How to train your decision making gremlins!
When I tell people that I use coaching and therapy to help business leaders make better decisions, invariably they answer one of two things. ‘I’m terrible at making decisions,’ or ‘I’m an executive/CEO/entrepreneur (replace with any senior title) blah blah… clearly I don’t need help!’ as they proudly puff out their chest. However, if we talk more closely they will come to the conclusion that they do need coaching and/or therapy. We all do.
If asked, we often say we make decisions ‘from my gut’ and that’s brilliant… if your gut instinct is working from a good place. However, if we look over the shoulder of intuition (and I work extremely intuitively so it’s hard for me to do), our gut instinct is actually arrived at by our subconscious making a series of decisions itself to come to a point where it feels it has gathered enough evidence to label it as a feeling, and hand it back to you. Hey presto! Based on that feeling, you make a decision.
I’d like to say this has worked for me and I’ve led a faultless life, but unfortunately, it hasn’t. In the past, I made several poor decisions with far-reaching results. Given that there is no such thing as failure, only feedback (a horrible cliche but true coaching phrase), or deferred success (a phrase I prefer when things don’t go my way), I have worked hard to understand why. I now make very healthy decisions most of the time. Decision-making is something I work with every business leader on when we are doing coaching or therapy and it’s one of the things that when they get it right, it makes a huge impact both at work and at home. Decision-making is a huge topic, so let’s scratch the surface here.
Imagine your brain is a huge filing cabinet of memories and experiences. You present it with a request for a decision, and it rifles quickly through and looks for evidence from previous experience and learning that may help you reach a conclusion. Your brain is filtering 2 million pieces of information (images, smells, language, etc.) per second down to between 5-9 pieces that you will consciously see, so clearly it’s developed some clever shortcuts to survive. Here’s an example from a leadership coaching client of mine; she was asked to apply for a promotion, but she felt unable to do so. On an evidence basis, she was an excellent fit for the role. So, why did she have a gut instinct that prevented her from pursuing this opportunity?
Through the therapeutic elements of our coaching, she was able to work through the thoughts, assumptions, and emotions around the promotion, and bring to a conscious level the evidence for her reluctance to accept the promotion. She quickly remembered that many years previously a colleague had made a comment along these lines, ‘I hate you, you are so organised!’ The brain often doesn’t hear caveats and she just heard ‘I hate you’. Given that this promotion meant working with this colleague, the brain had pulled this comment out, dusted it off and put it out as negative evidence. All of our behaviour at some level is trying to protect us. Do you see the problem? By using a subconscious selection of evidence that may or may not be relevant now, we end up making decisions based on a quick rifling through our past, and not on new and updated data. Dangerously, this then presents as our gut instinct and we often trust it without question. It is a huge benefit to us all to have therapy clear out of our old files to make space for upgraded learning and for us to learn to self-coach in the moment. Imagine a business leader or executive running a whole company when they have this sort of poor filtering system running in the background. Eek!
If you want to make better decisions or have a mental spring clean to keep you on track, coaching, and therapy offer a space where you can be guided to find those lurking files you think you deleted, to help you weigh up what is relevant to you now, what new learnings you have gained and to empower you to make the decisions you need to make from a point of clarity and understanding. Filing cabinet gremlins can be trained!
If you are interested in leadership coaching but would like something that goes a little deeper, do get in touch.