S3E01 - Feelings in Decision Making - Friend or Foe
In today's episode, I'll be talking about why it's important not to ignore feelings in decision-making, but instead to acknowledge and examine them.
I'll touch on how naming your feelings can help you get unstuck, how tuning into feelings can help you make better decisions, aligned with what you actually want and how it becoming adept at assessing what your feelings are telling you can help you make decisions more quickly. By the end of the episode, I hope you'll see why feelings can be a friend instead of a foe in decision-making.
“We need to stop thinking that the best decisions are ones made in an emotional vacuum. There’s a cost to ignoring how we feel. At best we leave useful data on the table.”
Episode Notes
We need to stop thinking that the best decisions are ones made in an emotional vacuum. There's a cost to ignoring how we feel. At best we leave useful data on the table. But at worst,
we waste time beholden to emotions that do have a powerful hold over us
we make decisions that deliver on the opposite of what we actually want
we exhaust ourselves by only using a portion of the brainpower that we could possibly be using.
The more we can get curious about what is the feeling that's coming up and what is it telling us about our process, the more useful it can become in moving forward with a good decision.
If you have feelings come up, take a step back, not to ignore, but to observe. Take an engineering lens and try to get at what is the data, ask yourself:
How can I learn more about these inputs for the decision problem I'm trying to solve? Where's that coming from? Why is this feeling coming up? Is it because there's a particular objective or value that is not being acknowledged? Is it because I feel constrained in my options? Do I have a sense of knowing my intuition and summary of past experiences? Is this a feeling stemming from a discomfort with not knowing? Perhaps it's simply the discomfort of not having reached a resolution yet.
