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To become a confident decision maker, you have to start making decisions in a different way. There are 4 distinctions that separate confident decision makers that ensure they don’t procrastinate, people please or perfect (the enemies of all decisions). In today’s podcast I will cover each of the distinctions and why they are so important.
Topics in this episode:
Confident decision making does not mean you will get it “right”
The importance of giving yourself a container of time to make a decision
How gathering people’s opinion does not lead to better decisions
The importance of making faster more decisive decisions to create a balanced life
Why self-trust is important part of confidence
Show Notes & References:
Want to make a confident decision about your life & career? Schedule a time to chat and I will walk you through the process of confident decision making: www.rebeccaolsoncoaching.com/book
Have an episode idea? I’d love to hear it, send me an email with your suggestions: rebecca@rebeccaolsoncoaching.com
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Transcript
Intro
As a coach for Working Moms, I help women make confident decisions. I help women trust themselves and their instincts. I help them to take risks and care a lot less about failing and what other people think. Confident decision making is an important part of creating balance because it saves time and energy. Indecision is exhausting both mentally and physically. In today's podcast, I'm talking about four characteristics of confident decision making. You ready? Let's get to it.
Welcome to the Ambitious and Balanced Working Mom podcast, the place for women who want to balance their ambitious career goals with their life as a mom. If you're looking to feel more confident, decisive, and productive at both work and home, then this is the place for you. I'm your host, Rebecca Olson. Let's get to it.
Hello, working moms. I know a lot of us out there have kids that are on spring break or are coming off of spring break. I myself am writing this while I am on spring break with my kids. And I just want to remind you that during weeks like this that are not a part of our usual rhythms, that we need to practice giving ourselves a ton of grace and compassion and maybe even planning for a little extra time of rest, because when our kids are out of rhythm, it throws us off as well. And so it's just better to expect that there's going to be a little bit of offness during this time and that's okay. We can plan for it and have the thought that we're going to get right back into the normal rhythms soon. For me, as I sit here and write this podcast, I am looking at these amazing views of San Francisco and the Golden Gate Bridge, sitting here at the Bay while I write. And then I'm going to go home and I'm going to shut down for the day, and I'm going to be with some family that's coming into town or has just come into town, and I'm just going to enjoy my day. So you have my permission to do that too.
Are you constantly second-guessing yourself?
Here's what we're going to talk about in today's podcast, confident decision making. Now, a few weeks ago, I hosted a free five-day event called Belief Week, and I asked Working Moms why they want to increase their beliefs in themselves, what was important about them believing in themselves at a higher level. And by far the most common reason people gave me was because they wanted to learn how to make more confident decisions. They wanted to learn how to trust themselves, to not go back and forth so much, to not need somebody else's opinions all the time, to not worry about what other people think, to take more risks. And they sort of all just lump this into this idea or really, I lump it all into this idea of making confident decisions. And it makes sense. You make over 30,000 decisions a day, and most of them with a little bit of consciousness. It takes a lot of energy to make decisions. And if you're constantly second-guessing them in the middle of the decision-making processes, that's an exhausting place to be.
I want you to imagine yourself being indecisive. Maybe you would describe yourself as being an indecisive person, but I want you to imagine that in-between space of indecision or someone that lacks confidence in their decisions, and they're constantly fearing failure. There's always this nervousness and anxiety around making decisions. Imagine how much time and energy is just wasted in those 300 somewhat conscious decisions. How much brain space is literally taken up with the indecision process. And as a coach for working moms, I help my clients make more confident decisions. Whether that's a really big decision, like what you want to do with your career, or it's an everyday decision, like, what are you going to prioritize today? There is a big distinction between being a confident decision-maker and then someone who is not. And today I want to talk about some of those distinctions.
I want to paint a picture for you of how a confident decision-maker makes decisions versus somebody that is potentially stuck in indecision or would describe themselves as being someone that's not a confident decision-maker. Because having worked personally with hundreds of working moms helping them make more confident decisions, I've noticed some pretty big differences between women and their processes.
Time containers.
