Category Archives: Coaching

Nowadays, it seems like we are constantly hearing about public figures making controversial statements that carry heavy demands for apologies and /or consequences.

It would make sense that if leaders – corporate, political or otherwise – make a mistake or make an insensitive statement, a sincere apology would be the right course of action. It would certainly help them save face, demonstrate character and make peace with the public. But surprisingly, recent research by Columbia University shows that, following a blunder, apologizing might not be the right way to go.

The experiment tested public response to leaders’ apologies. And the results were surprising: “The evidence suggests that when a prominent figure apologizes for a controversial statement, individuals are either unaffected or become more likely to desire that the individual be punished.”

These findings validate the theory that apologizing might make public figures appear weak and risk averse, which may make them less likeable. So if you find yourself saying or doing the wrong thing, apologizing may not necessarily help.

Regardless of what research shows, I am of the opinion that you shouldn’t stop apologizing too quickly. However, it would be important to consider in what kind of instances you’d be apologizing in a leadership capacity – and your everyday life too.

If it serves an important purpose, the offence is of serious consequence, or if it’s appropriate that you as the leader assume responsibility for it… all of these will certainly have a positive outcome. Yet apologies aren’t necessary in all of the cases.

Bottom line, if you’ve done something that has major negative consequences for someone else, it’s important to acknowledge it if you value the health of those relationships. If you’re just apologizing to smooth things over or difuse the situation, you may need to consider what those kind of apologies may do to your authority or status. A leader that apologizes often over trivial things may lose credibility for those who want a confident, assertive person leading their path to success.

One thing is for sure, if you’ve messed up, whether you decide to apologize or not, whatever you do, be sincere and authentic. Don’t just say “I’m sorry”, follow up also up with an acknowledgement of responsibility. This will help you rebuild trust with people.

So is an apology the right move? Well, it really depends on what’s occurred and why you’re apologizing. But whenever you do decide to make an apology, make sure you come across as heartfelt and authentic—because if you truly are sorry, you want your audience to know.

To your success,

Isabel x

Isabel is an experienced Peak Performance Strategist with over 20 years of international work experience holding senior positions within the hospitality industry in countries around the world, as well as Executive and Leadership coaching, mentoring and training.
She specializes in high performance strategy, leadership development and building organizational culture to help leaders and their teams learn, grow and succeed.
Isabel is passionate about helping empower business leaders with the mindset, performance, skills and strategies that they need to get ahead.
More available on www.isabelvalle.com

TIME TO EMBRACE SMART WORK

Become More Efficient and Come Out Stronger by Working Smarter, Not Harder

The coronavirus pandemic will have a lasting impact on the future of work. As the pandemic resets major work trends, I thought this would be a perfect time to also address the big elephant in the working room: the hard, long working hours that many of us give to work for the sake of a promotion, pay rise, unrealistic working demands, inflexible working cultures, over demanding managers, or simply because we got so used to working hard that we really don’t know how to turn it off and enjoy time with friends, family, hobbies, or however else we may choose to spend our time and energy.

This pandemic has caught all of us by surprise. And yet, despite facing difficult times, it has also allowed us to understand that there is a different way in which we can work and go about our lives, whilst remaining efficient and focused on delivering business results. Rather than panic, I’ve watched how many are actively working on what they can control, figuring out ways to work smarter and more efficiently for the sake of their work, their family, and their sanity. We may have been forced into a world we didn’t choose to be a part of, and yet, I believe that there are great learnings and opportunities to be exploited by going through these new world challenges.

In today’s ever-changing and often-chaotic business environment, organizations invested in succeeding must understand how to make change work when everything is changing. Allowing more employees to work from home, arranging more virtual meetings or holding online conferences alone won’t cut it. We are not just talking about cutting down on expensive and more time-consuming activities here. Your company’s survival in the long term is going to depend now more than ever on your ability to come up with smarter, leaner and more agile ways of working in order to be efficient, productive and stronger than ever before in the face of adversity.

Recent studies on how to “recession-proof” our businesses in order to avoid getting impacted from an economic downturn keep telling the same story, that agility and the capacity to adjust fast will be determining factors behind survival, as well as minimizing costs and being efficient. Learning to work smarter, not hard, will help companies and individuals accomplish all of this. Because what got us here won’t get us to where we need to go next. Change is unavoidable and it’s time we all embrace it.

