-maker.
If you are curious about how decision-making, keep reading as we will discuss 12 ways that good decision making positively impact your life.
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1) You Are More Likely to Get What You Want
The biggest reason we have trouble getting what we want is that we aren’t clear about what that is. Put another way, if you don’t have a goal that you are working toward, you are just going with the flow and not headed anywhere in particular.
What we need in life is a clear plan about what we want to do, which requires careful decision-making about what is best for us and what we need to be working towards. When we have a clear idea about what we want, we can plan and make it happen. Which, in turn, leads to us getting what we want.
My point here is that once you decide what you want, you have something to work towards, so it is easier to make choices as the need to line up with your goal. If the goal is to write an article, you must choose to write rather than waste a night on YouTube.
To get what we want, we need to know what we are working towards and then make the right decisions that help us get there.
2) You Gain Confidence in Yourself
When you see that you can change your life for the better or push it towards what you would prefer, you gain confidence in yourself. Instead of being the person who doesn’t get what they want, you become the person who gets what they want. And it feels good to get what you want.
There was an experiment where researchers fixed a game of Monopoly so that one player was guaranteed to win and the other to lose. They then had participants flip a coin; heads got the advantage, tails got the disadvantage. Once the players started playing, they forgot all about the initial conditions and started acting like they had done everything themselves.
Regardless of why things happen, we feel better about ourselves when our outside world matches our mental disposition.
If you prove that you can work towards what you want, then it becomes a self-fulfilling proficient that builds your confidence.
Having good decision-making skills improves your life because it shows you that you can decide how to make the most out of your life and the situations you find yourself in. And making the most out of your situation will give you the confidence that you can do it again, even if it is in a different way.
3) You Learn to Recognize that Your Choices Matter
I was in a bad relationship and wasn’t happy, and had known it for a while, but I never did anything about it. The relationship went on, and I kept trying to rationalize it, making excuses for why it was alight to keep it going even if I wasn’t happy. At some point, I hit a breaking point and decided to end it, but it wasn’t till long after that time that I realized I had made an important decision and committed to it.
When we live our lives, we sometimes accept that things are the way they are, and we can’t do anything about it.
But this is not true, there are always things that we can change, but that also requires action. But even more importantly, we need to have valid reasons for our actions, or we need to change our minds when we are wrong.
In the end, it all comes down to making good decisions that help us accomplish our goals and make our lives better. When we see that there is something that we can change and we make our lives better, we recognize that our choices matter and make a difference.
Long story short, decision-making makes your life better because it helps you realize that you are in control of your life, and you can make of it whatever you choose.
4) You Are Less Likely to Regret Outcomes
When we aren’t clear about what we want, we don’t have an explicit schema about prioritizing decisions. For this reason, we sometimes make choices for no reason at all. But once we have our priorities, we make our choice for specific reasons.
When we do something for a good reason, we are less likely to regret it later on.
Put another way, we regret things when we get them wrong, but we regret them less if we get them wrong early rather than later. In other words, having thought about what we should do before rather than after will help us avoid regret.
Being a good decision-maker is about making the best choice given the circumstances and our desires. We tend to have more self-confidence about what comes out of our choices because we know what to expect. Knowing what to expect can help you avoid regret because you can trust you made the right decisions at the time.
Sometimes bad things happen, but we have little reason to regret it when we have the confidence that we made the right decision at the time.
5) You Learn to Get Past Your Fears of Consequences
Often, our fears of the consequences are worse than the consequences themselves. This is because we can imagine a much worse outcome than what is likely to happen. But when we make clear decisions based on what we want, we no longer have anything to fear because the worst outcome isn’t worth worrying about because we already have realistic expectations.
I’m not suggesting that we can’t make bad decisions ok by pretending that the outcomes don’t matter.
When we are clear about what we are working toward, everything makes a little more sense.
There will be unexpected outcomes, but it is easier to ride out the rough waters if we make good choices.
When we know what we are working towards, we can be better decision-makers, making us less likely to make big mistakes in the future. But even if mistakes happen, as long as they aren’t fatal, they will make us stronger and serve as a learning experience.
6) You Learn How to be Persistent
After you have gotten past your fear of failure and seen how you can affect your reality, it is now time to be persistent.
Since the beginning of the year, I’ve been working on this website; my goal is to write at least 100 articles; I’m on number 74. I’ve written two books in the past, and while the planning took some time, it was done in about two months once I got to the writing. I am now on month eight for this project, which is 4x as much as my previous writing endeavours. But because I have been careful about my decision-making from the start, and I am starting to see some expected results, I feel confident to keep going.
When we learn how to make the right decisions, our lives improve because we are encouraged to be persistent.
Realizing what you want, working towards it, and then getting it is a perpetual lesson in the power of persistence. We are often told that persistence is the key to getting what we want, so we need to stick to our plans.
Making good decisions that lead to success will be the positive reinforcement it takes to keep us going, even with things get tough.
7) You Learn to Trust Your Intuition
The more clarity you have about what you want, the easier it becomes to get it. Like any muscle, our decision-making skills can get stronger, so strong in fact that we might forget we are using them, sort of like those the monopoly players above. But at that point, we will be following our intuition which will be leading us to the better lives that we seek.
I’ve been more of an intuitive thinker for as long as I can remember, so I don’t always know where my ideas come from, but I tend to follow them. While that works for most things in life, the simple stuff related to living, it is easy to follow our institutions because they are prominent.