The first distinction I want to make is that confident decision-makers give themselves a container of time. One of the reasons why confident decision-makers don't get stuck in indecision is they don't allow themselves to. They don't give themselves oodles of time to make a decision. They give themselves a deadline in order to make that decision. And if you're a chronic procrastinator, you know how useful deadlines are because you need them in order to get things done - in order to finish a project, in order to work on a task, in order to make a decision. A deadline is like a forced timeline that you give yourself. So let me give you an example. I spoke to a woman recently on one of the free breakthrough calls that I offer when you're thinking about working with me as your coach. And she was thinking about changing jobs. She had been a teacher for the past decade, and she was unhappy, but she loved the time off and the benefits that she had. And so she's been sort of mulling over this idea for quite some time, going back and forth around if she was really happy. And then, of course, every summer she would think she was totally fine and everything was great. And then the fall would roll around, and she realized that she really wasn't happy. And then she'd go back into the ‘Do I really want to do this? Do the benefits outweigh the cons?’ She would talk to friends, she would wonder. She would stress, all the while still being in this unhappy state. I know a lot of you can totally relate to this, whether you're a teacher or not. I told her that in coaching she would make a decision on if she wanted to stay or go, and if she left, she would figure out exactly what she wanted next, all within six months. And there was a long pause, and I asked her what was coming up for her. What emotion was she feeling as I gave her that deadline? And she said, fear. She just felt paralyzed almost by the idea of having to make that decision because things got real, fast. All because I had given her a container of time. And as we started to dig into it, we started to get what was behind that fear. She started to talk about how she really wasn't on the same page with her husband and that she needed to really have an honest conversation with him about it. She realized that one of the reasons why it was so hard to figure out what she wanted is she didn't really have any sense of what other options were out there and if she could continue with her benefits in the way that she has them. The deadline is meant to help bring up all of the fears, all of the crap, if you will, that is getting in the way so that you can address it and not be paralyzed by it anymore.
Deadlines or containers of time also prevent perfectionism and people-pleasing.
I want you to think back to when you were in college and you had to write a paper and you had a deadline of 08:00 a.m the next morning or whatever it might be. Maybe you've had weeks of time to work on it, but you wait until the very last minute. And what happens when you pull that all-nighter? You don't have time to perfect your writing. You don't have time to focus on if you're getting it right or wrong. You just have to get word on the paper. You can't worry about if you're doing things right or wrong or what other people may think or whatnot, you have to push your brain through all of those thoughts. They're still there, but you have an ability, because of the deadline, to push through them and say I can't listen to those thoughts, those thoughts aren't important, I just got to get words on the paper, and then you push through until you turn it in at 7:59 the next morning.
Deadlines help move us past all of these tendencies that we have to try to get things right and make sure we're pleasing everyone. It automatically silences a lot of those very dominant thoughts because there just isn't any time to consider them. Confident people give themselves a container of time to make decisions.
Asking yourself the right questions.
The second distinction between confident decision-makers and those that are not is that they figure out all of the variables or the options by asking themselves questions and then answering them. What I teach my clients as I help them to learn the skill of confident decision-making is that they always have the right answer within them. We just assume that to be true. Now, that doesn't necessarily mean that they always get to the desired outcome, but that really has no bearing on whether the decision is right or wrong. What? Let me say that again, confident decision-making isn't about getting to the right answer where you always get the desired outcome because getting to the desired outcome has nothing to do with whether the decision is right or wrong. I could probably do a whole other podcast on that because remember rightness? Something that we label as right that's completely subjective to you. You just simply get to decide what is right for you, the outcome of that comes later and then you get to decide what is right based on how the outcome turned out. Maybe you need to tweak it. Maybe you need to change something. Maybe you need to do something different. A confident decision maker figures out what the best decision is, what the right decision is for them, not by researching what other people think or getting other people's opinions of that, or researching a whole bunch of data or worrying about the desired outcome. Instead, they simply look inside of them. They use internal data to guide them.