This is often easier said than done though – without a clear plan and strategy for your workday in place, most people end up overcommitted, overwhelmed and overworked. Adapting to a more agile, effective and efficient way or working will require everyone’s participation and contribution. There are many issues that need resolving, such as looking at root causes, people not being team players, dominance, lack of communication, top-down management decisions, silo mentality, and the list goes on.

How to make working smarter the new way of working at an organizational level

To build the workforce you’ll need post-pandemic, you must focus less on roles — which group unrelated skills — and instead sharpen the skills needed to drive the organization’s competitive advantage and the workflows that fuel that advantage. Encourage employees to develop critical skills that potentially open up multiple opportunities for their career development, rather than preparing them for a specific next role. Offer greater career development support to employees in critical roles who lack critical skills, such as leadership, creativity, interpersonal skills, problem-solving and critical thinking or data analysis skills.

This shift will help you create a more responsive, resilient organization, by designing roles and structures around outcomes to increase agility and flexibility and formalize how processes can flex. As an added bonus, provide employees with varied, adaptive and flexible roles so they acquire cross-functional knowledge and training.

The partnership between Finance and HR as key strategic partners:

In order to navigate the way of doing business post-pandemic, the focus must not continue to be placed in finances alone to secure the company’s moves in the short-, mid- and long-term. In considering which moves will be of the greatest benefit to the long-term growth of companies, a clear emphasis needs to be placed in labour.

Quick and easy layoffs and reducing headcount at a time of crisis could have catastrophic consequences for the long-term survival of any business. Better, smarter options would include recruitment freezes, granted leave of absence, and pay cuts, options which must all be assessed with HR.

HR must therefore become a strategic partner moving forward. This is a unique opportunity for HR to be at the forefront of shaping the business to navigate through this challenging time.

A Finance / HR partnership at a strategic level can help companies take decisive valuable steps to ensure that they are not only responding well in the short term, but also positioning their company for success throughout the phases of economic recovery. Just as important as managing the cash flow is the health and wellbeing of employees. Take care of them and in return they will bring their best game. Moving forward, your people will judge organizations by the way in which they treat employees and their transparency, so become an employer of choice.

 

In today’s business environment, leaders are not the only ones who drive change. Now, everyone understands change and is a change agent. Also, experienced players are not the most important and innovative.

Nowadays, it is crucial to create leaders at all levels. A Deloitte recent global survey found that leadership is the #1 issue organisations face today, yet only 15% of companies are actively developing their talent. Without their own pool of potential leaders to develop and nurture, organizations are forced to recruit externally. This comes at a higher price, and often with mixed results.

Gone are the days when traditional leaders sat in their office and delivered orders that their workers carried out. This kind of top-down, information-sharing, decision-making and development-modelling is becoming increasingly ineffective. The very idea of what it is to be a leader is changing.

We must now consider ways in which to instil leadership at all levels, so that employees are informed, enabled and empowered to move company goals. As more organisations dismantle their traditional hierarchies, and as more traditional leaders retire, the need to establish leaders at all levels grows significantly.

Companies need to draw focus to discovering talent, and put potential leaders in positions that stretch them beyond their current skillsets. To attract and retain the top talent of the future, leadership at all levels must become a strategic imperative. How organisations do it is something they need to take their own lead on.

Your employees are under immense pressure to push themselves as far as they can, frequently facing their own breaking points, for the promise of a promotion or salary increase. But these perks no longer come as steadily, even in larger corporations.

So, not only are many work cultures more intense than they’ve ever been, employees aren’t even being compensated for the work they are doing. As you can imagine, that’s not good for your employees or your business. Studies show that overworked employees are actually less efficient, less productive and overall unhappier than their counterparts.

A study by Stanford University also found that when employees work more than 40 to 50 hours in a given week, they are two-thirds less productive. Two-thirds! This is not only detrimental to their quality of work, but it’s also dangerous to their mental health.

Most employees understand that there are certain days and weeks throughout the year when they will be required to work longer hours—like during month-end closings or leading up to a company event or organized trip. Yet, if they work like this every day, you could potentially be driving your employees to burnout.

To combat this, companies must promote physical health and improve the emotional wellbeing of employees. One of the biggest predictors of employees’ disengagement at work is doing very long hours, and being overwhelmed with too many things to do. With such burden on employees, it’s going to be difficult for you to retain your top talent.

