Sometimes you may find that you can make decisions instantly while at other times the choice feels overwhelming. That decision anxiety will often stem from concerns over risk or a surfeit of choices.
“Rather than make the best choice based on rational criteria, you may opt for safer, less risky options,” science writer Hannah Rose, who trained as a doctor, writes on the Ness Labs site.
“While these decisions may not have a high risk of failure, they may make you miss some exciting opportunities, which could leave your career, or even your life, feeling stagnant. Learning to overcome decision anxiety can help you stay on track with your goals and aspirations.”
She says one of the first steps is to acknowledge when you feel anxious about a decision and determine the root of your concerns. By understanding why you feel anxious about making a decision, you will be better prepared to manage the way you feel.
If your anxiety stems from the risk of loss associated with the decision, check with others on whether your caution makes sense or you are just over-thinking. Give attention to the positive outcomes that could occur, not just the negative. She also suggests writing down how you would cope in a worst-case scenario. “If your business was to fail, how quickly could you become employed again? By recognizing that a bad outcome could be managed, you reduce the impact of your internalized fears,” she writes.
If you are overwhelmed by choice, purposefully narrow your options down. She cites as an example limiting yourself to one store in making a purchase.
Giving yourself a few days and coming back to the decision can also help – but she stresses also setting a deadline. “If you are still struggling to decide what to do, keep your long-term goals in mind. Decisions of all sizes can take you towards, or away from, your dreams,” she says.
Cheryl Strauss Einhorn, who founded the decisions sciences company Decisive, recently polled the 2,000 people at a keynote speech she gave at Cornell University and learned 92 per cent of them worry about making a mistake when faced with a big decision. Interestingly, a prime concern was relying too much on their gut – moving too quickly, being impulsive and making emotional decisions.
“When we’re faced with difficult and complex decisions, we typically experience difficult and complex emotions. Many of us don’t want to sit with these uncomfortable feelings, so we try to get the decision making over with. But this often leads to poor decisions. We may not truly solve the problem at hand, and we often end up feeling worse. It’s an unproductive feedback loop that bookends our decisions with negative feelings,” she writes in Harvard Business Review.
But she argues that emotions aren’t the enemy of good decision making. They can be your secret weapon in making better decisions if you identify the emotions you are feeling and the emotions you want to feel as you’re looking at your decision in the rear-view mirror.
So as you are grappling with the decision, what is the dominant emotion you are feeling? Fear? Anxiety? Overwhelm? Excited by the opportunity? Consider whether those feeling stem from previous experiences or other sources.
“Naming our feelings can help create a little space between our emotions and our actions. Gaining that distance allows us to examine the emotion, and to acknowledge feeling it, without letting the emotion drive the decision, replacing our conscious thought and agency,” she says.
Now, with that distance, imagine you’ve made a successful decision. How do you feel now? Accomplishment? Relief? Have you furthered your career?
She calls those two steps emotional bookending. She says it helps you name and tolerate your emotions, instead of burying them or running away from them. You are better poised to push past anxiety and other emotions to a good decision.
Quick hits
- Career coach Emily Stark recommends keeping a ‘brag file” with key achievements as it can be helpful finding another job after a sudden layoff. In the first 24 hours after the layoff announcement, assuming you still have access to your work computer, find documents that can help such as certifications, accolades from clients or your boss, performance reviews, promotional recognition, results from impactful projects and network contact information.
- Workplace columnist Alison Green says that most people wrongly believe they need to make a long presentation when asking for a raise. Keep it relatively brief, with an explanation of why you have earned the raise. If turned down, ask, “Can you tell me what you think it would take for me to earn a raise in the future?”
- Entrepreneur editor-in-chief Jason Feifer notes that LinkedIn has changed its algorithms to favour posts that share knowledge and advice, the author writing on their core subject area, offering meaningful comments to a distinct audience.
- In a browser, press Ctrl+L to have your cursor automatically jump to the address bar, ready for you to type in a new search or web address, advises tech writer Whitson Gordon.
Harvey Schachter is a Kingston-based writer specializing in management issues. He, along with Sheelagh Whittaker, former CEO of both EDS Canada and Cancom, are the authors of When Harvey Didn’t Meet Sheelagh: Emails on Leadership.