#Bad decisions how to
#Bad decisions professional

Are you trying to please others or worried that you will upset them if you don’t agree with their viewpoint?.

Do you believe it’s the right decision or others do?.

They don’t make decisions based on social approval. They place more emphasis on being right than being liked. They don’t give in to peer pressure and groupthink. Even if it means opposing and standing to everyone else, they aren’t afraid to do it. People who don’t give in to social context are the ones who don’t need approval from others to tell them what a good decision is. Different individuals have different thresholds that may be influenced by factors like social economic status, education, age, personality, etc. Threshold is the number or proportion of others who must make one decision before you decide to go with their opinion. Stanford University sociologist, Mark Granovetter calls this threshold model of collective behavior, which states that individuals’ behavior depends on the number of other individuals already engaging in that behavior. When part of a group discussion, do you find your thinking swayed towards the collective opinion?.Do you express your disagreement or nod in agreement with the most popular decision? Think of a decision in front of an authority figure like your boss.When everyone around you is saying something and you have something entirely different to say, it may be hard to make the right decision for yourself: We know what a perfectly good choice is, but cave into the social context in which the decision is made. Regardless of our beliefs or knowledge, within certain social contexts, we may choose what’s easy over what’s right. But, we also make bad decisions when we know what’s better. We do make a lot of bad decisions because of our beliefs, because we are ignorant, because we refuse to put in the effort or otherwise ignore signs that are right in front of us.

#Bad decisions how to

6 reasons why we make bad decisions and how to avoid them 1. We can learn to make better decisions to make a positive impact in our own lives and the people we work with.Īn understanding of why you make bad decisions will profoundly enhance the success of all your future decision-making by preventing you from making choices you end up regretting. But instead of feeling helpless, we can invest in our decision making abilities. Our imperfection combined with the fact that the future is unknown can lead us to make very bad decisions. For everything you say or do, there is an infinite number of alternative choices you must forgo in order to say or do them.” He adds “We like to believe that we can find a life of only pleasure and no pain, of only success and no failure, of only acceptance and no rejection. But nonetheless, there is always a trade-off.” Sometimes the costs or benefits are subtle and psychological. Those costs and benefits may not always be immediately apparent-sometimes the costs and benefits are dislocated in time, the benefit being immediate and the cost in the distant future. Anything you say, do, or pursue has a cost and a benefit. Mark Manson, author and blogger wrote “Everything you do in life is a trade-off.

#Bad decisions professional

From health to relationships to professional and personal growth, our decisions form an integral part of our overall well-being. They control how we spend our time, how efficient we are in doing things that matter to us and ultimately they feed into what we achieve. They impact our experience by directing our focus and energy in a specific direction while taking it away from something else. They determine the costs we accrue for the benefits we gain.

Our life is nothing but a sum total of our decisions. “I kept on investing more time and energy into a project that was bound to fail. If only I had gathered the courage to speak at the time.” “I knew that my team was making a bad choice, but I went along with the popular opinion. I now realize I could have handled the situation better.” I handled my frustration by bad mouthing my manager. “I was super upset about not getting a promotion though I deserved it. Only it seemed like a perfectly rational decision at the time.” Most of us have heard some version of these: We live with the experience of a terrible decision, blame ourselves or others for not thinking out right only to repeat the same mistakes again. It’s only later we realize how distorted our sense of reality was.īut we don’t stop there. Rather, in those moments when we are making a decision, we seem to be quite pleased and reasonable with our choice.

It’s not like we consciously decide to act like a fool. We do irrational things all the time, make stupid choices that we regret later.