In my personal opinion, it all starts with great leadership, by empowering and trusting employees with the right culture, tools, targets and processes. And this must continue with the employees, who need to demonstrate both the commitment and responsibility to earn the trust of leadership and their own peers. In other words, it’s everyone’s responsibility to make smart work work.

Employees look to their leaders to set an example of work ethic and also to set the culture of the company. If you lead from a distance—otherwise known as the “invisible CEO”—and employees see themselves and their colleagues doing all of the hard work, that will be the perception of your company, whether it’s true or not.

In a recent study, 52 percent of employees reported that they believed their leaders cared about the productivity of the company over them. If you expect your employees to remain committed to your business, you need to prove that you don’t value efficiency over their wellbeing.

Your company may be your life, but to your employees, it’s a career. You may have built a robust enough foundation within your company where you can delegate more tasks and step back from the day-to-day routine a bit more, but make sure you pay attention to both the expectations and work you’re putting on your team. They shouldn’t be grinding away more than you are.

Research from the Behance team found that placing importance on hours and physical presence over action and results leads to a culture of inefficiency – and anxiety. We must create an intention to change the way we view working hours, and proactively make a shift from work based on number of hours to results achieved within a timeframe.

This became a very clear concept for me personally years ago when I became both a new mum and a new GM in a new city and a new hotel. Very quickly I realised that, if I wanted to succeed and do well, I’d need to focus on creating results based on working smartly, so I could dedicate precious time with my baby.

I became familiar with Parkinson’s Law, which states that work expands to fill the time available for its completion – and realised soon after that with clarity and intentional action we can in fact become high performing, productive individuals in much less time and effort.

Employers need to appreciate the importance – and return on investment – of employees who work smart. The idea that the longer something takes to complete, the better quality it must be, is no longer justifiable.

Measure results, not time. A 12hr working day haunted by stress, interruptions, sleep deprivation, or overwhelm is not worth the 720 minutes it’s allotted. It’s a low-quality working day. You’d be foolish to expect that you can turn such dirty input into clear accomplishments. Instead, you need to actively work on increasing the purity and quality of your hours.

You can do that by asking yourself these simple questions to start helping you clarify important tasks and create more quality time:

1. Do I need to be involved in this?
2. Is this bringing me closer to my goal?
3. Could this wait?
4. Can I say no to this?
5. Can someone else do it?
6. Could this be replaced by something else that would help me generate quicker and better results?

One way to assist you with measuring results instead of time is by generating done lists. This is simply an ongoing log of everything you completed in a day. By keeping this list you’ll feel more motivated and focused since you can actually see what you accomplished. When you review your day, it also gives you a chance to celebrate your accomplishments, and helps you plan more effectively.

You are always choosing. Choose well. Your time is valuable – respect it with a solid plan, getting the rest you need to stay focused, and tuning into your passions and your customers. Once you start working smarter, the results will speak for themselves.

 

To your success,

Isabel

Isabel Valle PCC

Isabel is an experienced Peak Performance Strategist with over 20 years of international work experience holding senior positions within the hospitality industry in countries around the world, as well as Executive and Leadership coaching, mentoring and training. She specializes in high performance strategy, leadership development and building organizational culture to help leaders and their teams learn, grow and succeed. Isabel is passionate about helping empower business leaders with the mindset, performance, skills and strategies that they need to get ahead.

Más información disponible en www.isabelvalle.com.

WANNA BE AN EFFECTIVE LEADER?

Isabel is an experienced Peak Performance Strategist with over 20 years of international work experience holding senior positions within the hospitality industry in countries around the world, as well as Executive and Leadership coaching, mentoring and training.
She specializes in high performance strategy, leadership development and building organizational culture to help leaders and their teams learn, grow and succeed.
Isabel is passionate about helping empower business leaders with the mindset, performance, skills and strategies that they need to get ahead.
More available on www.isabelvalle.com

ARE YOU AFRAID OF EXPRESSING YOUR OWN IDEAS AND OPINIONS?

You struggle to find the right words. You try to be smart but feel like nobody’s paying attention. I used to feel awkward at social gatherings. I struggled to come up with something valuable to say. And when I thought of something, the conversation had moved on. So, I decided to become smarter – not by learning more necessarily, but by becoming an original thinker. Wanna join me?

Over the last few years, I have spoken to many people who feel their ideas have no value, they don’t know how to come up with ideas of their own, or are so caught up on other people’s ideas they don’t give themselves an opportunity to come up with and express their own.

