Find the full transcript at yourfuturerealized.com/24.
How often do you get stuck overthinking, and struggle to make important decisions? It’s common for many in leadership.
One of my clients, a brilliant leader in ops, excels at solving tough problems and inspiring her team. The CEO trusts her, her staff adores her, and she consistently gets rave peer reviews.
She confided in me that her Achilles heel is making decisions. She’ll get caught thinking in a loop of details and stall there. She thinks, or hopes, that her team doesn’t notice. But it eats up a lot of her evening time and she knows it has ripple effects elsewhere.
Sometimes not deciding is riskier than making the wrong choice.
In this episode, I’ll unpack the mystery of analysis paralysis. And I’ll share the hack I use that can help you make better, faster decisions.
How often do you get stuck overthinking and struggle to make important decisions? It’s common for many in leadership.
One of my clients, a brilliant leader in ops, excels at solving tough problems and inspiring her team. The CEO trusts her, her staff adores her, and she consistently gets rave peer reviews.
She confided in me that her Achilles heel is making decisions. She’ll get caught thinking in a loop of details and stall there. She thinks, or hopes, that her team doesn’t notice. But it eats up a lot of her evening time and she knows it has ripple effects elsewhere.
Sometimes not deciding is riskier than making the wrong choice.
In this episode, I’ll unpack the mystery of analysis paralysis. And I’ll share the hack I use that can help you make better, faster decisions.
Find the full transcript at yourfuturerealized.com/24.
Hey Ops Execs,
The Art of Decisiveness: Finding the Sweet Spot of Decision-Making
Decisiveness is the oil that keeps operations running smoothly. Indecisiveness is a time thief.
When you indulge in overanalyzing, it slides into self-doubt. The pressure increases. This can play out any number of ways as you become a bottleneck, miss out on opportunities, and slow down your team.
You need to find the sweet spot where you make quick, smart, and confident choices.
So, how do you stop getting bogged down over-analyzing?
Boosting Confidence through Swift Decision-Making
As someone who sometimes gets caught in analysis paralysis, and so I’ve had to work with this. In fact, as I’m saying this, I’m looking at a quote that’s hanging over my desk from Peter Drucker. "Whenever you see a successful business, someone once made a courageous decision."
I’ve found that a great way to deal with overthinking is by playing a game where I make myself make quick decisions.
Making quick decisions can help you get better at making choices. When you practice deciding fast, you can teach your brain to be quicker at picking the right option. This can make you more certain and ready to act.
One way to practice making quick decisions is by setting time limits for yourself when faced with choices.
Setting deadlines forces you to rely on your instincts and streamline your thought process. Then you experience less decision fatigue and make swifter choices.
Also, I’ve found that making many decisions quickly boosts my confidence and willingness to take risks to achieve my goals.
Mastering Quick Decision-Making: A Roadmap for Operations Executives
A few guidelines when you’re practicing making decisions quickly:
- Set your priorities: Name what is most important to you or the task at hand. It might be a specific measurable result, an approach, or a value you want to honor.
- Tune into your instincts: Sometimes your gut feeling can guide you in the right direction. You’ve already got a lot of good, practical experience. Try trusting your intuition when making quick decisions.
- Practice makes perfect: The more you practice making choices, the better you become at it. Start with small decisions that aren’t very important and gradually work up to more significant ones.
- Reflect on your choices: Analyze your process and the results and refine it, so you keep improving.
Remember, the goal is not to rush through decisions but to be efficient and effective.
It's to find the balance between thoughtful analysis and trusting your instincts. With some experimentation, you’ll start making decisions more efficiently. Each decision you make, even small ones, can help you get more skilled at handling uncertainty and making tough choices in the future.
So, I’ll leave you with this question today: How can you tune into your intuition or gut instinct to expedite your decision-making?
If you're stuck thinking too much because you want to please everyone, check out episode 16, “How Operations Executives Break the People-Pleasing Curse.” You’ll find it at yourfuturerealized.com/16.
You can’t stop the chaos, but you can change the game.