Okay, let me give you an example of this. I'm going to use a simple one, one that is based on my experience. When my firstborn was a little bitty baby trying to buy the first pair of shoes for her, she was just starting to waddle a little bit and we needed to buy her something that had a little bit more of a sole. So I hop on the internet and do some research. There's a bunch of different opinions out there and thoughts about what kind of shoes are best for early walkers. And then I jumped in some Facebook groups and I wanted to see what other moms would think and try to get some recommendations on types of shoes or brands to buy or thoughts about it. And then of course that sends me to all of these stores where now I'm looking at prices. And then I kind of realized that I don't really want to spend $40 on these first pair of walking shoes because she's not going to wear them very long and they don't need to be that expensive. And so then I went back into the Facebook group. I started to look at other people's recommendations and by this point I'm hours into the project of just simply trying to buy my daughter a pair of shoes. Right? It's not the end of the world. It's not that big of a deal. I wasted all of this time that I could have otherwise spent with her. Now a confident decision-maker, what they would do is they would think about what's the most important thing in buying these first pair of shoes? And maybe they don't have any idea because they've never had kids like me. But rather than allowing themselves endless time to research that and ask other people, they just say, I'm going to give myself ten minutes to look at this. And so they jump online. They read a couple of articles, they figure out a list of a couple of things that they need to watch out for, right? They gave themselves that deadline first, and then in ten minutes they're really only able to look at a couple of sites because that's really all they need anyway. It gives them the gist of what is most important in the shoes. They learn that they shouldn't be very rigid. They should be very flexible. They should learn that the toe shouldn't come up all the way over to the top of their foot because it adds a little too much friction. It says that they should go about a half a size bigger if there's any discrepancy between the 2ft. At the end of ten minutes, a confident decision-maker might feel like they want to go ask their friends about it, or jump into some Facebook groups and check out a couple of other sites. But they don't let themselves, they have the urge, they just say, no, I have everything I need. It's not worth my time. They trust the information that they have and take a moment to zoom out. They think about the perspective. They know that they're not going to screw up their kids' feet if they don't buy the perfect pair of first shoes and so they just simply get the data and they go on a site, they buy the shoes, and they're done all within anywhere between ten and no more than 30 minutes.
Stop looking outside yourself for the answer and start looking within.
Let's take another example of one of my past clients that just recently took a promotion in her job. The less confident version of her - as she was considering taking this promotion or not, would have likely consulted as many people as possible, talking to them about the pros and cons, seeing what they thought. She probably would have had endless conversations with her husband about if she should do it or if she shouldn't. She would have maybe even asked some of her colleagues if they thought she was ready for that promotion. She may have even tried to get some insider information around what other people thought. You know, the kind of balance that in this role she would expect to experience. She would always be having this pros and cons list running in her head. She might even talk to her current boss about it. All this data. She's trying to get what everybody else feels. She's trying to talk it out on some level, and she would have spent endless amounts of energy doing that getting other people's opinion, which is kind of a form of research right? And trying to figure out what the ‘right answer’ was for her. But now as a much more confident decision-maker, having spent almost a year working with me, Haley didn't do any of that. She didn't tell me exactly what her process was for making this decision, so I'm guessing on a little bit of this - based on the conversation that we did have this time around, she focused on really asking herself why she would be successful at that job. She asked herself what kind of support she would need in order to be successful. She asked herself what kind of boundaries she would be able to put in place in order to make sure that her life would remain balanced. She asked herself how this job fit into the bigger picture of her career. She asked herself if she thought it was worth it. Notice the focus is so much more on what did SHE think about all of these things, not what did other people think and trying to validate some of her opinions through other people. The biggest part of this distinction is that you're figuring out all of the various variables your research, if you will, and the different aspects of the decision, not by looking at what other people think and what other people do, but simply by looking at yourself and your own opinion, your own brain for what it is you think is most important, and you don't run it by other people to get validation. When your brain asks, is this right? You answer it with your best guess and why you think that. So you give yourself a time frame to make decisions and you look to yourself to figure out the various variables and self validate your own thoughts.