Let me ask you, are you consuming too much information? Over the last decade, I’ve noticed how more and more of us are spending any available time we have reading books, listening to podcasts, watching shows, attending workshops and devouring social media non stop. I fear information is now becoming another drug of choice, filling every moment.

I remember the good old days when all I had available to keep me busy was a bunch of books, a TV with very selected channels, and a wild imagination. What I liked about that time was the fact that I’d watch something on TV and then I’d have a period of hours or days to help me form my own ideas about what I had read or watched. I remember so vividly having constant conversations with myself, inside my head, trying to figure whether I agreed with what I had learnt or not, if I felt comfortable about the situation, or whether I could imagine different ways in which the situation could be improved. Thankfully, that inner dialogue has stayed with me ever since, and I thoroughly enjoy looking at different topics from a variety of angles to allow me to form my own ideas and opinions.

Unfortunately, newer generations have been blessed with a myriad of gadgets and ways in which to stay busy and distracted, which is hindering their ability to create the quiet space that’s required to come up with the kind of creative, innovative, original ideas that the world so desperately craves.

I see it all the time in my practice. Clients will come to me wanting to find clarity, ways in which to be, do and feel better, hoping to become a better version of themselves, wanting to inspire others to do the same. The internal calling is always there. Most of them will spend decades educating themselves in the most impressive way. I feel honoured to be able to work with such impressive creative, highly intellectual minds. Their knowledge can at times seem intimidating, so why the conflict?

Having a passion for learning myself, I used to joke at times that “the more you know, the more you realise you don’t know! My mum watches me in disbelief and tells me, “when will it be enough Isabel? why do you keep learning? why put yourself through the added responsibility of trying to find the time/ energy for it?”. I laugh at her comments, but deep down I know she’s not entirely wrong.

Often, what’s missing is not a PhD, Master’s Degree or certification. What’s really missing is our ability to come up with our own original ideas and opinions that we can proudly express to the world.

Allow me to clarify, consuming information does not equal learning. Consuming information is passive, and if that’s all you do, you’ll forget the most of it, and rarely apply in your life.

If all you do is consume the ideas and facts and creations of others, you don’t leave your mind enough time to do its thing—think. You have to form your own opinions, to structure ideas in your own way, to let your imagination get involved.

Imagine cooking. Reading a processed idea is like cooking a dish by following a recipe. The food might be great, but you don’t learn to cook. A seasoned chef doesn’t need recipes. He knows why different ingredients are put together. He understands how to combine them to form a delicious dish.

If all we’re doing is reading other people’s ideas, without forming our own, we often feel as if there’s still more to learn. In my experience what’s missing more often than not, is forming your own conclusion, doing your own thinking, even creating a different type of option that reflects your own experience.

The best way to improve your ability to think is to spend time thinking.

Thinking means concentrating on one thing long enough to develop an idea about it. Not learning other people’s ideas, or memorizing a body of information, however much those may sometimes be useful, but developing your own ideas, thinking for yourself.

I love when my clients tell me: “That’s a great question. I’ve never thought of that before!”. That’s when I know that we’re about to uncover some original ideas, and I’m never disappointed.

You must learn to express yourself. It’s nerve-wracking putting your own material into the world. You don’t know how people will respond, you don’t know if you missed something, you don’t know if you could have made it better.

You have ideas that no one else has. The best thing about creativity is that when you make something your own, it will be unlike anything else, setting you apart from everyone else.

If you spend hours each day consuming other people’s information, it’s time to take a break. This is one of the top habits that can make you feel intimidated, overwhelmed, and like there can’t possibly be anything you can add. Instead, create some space to come up with your own.

Creativity and original ideas are like a muscle. You must work them often in order to keep it in good form. Ask “What’s missing? Do I feel that there are still some unanswered questions? If it was up to me, what would happen next? What obstacles may come up and how could we overcome them?” There are gaps in every story. Find them, and you have a new idea that brings the topic forward.

I find that most of us do have good original ideas. The issue is what we do with it. Most of us are lazy. We can’t be bothered with writing down our thoughts. We take a mental note and continue with our day. Only to find out later that we can’t remember what this great idea was about.

