Decision Making for the Decision - Challenged

If you’ve ever felt stuck, overwhelmed, or paralyzed trying to make even simple decisions, this episode will hit home. 

In this powerful breakdown, Coach Juli reveals why decision-making is one of the biggest hidden productivity killers—and how it silently drains your time, energy, and confidence. You’ll uncover the real reason your brain struggles with choices (especially under stress), how overthinking and perfectionism keep you stuck, and why more time doesn’t always lead to better decisions. Most importantly, you’ll walk away with practical, easy-to-use tools you can apply immediately to make faster, clearer, and more confident choices in your life and business. If you’re ready to stop second-guessing yourself and start moving forward with momentum, this episode is your turning point.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:03

Are you ready to finally break free from overwhelm, procrastination, and burnout? If you're ready to focus on what truly matters and create momentum to reach and exceed your goals in business and in life, then this podcast is for you. Welcome to the Efficiency Advantage, the podcast where clarity meets action and purpose that fuels your progress. So here's world-class productivity expert and your host, Coach Julie.

SPEAKER_01 0:44

Welcome to the Efficiency Advantage Podcast. I'm Julie Shillam, and today's topic is something that we all struggle with. Decision making. So this is all for anyone who struggles with making decisions in a timely manner and being able to make that decision with confidence. Because honestly, decision making plagues most of us. So decisions and the ability to make them play an important role with regard to our sense of independence. The very act of being able to make a decision confirms our ability to live independently. We are quite literally confronted with decision-making situations constantly. Think about it. What are we going to do for dinner? Where are we going to go? What are we going to do next? We're making decisions all the time. And we're confronted with all kinds of situations. But what happens if too many of the decisions we make on a regular basis don't come easily to us? When each choice is a struggle, when we're paralyzed with the simple act of making one decision. Not to mention the multiple decisions we often are confronted with. So clients share that decision making, at least certain kinds of decisions, can become a tremendous burden. Some actually stifle our ability to be productive all the way from school age through later in life when in our career. And there are those decisions in everyday experiences. So, such as whether to spend money or not, whether to engage with someone or not in conversation, when to spend one's time at a given point, and even where to put something that you no longer use but want to hold on to. And how about what I asked said earlier? You just what are we going to make for dinner tonight? Everything we do ultimately requires some sort of decision. The problem of decision making has actually been scientifically shown to be a lack of activation of the hippocampus and interior cinglet in the brain. The hippocampus is seen as important in functions associated with decision making, specifically encoding unfamiliar stimuli or situations, like you know, is this familiar or new, processing spatial information, and being able to call up past experiences in order to influence the current decision at hand. Now the anterior cingulate cortex assists with conflict monitoring, such as you know, which option is better. Also, error detection. Well, that didn't work before. Is this going to work next time? And determining if the effort is actually worth the time just making the decision. And you know, is the is the end result going to be worth it? Now, people with ADHD often experience reduced or inconsistent activation of these areas. So that results in delayed engagement. So the brain isn't really kicking in as quickly as we'd like, and there might be a lower amount of dopamine available, which will affect motivation and being able to get this done. Practically, this looks like difficulty using past experience to guide current decisions, struggling more with novel or unstructured situations, something new, increasing decision paralysis or just avoiding it altogether, choosing immediate reward over long-term benefit, you know, that impulsivity challenge. Now, many times making a decision needs to be done in a limited time or you know, having within a very specific time frame. Now, this might be difficult for someone with executive functioning skill issues because being able to actually understand the options could stop one in their tracks right from the start, since working memory of those with ADHD is sometimes faulty, and the act of remembering all the subtleties and variables in each option may not be as doable for that person. But neurotypical or not, if you are under stress, if you're overwhelmed, if you're fatigued or faced with way too many choices, your decision-making ability will be difficult. As human beings, we generally make many of our decisions by focusing on the various options, maybe one at a time, and then eliminate an option one by one until the choice is narrowed down. Basically, we go with what's left after applying all the criteria to the options that we're deciding between. Many individuals find themselves stuck not knowing what they should choose and wind up either making no decision at all and perhaps missing an opportunity or making a rushed decision, resulting in a potentially bad choice, a financial loss, or some other negative scenario. Now, impulsivity control can exacerbate the decision-making process because important decisions, some of those take time, something many people don't typically allow when confronted with a decision. And perfectionism is often a method that those with ADHD use in order to compensate for their impulsivity, which is essentially thinking about it and analyzing a decision to death until they eventually give up and make no decision at all. Dopamine and noradrenaline play a big part in decision making. This, of course, is important information as those neurotransmitters play a key role in the executive functioning skills of the prefrontal cortex. That's this part of your in front of your head, and are typically diminished in the ADHD brain. One way to support the need for immediate gratification and curtail the impulsivity challenge in the brain could be to build small rewards for benchmark steps in the decision-making process. That's one thought. Also, receiving milestone rewards that feeds the brain's desire for pleasure and immediate gratification at the same time. Meditation, another process, helps to give the brain, especially those with ADHD, a chance to kind of slow down, regain better focus, and create more mindfulness. That whole idea of sleeping on it many times helps us to come up with a decision with way less effort and doubt as well. So, not to make this all about the ADHD brain, but as I've noticed in my career of 24 years, coaching goes with ADHD, decision making is hands down one of the biggest challenges my clients come to me with. So, in light of that, and to help anyone with decision making, I'm