Think about the leaders in the world you most respect. The best leaders have one thing in common – they know how to make difficult decisions with confidence. As a result, they inspire, lead, and leave legacies of incredible accomplishments. We hold them in high esteem for many reasons, many of which come from our respect for their decision making capabilities.
Making difficult decisions is far from easy. I often see business owners paralyzed by their decisions because they are afraid of making the wrong one. Unfortunately, as a business owner, making decisions swiftly and with confidence is paramount to your success. One choice can change the entire outcome of your biz and your life. When you are faced with a difficult decision, ask yourself the following three questions. This process will ultimately increase your speed and confidence when making decisions and help ensure you are making the right ones.
1. Where Are You Going?
The key to making extraordinary decisions is being clear on why and how to make them. Naturally, a decision becomes much more difficult to make if you don’t know where you are going and what you need to do to get there. So the first step is to really understand where you want to be. What is your end game? Why are you doing what you are doing and what do you ultimately want to accomplish? Take some time to really think and dream about your business. The sky’s the limit, but be really honest with yourself about what you want to get out of your efforts, both personally and professionally. Use the Personal Accomplishments worksheet and the Professional Accomplishments worksheet from chapter 6 of The Results Map for Women in Biz to help sort through what you want.
2. What Do You Need to Do to Get There?
If you know what you want, perhaps more important is identifying what it’s going to take to get there. The how and why will be extremely helpful when making decisions pertaining to your business. You will have times in your business when you have opportunities to gain an immediate financial win, but you’ll want to match the opportunity up with where you want to be and what it will take to get there. You may find that taking on large projects with immediate financial gain actually derails you from your plan if it changes the course of your business. If the financial gain is the only benefit to you and your business, you may have to choose whether the financial benefit is worth putting your goals on hold so you can accomplish it, or if you should pass on the project to stay on track with your planned accomplishments. If an opportunity takes you away from what you are doing to get to where you ultimately want to be, it may be easier to turn it down.
3. Who Can Help You Get There?
Finally, a big part of making decisions that result in the future you want has to do with the people you surround yourself with – your crew. It takes a village to accomplish truly great things and the right people by your side can help make your decisions easier. For example, perhaps you are struggling with whether or not to take on a project – ask yourself whether or not you have the people in place to help you accomplish it. If the answer is “no,” then no matter how great the opportunity, your answer should be “no” as well. Your crew can help you make decisions in other ways as well, by being your trusted advisors. If you have the right people on your crew, the people that will do anything to see you succeed, they should also know what you are ultimately trying to accomplish. If they do, you can pose your question to them and they can look at it unemotionally and from an objective perspective and tell you whether or not it falls in line with your planned accomplishments. Having this kind of feedback is invaluable, especially when you are caught up in the decision from an emotional perspective.
Ultimately, it is easier to make decisions with confidence when you know where you are going, how you are going to get there, and who is going to help you along the way. Having this perspective helps you become more objective, which ultimately helps squash your fears and makes it easier to make difficult decisions.
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