I often have great ideas when I least expect them. They pop up in my head while I’m working out, taking a shower, being stuck in traffic or trying to go to sleep. Having a way to write them down immediately is a great way to track your best thoughts and insights. You’d be in shock if you saw the endless pages of notes that I keep in my smartphone. Don’t lose your ideas. They’re invaluable.

One of the most important things an original thinker needs is an inner belief that what they are doing has value. If you think you’ve got something, don’t let any negative thoughts or external critics stop you from pursuing it. Instead, begin to express your ideas. Speak up in a meeting, challenge a teacher in class, push back against stereotypes in a conversation, or write a book about it. Life will present you many opportunities to share your ideas, but you must be willing to do so.

Question everything. Think about a topic and ask yourself:

– Do I agree about the ideas presented so far?

– What’s my own take on it?

– How does it relate to my own personal experience?

– How could we bring the conversation forward?

– What’s missing?

– How could we improve / make the situation better?

Stop consuming endless information. Start producing original thoughts.

We live in an information-saturated world. Make room to explore your own thoughts and ideas. Spark your creative thoughts and watch every area of your life improve.

Become an original thinker. Come up with your own creative ideas and share them with the world. Your ideas matter. Your voice matters. Your truth matters. You matter.

To your success,

Isabel

Isabel is an experienced Peak Performance Strategist with over 20 years of international work experience holding senior positions within the hospitality industry in countries around the world, as well as Executive and Leadership coaching, mentoring and training.
She specializes in high performance strategy, leadership development and building organizational culture to help leaders and their teams learn, grow and succeed.
Isabel is passionate about helping empower business leaders with the mindset, performance, skills and strategies that they need to get ahead.
More available on www.isabelvalle.com

PERFECTION: THE ENEMY OF LEADERSHIP

More than two thirds of my current conversations with clients have a “perfectionism” theme. A constant voice inside us telling us that we are not good enough, our work is not good enough, we are not competent enough.

Giving into this inner voice, we demand and expect a lot of ourselves and others, working harder than we need to – instead of becoming effective and productive – ending exhausted, stressed and overwhelmed by the ongoing list of unrealistic expectations.

The continuous stress of this self-judgement reduces effectiveness and performance, and it makes it harder for you, demotivating and demoralizing your employees, choking teams of creativity and authenticity. It’s a high price to pay for perfection.

Perfectionism aims to avoid failure and prevent negative outcomes. This is both unrealistic and illogical. You simply cannot move forward and learn in the absence of mistakes. To combat perfectionistic tendencies, we must embrace mistakes and failures with humility and humour, accepting the fact that no human comes free of weaknesses or imperfections.

Instead of accepting the “perfectionistic” label, reject it and become focused on continuous improvement. Accepting perfectionism feels terrible because nothing is ever quite good enough. So change your focus, strive for excellence instead, which feels much greater because your focus is on being and doing your best.

Perfection is overrated. Just because you’re a perfectionist doesn’t mean you are perfect. Nobody is. Perfection does not exist. Aim for progress instead, and watch your life change for the better.

To your success,

Isabel

Isabel is a Peak Performance Strategist and experienced ICF Leadership Coach with over 20 years of international work experience holding senior positions within the hospitality industry in countries around the world, as well as Executive and Leadership coaching, mentoring and training. Isabel specializes in high performance strategy, leadership development and building organizational culture. More available on www.isabelvalle.com

COMBAT DECISION FATIGUE AND HOW TO MAKE THE RIGHT DECISIONS EVERY TIME

Making decisions, even small ones, can wear us down over time. Every day we make endless decisions about what we eat and wear, what we work on, what we do with our spare time. By bedtime, the average person has made 35,000 decisions! Every decision requires time and energy, and depletes our willpower. Add to that our addiction to fill our days being busy for the sake of being busy, and you my friend have got a great recipe for disaster. Regardless of how strong you are, your ability to make the best choices can eventually run out.

When many of the business leaders come to me initially, they talk about feeling drained, stressed, scattered, irritable, having physical fatigue, increased anxiety, tension headaches and even digestive issues, which makes them feel unproductive and overwhelmed for the majority of their day, even though they try to eat healthy, excercise and sleep well. If that’s you, I dare say you may not actually have physical fatigue, what you may have is called decision fatigue, and it affects us way more than you realise.

With decision fatigue, you’re not consciously aware of being tired, but you’re low on mental energy. The more choices you make throughout the day, the harder each one becomes for your brain, and eventually it looks for shortcuts. This may cause you to become reckless in your decision-making, acting impulsively instead of thinking things through. Or you may simply do nothing, which can create bigger problems in the long run.