gonna give you some ideas and some solutions to actually work with this. So, in order to accomplish the decision, I'll get this outright. In order to accomplish the decision-making task, it's important that there be fewer pieces of information with which to consider. Unfortunately, this is precisely the difficulty that those with decision challenges struggle with, filtering out data. Many people have difficulty determining what information is crucial to the decision, and many times feel compelled to look at every single option while there are many in reality, too many in reality, actually. So a person may spend way too much time, hours and hours just trying to decide and reviewing all the details and the myriad options of every single possibility, which is simply not warranted for most decisions. This process and the stress associated with it, that can result in procrastination and just not making the decision at all. It just becomes overwhelming. So, conversely, the person may wind up making an impulsive decision simply in order to avoid the drudgery and overwhelm of the process. Basically, just getting it over with. Decision-making challenges can really leave people stuck. And if you're one of those people, I get it. I'm gonna give you five easy tools, five tools that you can use immediately when faced with a decision. All right, here's the first one set boundaries. You can set a boundary such as a time limit, create a deadline. The first rule of decision making I'm gonna share with you is more time does not create better decisions. In fact, it can decrease the quality of your decision. You can quite literally take forever to decide on something, only to have an opportunity disappear or get so overwhelmed, you just don't commit at all. Circumvent this by giving yourself a deadline to make the decision by. While taking more time to gather information may help, if you keep dragging out the process without a deadline, you're just going to create more anxiety and not necessarily any real results. Put this deadline in your calendar and plan out whatever steps you may need to take in order to come to some conclusion. Keep in mind, deciding sooner versus later frees up your most valuable asset time. A second boundary may be a budget limit. That can be exemplified by determining the top amount of money that you will spend on an item being considered and then removing all those that exceed the budget from the choices. That's a really great boundary to utilize. It'll keep you from overspending. A third one could be a physical boundary. For example, if someone is trying to decide which items to keep in their closet or drawers versus what to discard, this is a big issue. Making those decisions can be really challenging. They may determine that only the items which fit in the drawer can be kept. End of decision. Personally, this is the one I use. So I have a limit. If it doesn't fit in the area that I've got, well, then something has to give and go. And that's how I make a decision. What's going to fit? So when the you know closet or the drawer, whatever it's full, then everything else has to go. But then of course you need to decide which of the items need to go. And that's another discussion. And I cover a lot of that in the organizing podcast earlier. Another boundary could be a number limit. For example, say a person is getting bids on a home improvement project. This can go on forever without some limitations in place. So maybe you limit the number of bids to three and then decide between those. You know, you can end up getting more and more if you really end up continuing the process. Next, create a pros and cons list. That's always another option. Writing down a list of the benefits as well as consequences of a decision can often point us in the direction to head when it's a close call. Considering listing what the outcome of each decision would be to help choose the best scenario for your situation. Next, make a mind map. Those allow you to put all the aspects about the decision in a visual image so your mind stops going around in circles and ruminating on everything. Often the decision will almost make itself once it's out of your head. If you don't know what a mind map is, I'm gonna let you figure that out because you'll probably figure it out very quickly and you've probably seen them and just didn't know what it's called. Next, identify the most important criteria, whether that be the lowest cost, the higher safety rating, the aesthetic, whatever, and base the decision on that main criteria. Often this can help make the decision. So essentially, reduce the criteria to one component, the one that you deem as the most important component, and go from there. And lastly, don't discount going with your gut. Research shows that going with your gut can be just as successful as weighing all the factors. And going with your gut takes far less time, usually, as well. The inability to make conclusive and timely decisions can negatively impact our lives. This would logically impact home life, work life, relationships, overall success and joy. The key component seems to be when it comes to making decisions, have some rules or direction around it. And this applies to everyone. In a Harvard Business Review article on October 2016 entitled Noise, it was stated that there is a problem with reliability of human decision making because the judgments of humans can be strongly influenced by irrelevant factors such as our mood, when we've eaten last, and even the weather. So there is not going to be necessarily a perfect solution, at least not every time. So I challenge you, starting today, attempt to make every decision as soon as you have a reasonable amount of information. Decision making is a skill that with practice becomes easier over time. Consider how important the decision is and how much attention it really deserves. If you spend all your time worrying about a decision, you may miss the opportunity that it offers altogether. And after all is said and done, making a decision should leave you feeling complete and satisfied and able to move forward to the next task at hand and be able to tackle yet again another decision. So if you or someone you know struggles with any of these issues mentioned in this podcast, please feel free to reach out to me. Subscribe to my blog and my website. I have well over 200 articles on all things productivity related. And don't forget to subscribe to this podcast so you are the first to know when an episode becomes live. And if you have a question or idea of a topic you would like to hear me talk about, please email me. You can email me directly at balance at coachJulie.com and Julie is spelled J-U-L-I. There is no E. I look forward to sharing more on the Efficiency Advantage podcast, and thank you so much for listening.

SPEAKER_00 16:35

So that's it for today's episode of the Efficiency Advantage. Head on over to Apple Podcasts iTunes or wherever you listen and subscribe to the show. One lucky listener every single week that posts a review on Apple Podcasts or iTunes will win a chance in the grand prize drawing to win a private VIP day with Coach Julie herself. Be sure to head on over to the EfficiencyAdvantage.com and pick up a free copy of Coach Julie's gift. And join us on the next episode.