Now the third thing confident decision-makers do, and this kind of goes along with the second point is that they make a lot of educated guesses, or hunches, as I like to call them. What do you think you should do? What do you think is the most important thing to work on this week? Why do you think that is going to make you happy? Why do you think you should take that job or not to take that job? What's your thoughts about leaving your job? What's your best guess? Is that what you really want? What do you think the best way is to handle your toddler tantrum in this moment? Whatever you come up with, your hunch, your best guess based on the research that you just did in step two, where you were looking at all the variables and trying to ask yourself some good questions about what was most important. So you come up with a best guess based on that information, and then you ask yourself, why? Why is that your hunch? Why do you think that's the best decision in this case? And this is one of the hardest parts about becoming a confident decision-maker because your brain is going to want to tell you that if you took more time to research and ask more people and validate it, you will get a more right answer, that you would be able to somehow guarantee your results even more, when in reality, you can never really guarantee a result ever. When you research more and you ask more people their opinion, you're essentially giving yourself more data to sift through. And what more data to sift through is going to do is make your decision so much more challenging. Just think about when you were in college, was it easier for you to write a research paper that required you to read five books or just one book out of five books? Not only does it take time to read them all, but you also have to sift through their ideas. You have to figure out which ones are relevant and which one is not. You have to make connections between all of those things. It's so much harder to take more information and dwindle it down or sift it in order to get to an answer that feels right for you than when you have less information. Confident decision-makers make decisions that get them to their desired outcome more than those that are indecisive, not because they have a better sense of what is right or wrong, but because they make lots and lots of decisions. They don't allow themselves endless amounts of time to research. They don't get all of the different opinions and everyone else around there. So they just make decisions and they move forward and they learn based on whatever the outcome was, whether it got them to the desired outcome or it didn't. And then they make more decisions. And so over time, they make so many more decisions than the person that is sitting in indecision is constantly trying to make sure their decisions are right. Does that make sense?
We learn from our failures.
So much of our learning and life happens not from our successes, but from our failures, from the decisions that we make that don't turn out the way that we planned. You learn from those, and you can then keep applying and learning to make the next decision and then the next one and the next one. So confident decision-makers are willing to make lots of decisions based on their best guess, and they worry a lot less about it being right because they know that they will learn from it and they will make better decisions later. Let me give you an example. None of us know how to handle our kids when they first start tantruming. We have to start making a lot of in the moment decisions that feel very heightened emotionally on how we are going to handle it. Because our kid is literally throwing themselves all over the floor or hitting or just crying. And it's really difficult for us as parents. And this phase that our kids go through of emotionally tantruming lasts for many, many years, and so there are many opportunities to figure out the best way to handle your child and yourself in the midst of that challenging moment. And if every time your child was tantruming, you made a decision on how to handle it, one time you decide to sit with them through it, maybe the next time you decide you're going to put them in a time out, or another time you decide to give them a punching bag to hit - that's a phase that I'm in with my son. Or another time you decide to distract them and give them a toy or tickle them. Or maybe another time you decide to talk to them in the midst of it. Or another time you decide to stay silent and just let them talk to you or cry to you. Or another time you decide to give yourself a little time out in the middle of it and let them kind of run amok for a minute while you pull yourself together. There are so many ways to handle this moment. There are so many ways to handle a tantruming toddler. And if each time you make a decision to handle the tantrum based on what your best guess is, and then afterwards you think about what worked and what didn't, you file that away in your brain and figure out what's the best way to handle this moment with my child. Each time you do that, you try something, you learn from it. And instead of beating yourself up because the tantrum didn't go so well, or it lasted a really long period of time, or you got really frustrated or you got really angry, instead of sitting in judgment instead, you said, Well, I tried this. Here is the result. Did that work or not? What did I learn from it? You file all of that information away, and then the next time it happens, you have that information to build on and say, okay, here's what worked. Here's what didn't work. Here's how I'm going to try it differently. If you did that over and over again and took the time to really consider how to best handle your tantruming child 100%, you're going to be in a better place so much faster. Where you don't get angry so much, where you don't feel so judgmental of yourself when things go your way, where you aren't so frustrated at your kids when it's happening. All of those moments are going to lessen over time if you allow yourself to decide and learn from it.
So confident decision-makers follow their hunches and they make lots and lots of educated guesses - not right decisions, they make educated guesses.