Over the last few months I have witnessed so many of my clients having to completely adapt and reinvent who they are, what they do and how they go about moving forward, trying to set themselves up for success amid a global pandemic which gives little signs to ease up. The level of unpredictable complexity we are now facing has made many of us re-evaluate our options, explore new avenues, and try to come up with new pathways to help us stay afloat in today’s volatile environment.

For some, the prospect of a stable job or business has been taken away, with nearly half the global workforce at risk of losing income due to COVID 19 alone, according to the International Labour Organization.

For those who remain employed or in business, comes a period of intense evaluation of business practices, reinventing the wheel, entire new ways of creating value in the marketplace and never thought of ways in which to lead people to deliver results.

Today, we are faced by a world where millions of businesses globally are barely breathing. These are the real faces of the world of work. If we don’t learn to adapt and make critical decisions to help us navigate through this period of unprecedented history, many will simply perish.

Here’s something you need to know. Decision fatigue is caused by being forced to make too many decisions over a fixed period of time. There comes a point where good choices and thoughtful decision making cannot be expected from the depleted brain. This relates to all kinds of decisions, and the exhaustion leaves people open to making poor decisions, whether in their business, their health or their relationships, making us hasty or stopping us from making decisions all together.

But fear not, by changing your habits and setting up the right routines, you can decrease anxiety and conserve your energy for the decisions that really matter. Learning how to manage your decision-making can help you avoid feeling drained and conserve your mental capacities, much needed at a time like this!

Some signs of decision fatigue include procrastination, impulsivity, avoidance and indecision. If this sounds like you, take notice. It is a great concern what happens to our capacity to make good decisions when our brains are out of fuel.

Luckily, there are plenty of ways you can keep this from happening. Learn how you can combat decision fatigue, replenish your willpower and boost your productivity during a decision-heavy day with these simple steps:

1. Make less decisions.

Making too many decisions will stress you out. Take minor decisions off your plate, which take a lot of decision energy. If you get overwhelmed by lunch menus, take your lunch to work. Prepare your work clothes the night before.

By making fewer decisions, you’ll be giving your brain a standing chance to recharge and recover. Many laugh at my schedules, to-do lists, weekly food menus and shopping lists, but I’m the one laughing – they keep me on track, streamline my choices, which helps me stay ahead of my week and what happens in it, taking the guess out of how I run my days and weeks. Scale back and find ways to simplify your life as much as possible.

Hobbies, activities and volunteering are all great and wonderful things to do, but if you’ve reached the point where you’re overwhelmed, it’s time to drop the excess commitments in your life. Self-care must come first.

2. Delegate decisions.

I see many struggle with delegating – whether tasks or decisions to others. Many of us feel we must do it all to get it done properly or because we don’t have time to train others to do it as well as us, but at what cost? You can delegate decisions the same way you delegate tasks. If you keep complaining about how much you have on your plate, it’s tme to give responsibility to others for some decision-making. Stop micromanaging and do yourself a favour – you’re not the only person that can get things done, have confidence that others will also deliver.

Pass some decision-making to employees, spouses, children, friends and family members. Others can pick good options too. And it doesn’t always have to be perfect. There are way more important things in life, like knowing what decisions to pass on. 🙂 Letting others be part of the decision making can be very empowering for others and shows that you trust them. So help them help you!

3. Follow a process.

Being systematic about important or difficutlt decisions can help you become more decisive. This will help you analyze your choices by understanding options available, potential obstacles, and evidence to back up your decision. Having a consistent model to follow can also help you clear up confusion and keep your emotions at bay, so you can objectively weigh in options. For instance, a simple example would be:

• Identify problem
• gather information
• identify opportunities
• identify potential obstacles
• weigh the evidence
• choose best option
• take action
• review decision.

“Good decisions come from experience. Experience comes from making bad decisions.” – Mark Twain

4. Make priority decisions in the morning.

We carry the weight of the world on our shoulders, constantly thinking about what needs to be done. Do yourself a favour and write all that’s pending inside your head down in paper, where it can kept safe and can be tackled accordingly. Once you’ve written them down, put them in order of priority and tackle the most pressing ones first. That way, your most important decisions will be done when your energy it still at its highest.