But when we are faced with something new, we are forced to think about it, and this is where our decision-making comes into play.
There is an old saying, fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me. When we are clear about what we are working towards, we think of all the possibilities. This means that if we work hard, we will be prepared for all sorts of possible outcomes and will be able to follow our intuition as it leads us.
To make the right choices, sometimes you need to trust your instincts, but at the same time, you also need to be making decisions about what direction you are headed. Once you have a set of goals, it will be easier for your intuition to lead you.
8) You Learn to See Both Sides of the Coin
Being a good decision maker comes down to understanding a situation from top to bottom and then placing it within your scheme of sense-making, then choosing the best options given the prospects. At times, to know what is best, you also need to know what is worse, so looking at all the sides of the argument or options allows you to make the best choices.
We are often pushed to think of things as black and white, or just two sides of a coin, but that is never the case.
There are always many factors going into each situation. But acknowledging that you don’t necessarily know everything and that there are different possible outcomes to consider makes life decisions a little easier and even.
Understanding the different aspects of every choice is a difficult task, and when it comes to small things, we don’t want to waste too much time. But when it comes to something important, we want to make sure we have covered all our bases and are on the right track. So rather than looking at just one side, we need to look at all sides.
Good decision-making affects our lives by forcing us to be more creative thinkers who consider all possibilities.
9) You Realize Life is Limited in Some Ways
Making decisions is an essential part of life, but we also realize that we aren’t so good at some things. When you choose to do something, you can also see how you can do something else instead. When we are willing to try and fail and move on, we, in one way realizing our limitations.
This isn’t to say that this is all bad; instead, it is part of our life’s learning experience. We might realize that we suck when trying things out, but we can always move on to something else. While this is limiting ourselves, it also leads us towards one specific thing that we are great at doing.
Realizing our limitations might sound bad, but it is actually empowering.
When we think of a limit, we tend to associate it with negativity or not getting what we want, but it’s the opposite. Limitations take us away from what we don’t need and bring us closer to what we want.
Decision-making affects our life by helping us make more deliberate choices that eliminate the bad and help us get more of the good.
10) You Learn to See Past Peer Pressure
Once you have honed your decision-making skills, you can see past peer pressure, as often we do what others expect and say because we aren’t clear about what we want. Put another way, you can’t be pressured into doing something you don’t want to do if you are clear about what you want to do.
We have probably all been in situations where we were pressured to take action or make choices that we disagreed with. This is part of life, as there are many things that we are expected to do at different times in our lives.
We will always go along with what we are being pushed towards if we don’t know or think about the other options.
So gaining clarity about what we want through decision-making ensures that we always have a target that we are working towards. On top of this, having a target makes it easier to make choices that align with our goals.
So when faced with a difficult decision, if you know what you want, you can stand up against peer pressure.
Prioritizing decision-making in life makes it easier to get a clear sense of what you want, which helps you make better decisions on the fly. If you are clear about what you want, it is much easier not to give in to peer pressure.
11) You Learn to be an Example for Others
Being a good decisions maker means you are always working towards your best self and the ideals of what you are looking for in life. When we gain self-confidence from successfully doing what we work towards, our happiness and positively show. We become an example for others when we believe that change is possible and see it in our own lives.
When we make decisions in our lives and have clear targets and ideas of what we are looking for, we become the person we want to be. When we are the people we want to be, we are our best selves, which is something that the people around us can see.
When they see our belief in what we are doing, it serves as an example for them, and it serves as a reminder that changes and living a better life are possible.
The way we look at the world starts with our experiences and extends through our learnings.
As we make sense of the world, we develop a schema for decision-making based on our experience and values. While this seems like an intuitive thing to do, most people don’t spend too much time thinking about it or getting good at it, so if you do, you will find the edge case rather than the norm.
By being a good decision maker, you set an example for the people around you, and in turn, they follow your lead and work towards the same sorts of goals and ideals in their lives.
12) You Learn to Appreciate Your Mistakes
We always make mistakes, but the scale of how big they are is variable; you might choose the wrong shirt, which doesn’t matter much, but not showing up to an important meeting will be a bigger problem. But what is essential here is realizing that mistakes are a part of life, and everyone makes them.
But one benefit of being good at decision-making is that you always understand why you are making your choices. In other words, you aren’t doing what you are doing for no reason or at random, but you are doing it for a clear reason that you’d be able to describe later. Because of this, you are clear about what is happening and why, so you can more easily appreciate the mistakes and why they might occur.
Decision-making positively affects your life when you have clear goals, work towards them, and make daily choices that help you get closer rather than further from your targets.
It isn’t about always doing right; instead, it is about learning as you progress through life. Appreciating our mistakes means that we accept them, learn from them, and then move on towards better decisions in the future.
Good decision-making frees us to accept our mistakes as learning experiences and an opportunity to move forward and progress towards our goals.
It might be challenging to make good choices at times, but we always have a framework to work with and within if we have sorted out what we are working towards.
Being a good decision maker will help you get what you want, resulting in a more positive outlook on your life and your actions. At the same time, by being sure about our choices, we have less reason to regret or fear what happens as a result.
Decisions making positively affects your life because it ensures that all your actions are aligned and leading towards what you are seeking in your life.
If you feel you are headed in the wrong direction, you need to look at your priorities and see where you can make different decisions that will lead to the better outcome you seek.