Now, the last distinction I want to make about confident decision-makers is that they spend more time thinking about how their decision is right instead of poking holes in their theory and ruminating on why it might be wrong. This is where flip-flopping decision-making happens when you make a decision and you think you're all in until something happens, which then makes you reconsider that decision. And always that something happening is an emotion. Think about the example I gave you about the teacher that was thinking about not being a teacher anymore. She was flip-flopping for years around this decision on whether she wanted to stay a teacher or not. And during the summertime, she felt really good about being a teacher because she had the summer off, but then the fall would come and she would start feeling overwhelmed or that she wasn't enjoying it, or she'd feel unhappy and she would flip flop in the other direction. She would use the feelings of being overwhelmed and stressed as evidence for how the decision to stay a teacher was wrong. And she would use the feelings of calm and satisfaction over the summer for evidence, essentially on how that decision was right to stay a teacher right? Remember, our brain is wired to think about all of the bad stuff that's going to happen, right? It's wired to tell you why your decisions are likely wrong. It's wired to poke holes in all of your decisions to focus on the cons, not the pros. So confident decision-makers, they still have that same brain, they just simply redirect their thoughts on why their hunch is right, why they're educated. The best guess is the right decision to make when you get to work on a Monday morning and you have 20 things that you need to do, you have to decide what to prioritize and what not to. There's not a right or wrong way to prioritize any of it. Actually, though, it’s likely people are probably affected by your decision, but there's no right or wrong way to prioritize. Though likely people are of course affected by your decision. Some people might have to wait longer for your response, or for your approval, or for your email or whatever it may be, but all you could ever do is make an educated guess on what the best thing is to prioritize and then move forward towards it.
Now, someone who is not a confident decision-maker, they'd likely feel pretty paralyzed in this moment, they don't know what the right thing is to do. Out of the 20 things, they don't want anyone to be disappointed in them. And so because of that, they just likely tackle the easiest things first like emails and messages. They do the simplest things, things that make them feel like they're making progress. So they check off the list. They do the things that affect other people, so other people aren't disappointed in them. But all of those things, or none of those things are likely the most important thing to get done. It's a very powerless way to prioritize in that way. And if they finally make a decision to work on a project or a presentation or something that needs to get done where somebody isn't waiting on them or there isn't a deadline focused on it, their brain is always sort of wondering that maybe they should be working on something else. Maybe somebody else needs them. Maybe they should check that email a little bit more. Maybe they need to tackle more things on this list and the brain is just focusing more on poking holes in whatever decision that they make. And a confident person, they look at that same list of 20 things and they say, okay, what's the top five things I really need to get done today? What's my must-haves? One of my clients uses that phrase, what are my must-haves today? Like I have to get these things done. And when a frustrated coworker comes to them looking for something that they need from them, rather than using that as evidence for why they maybe didn't prioritize correctly, they were waiting on something that wasn't in their top five. Of course, they apologize for the delay and they tell them when that task is going to get done. Maybe they decide to reprioritize in the moment to accommodate them, but maybe they don't and they don't ever use it as evidence for their doing something wrong. People are waiting, so I must not be doing a great job. People are potentially being disappointed. Deadlines being moved as evidence for making wrong decisions. So confident decision-makers, they're constantly redirecting their brain as to why their decisions, why their hunches, why their best guesses are right instead of ruminating on how they could have been wrong or are wrong if they don't get to the desired outcome, how they've made wrong decisions.
All right, so let's review for a second. Some of the key distinctions between confident decision-makers and those that are not are that confident decision-makers give themselves a container of time. They give themselves a deadline. They look more to themselves for the answer instead of others or doing endless amounts of research, they follow their best guess and trust that it's the right decision no matter what the outcome is.
A confident person makes decisions based on trust.
I've spoken about this before on the podcast, but remember, an expert makes decisions based on knowledge. A confident person makes decisions based on trust. Trust in themselves, trust in their instincts, trust in their skills, trusting in the information that they do have instead of focusing on the information they don't have and I am sure there is going to be so much more on making decisions in the Ambitious and Balanced Working Mom's Podcast because I know how important it is for experiencing balance. You have to be able to feel like your decisions are right for you in the moment. You have to not beat yourself up when you don't get to the desired outcomes. You need to learn how to be more productive with your time which means making faster, more decisive decisions. It's such an important part of creating balance and I love always hearing your topics. If you want me to cover something very specific in this podcast, please do send me an email. I will put my email in the show notes so that you can send me a quick email. Let me know something that you want me to cover and as always working moms, let's get to it.
Outro
Hey, before you go I want to take a moment and tell you about an opportunity to speak with me directly. If you've been listening to this podcast and still feel like you need help balancing a fulfilling career with motherhood then I encourage you to schedule a free breakthrough call. On this call we will get crystal clear on exactly what it is you want out of your career and how you want to balance that with motherhood and then we'll crack the next steps for you to start moving toward a more calm and fulfilling working mom life. Head over to www.rebeccaolsoncoaching.com/book to apply for this free call.
Until next week and working moms, let's get to it.