For most of us – even night owls – the best time of day is in the morning — that’s when we make accurate and thoughtful decisions. By afternoon, most people hit a plateau, and as the day wears on decision fatigue sets in, and we start making riskier decisions.

Don’t risk making snappy decisions. If you are feeling overwhelmed about making a decision, create micro-deadlines that force you to act early and not keep pondering your choices. Better to space out decisions over time than to make critical decisions at the eleventh hour.

5. Avoid analysis-paralysis.

Stop second-guessing yourself. We often get trapped in the mindset that everything we do needs to be perfect, and this puts a lot of pressure on us to make the “right” choice, because a “wrong” choice could somehow ruin something. The truth is, in most cases, there is no right or wrong choice, you can only go with the information you have at the time and hope for the best.

The most important aspect in decision making is to review your decision early to confirm whether it was the right one, or to recalibrate as needed if it wasn’t. So stop wasting time trying to come up with the perfect solution. It simply doesn’t exist. The more decisions you make, the more experienced and comfortable you’ll get at it.

You cannot make progress without making decisions.

DO YOU WANT TO KNOW HOW TO MAKE THE RIGHT DECISION EVERY TIME?

If you’re feeling torn about making a decision ask yourself: do I feel expansive when I think about this or contracted? pay attention to the answer. If you feel an instant sense of dread or heaviness or something in your body just going “no”, or you actually notice your body subtly moving back, those can all fall under the umbrella of feeling contracted. On the other hand, you might ask yourself do I want to do this, and all of a sudden inside you notice a very subtle shift where something feels lighter, something feels brighter, even a sense of excitement. Perhaps your physical body actually moves forward. Or even if it sounds a little scary, something in you just feels bigger. That would be an example of something that is expansive. These are all clues that your intuitive inteligence give you. Learn to notice to those clues if you want to feel at peace with the decisions you make. Contraction for me is a big no and expansion is a big yes. Try it for yourself.

Beyond tapping into your intuitive intelligence, you can also ask yourself: what’s the worst thing that can happen if I do this? You’d be surprised how many people don’t take the time to really drill down into the worst case scenario. Once you do, ask yourself: How exactly, specifically, would I deal with it? Is it a matter of losing some money, could you lose your job or your business? You know, sometimes the worst thing that could happen is that you’d be embarrased by making a mistake. If it’s beyond what you’re willing to risk, then there’s your answer. Don’t do it.

If still in doubt, move onto the next step, which is looking on the flipside and imagining what could be the best case scenario. Think through what are all the possible payoffs that might come from saying yes to this decision? Will you learn a tremendous amount about yourself? Are there financial / creative / freedom upsides that can only come if you take a chance and say yes?

Finally, if after considering the above steps you still find yourself unsure about which decision to make, it’s time to move into action. Because for certain decisions to become clear, you must first experience them.
You have to find a way to experience it. So I want you to ask yourself, is there some way that I can test drive this opportunity? Can I take a first step? Can I take a class? Can I do a test run in some way? Can I try it on a small scale, even if it’s just an experiment?

So for example, the first time I considered running marathons, I could hardly run 100 meters without trippping my back. It seemed impossible, and yet I couldn’t get the idea out of my head. Before committing to getting myself through the process of training for long distance running, I experimented with smaller milestones. My first kilometer, my fastest 5 km time, ways to keep my back strong through the pounding on the road, etc. By the time I committed to the full process, I knew it was the right decision, and having experienced my growth, there was no resistance to the process at all, no matter how hard or scary it was. Trying something out before you go all in will help you get clear quickly and effectively.

On a final note, let me add a different perspective about decision making. Nothing is permanent. Most things you can stop, evolve or reverse. Even if the decision you make is wrong, or is not working out the way you thought it would, you can always catch it and change it.

Now I’d love to hear from you. Tell me: Do you have a decision you’ve been avoiding making lately? What’s your favorite method for decision making? How do you distinguish what the right decisions are for you? Post your answers in the comments below.

Isabel is an experienced Peak Performance Strategist with over 20 years of international work experience holding senior positions within the hospitality industry in countries around the world, as well as Executive and Leadership coaching, mentoring and training.
She specializes in high performance strategy, leadership development and building organizational culture to help leaders and their teams learn, grow and succeed.
Isabel is passionate about helping empower business leaders with the mindset, performance, skills and strategies that they need to get ahead.
More available on www.isabelvalle.com