Emotions can help us improve decision making. Unfortunately, emotions can also get in the way. The key is to make decisions based on emotional intelligence, not raw emotions.
Most of us don’t think of decision making as an emotional intelligence skill, but often, it’s emotions that get in the way of good decisions. Using emotional intelligence to inform your decisions can help you get better outcomes.
Using emotional intelligence means being aware of what you are feeling when weighing your choices. It also means being aware of how others will feel based on the decisions you make. Being emotionally intelligent means asking yourself: are my emotions helping or hindering me here? Will other people feel like helping me or hindering me?
Here’s a simple example that I come across frequently: a direct report makes a mistake. How do you respond? If you respond with raw emotions, you might express frustration, disappointment, even (on a bad day) outrage or anger. Most of those emotions won’t help you fix the problem. Even if venting feels good at the moment, even if it feels like you are being authentic and a straight shooter, it often leaves you further behind in redressing the mistake.
It’s likely the direct report already feels bad about the mistake. Once they are on the receiving end of an emotional outburst, that in itself is another event that they feel bad about. Now they also feel bad because their boss got mad at them. You have lost their loyalty just when you need it most to get them to take the extra time and effort needed to fix whatever went wrong.
There are Few Right or Wrong Decisions
There are few times when a decision is absolutely right or absolutely wrong. Most of the time, decisions lead to outcomes that get you closer to—or farther away from—achieving your goals.
Especially in this era of rapid changes, effective decision making is a process of identifying a goal, trying actions that help you achieve it, testing what works along the way, adjusting and trying again. The only way to truly fail is to quit trying. As long as you are still learning and getting even incrementally closer to what you want, you can keep trying until you reach your goal.
When my clients tell me they are afraid of making the wrong decision or afraid to fail, I know that emotions are getting in their way. Often, they are perfectly capable of deciding on a plan of action, but they are stymied by their fears. This can lead to endless missed deadlines, incessant information gathering, and other avoidance techniques. These are all classic flight responses. I find some people are very adept at doing anything that helps them run away from making a decision.
Nearly every decision is time sensitive, a window when the decision is relevant. Getting stuck in your thinking or in your decision making process can result in missing the moment of opportunity. Often, a pretty good response delivered in a timely way is far better than delaying the response while you try to find a perfect or better solution.
Keeping Emotions Out of a Decision
Ironically, the people who try to keep their emotions out of decision making are most likely to be ruled by their emotions.
If you could truly keep emotions out of your decisions, you wouldn’t be able to make the simplest decisions, like what do you want for lunch today? Soup or salad? Turkey or tuna? Without emotions, you would only be able to say something like: I found something on the web for that.
It’s smarter to be aware of your emotions and try to see how your feelings are helping or harming what you are trying to do.
Even seemingly simple decisions can involve a surprising number of competing interests and feelings. In deciding between soup or salad, you might weigh health goals against taste, what’s most convenient against what you really want. In the end, you have to pick something, and if you are hungry, time is of the essence. It helps to make the decision if you know what your eating goals are, for example, if your health goals are more important than the time it will take to find a healthier or more delicious option, or if your time is the most important thing right now. Being aware of your priorities is a matter of emotional intelligence, thinking about feelings and using the information strategically to reach your goals.
Larger decisions work the same way. It’s almost never about being right or wrong, but whether you’re moving toward your goal. If you did your best, got the information you needed, and consulted with the people who have a stake or have expertise, you can be happy with your decision even if you don’t get the result you wanted. If nothing else, you learned something, and what you learned may be the most valuable outcome of all. It helps you try again smarter and gives you a basis for trying again.
Emotions that Get in the Way of Decision Making
For most people, the hardest decisions are those that commit you to something in the future. A lunch choice probably won’t change your life but buying a new car or investing in a business strategy can change a lot about the future. Because we can’t predict how our decisions will play out in the future, decision making can lead to a lot of anxiety and stress.
When the stakes feel high and the outcome of any decision seems uncertain, stress can put a stop to the decision making process. Here are some of the most common emotions that stop decision making in its tracks:
- Perfectionism: If you wait to find the perfect answer, you might find yourself unable to find an answer at all. Perfectionism in itself can become a holy grail, an endless search for something mythical that doesn’t exist, causing you to miss the key moment of opportunity.
- Fear of Being Wrong: The fear of being wrong is the other side of the coin to perfectionism. The chance that things won’t turn out well can in itself become an obstacle for moving forward.
- Paralysis by Analysis: When perfection and fear come together, people can get stuck in a cycle of endless analysis and exploration of options that leads nowhere. When they feel a decision becoming clear, they often revert back to information gathering to avoid moving forward. This can be pernicious cycle and can negatively affect work performance or even personal relationships.
- Rumination or Circular thinking: Rumination is dwelling on the past, particularly on negative experiences in the past. When you begin to think about a decision and return again and again to the same analysis, you are stuck in a rumination cycle. This can take up a lot of time without being productive.
- Information Overload/Lack of Information: Information is necessary for every decision, but when there is too little or too much, the information itself can be a distraction from making a decision.
- Bias or Clinging to Past Beliefs: Conscious or unconscious bias has always been an impediment to good decision making. Some people are prone to doing what they always did even when newer choices offer clear benefits. This is increasingly a problem now in an era of unprecedented changes brought about by the pandemic and social justice movements, not to mention technological advances. Old ways and old biases can have real detrimental effects.
Getting Unstuck in Decision Making
When your feelings are bogging down your ability to make a decision, try these steps:
- Separate the feeling from the decision. Try to separate how you are feeling from the current decision. This takes a high degree of emotional self-awareness. It often helps if you identify past events where you felt the same way. Did your feelings help or hinder you there? How did that decision turn out? How can you improve your decision making process this time? Answering these questions can be helpful in finding a better pathway to moving forward.
- Make a Pro/Con list. It seems old fashioned, but this too can help you separate what is a feeling and what is rational. Although in the end you have to reconcile your feelings with your decision, a list helps separate feelings from the rational part of the decision making process.
- Imagine yourself without the feelings that are getting you stuck. Ask yourself, “If I wasn’t feeling afraid, what would I decide?” Make it a thought experiment to move forward with the decision without making a commitment. Once you have a rational option, then try to reconcile it with your feeling. Are you more or less afraid thinking about this decision?
- Recast failure as learning: Few decisions are really final. Try to see that there is no way to fail. You will either succeed in achieving your goal, or you will learn something that will help you try again smarter.
- See Decision Making as a Process: It’s helpful to see decisions as a process, rather than a final act. Here is a process called the GOOD Model that can help you sort out the most likely pathway for success.
- Goal: start by clarifying the goal of the decision. What are you trying to achieve?
- Options: Explore your options. This might be something you do alone or in collaboration with others who have expertise or experiences and who can offer insight into new options.
- Obstacles: It’s essential to ask: What could get in the way of success? It may be that you don’t have the resources for how you want to proceed or there are some people who don’t like what you’re asking them to do. If that’s the case, even the best options can fail. Consider how you will overcome the obstacles that stand in the way.
- Do: What do you want to do or try? After you know what you are trying to achieve, have explored the options and obstacles, try to commit to doing something rather than going back for more investigation. If you get stuck, give yourself a deadline for committing to an action plan.
Moving Forward Doesn’t Commit You Forever
Remember that decisions are part of a larger process of achieving your goal. It’s not about fear, it’s not about failure, it’s about learning and trying.
No matter what you do, there is no failure unless you avoid the decision or stop trying. You will either succeed or learn by trying.
Test out a decision, find what is working and what isn’t. Then be flexible. Iterate and try again. Move slowly toward your goal and you’ll find more success.