Decision making is a natural behavior as well as an acquired skill. You can develop your decision making abilities through training, experience, and life long learning. Even after doing all the work your may still feel that there you are “Just missing those last pieces”.

At this point you can manage daily decisions, and have demonstrated the skill to be able to adjust and learn as needed. The majority of your life is well balanced and developed. However you consistently struggle with only specific categories. Although it is better described as a pattern, in which things go well in the category of your life, only to have it go poorly again. You seem to make the right decisions to make progress at first, but as time goes on the following actions do not stop it from unraveling.

These situations can be emotional painful and its typical a person would avoid talking about these areas, but instead silently focus on them to the point of obsession. Frustrated with inability to take the right actions in certain categories the emotional stress can trigger a downward cycle of frustration, avoidance, doubling down and back to frustration.

Something is driving this pattern. Maybe its because you want others to have a positive opinion, that leads to overcompensation in these areas. What is true is that you want a quality of life that matters to you, and even though it is good, it could be better. Goal achievement is limited by these specific areas, and your stress level is generally good except for…

Overall Life Satisfaction is good but could it be better?

Summary of Current State and Needs

Perhaps from education, work experiences, or talent this decision maker is able to complete daily habitual decisions as well as handle more complex novel and catalyst decision making.  They tend to work with decision making tools to provide orientation to themselves and others as well as process for maintaining progress during decision making.  They often are in a position to teach others. By ongoing use of decision making tools and processes they have developed insights as well as skills, especially having learned how to learn. This helps them explain decision making. 

However despite their acquired expertise, they struggle in limited and specific areas of their life. Having mastered other aspects of habitual decisions, work related decisions, and management of life, there remains one or two areas of their life that are consistently inadequate.  They spend time alternating between focus and learning and then frustration and avoidance.  It is this alternating pattern of behavior that is the clue that there is something else going on that is interrupting the Deliberate systems progress. Somewhere along the way they have applied that wrong standard of measurement to one or more areas of the their life. It is a measurement that is included in the area of struggle but is absent in other decision making in the other parts of their life.

The question is “Why do highly successful decision makers apply the wrong standard of measurement to an outcome?” To answer the question requires a deeper level of learning. Specifically, they will most benefit from learning about patterns and the impact their own conceptual framework has on metrics and measurements in specific categories of their life. With this fluency of their own decision making process they will be better positioned to make the right decisions now and in the future.

Goal of Learning Deliberate Decision Making

Goals of learning to make better decision include:

• Minimize the time that it takes to learn how to make faster decisions in specific categories
• Minimize the errors in decision making for more accurate decisions in specific categories
• Minimize the complexity of decision making to reduce cognitive stress in specific categories
• Minimize the time that it takes to make more than one decision in specific categories
• Minimize the time it takes to complete the Learning and Performance Plan
• Minimize the emotional strain of decision making in categories that have had failures
• Minimize the time it takes to achieve daily goals to provide more free time
• Minimize the time that it takes to improve productivity through decision making
• Minimize the feelings of frustration
• Minimize the cost of improving overall life satisfaction in terms of time and resources
• Minimize the time it takes to provide structure to the decision making process

Learning and Performance Plan

The Deliberate Decision Making curriculum guides the novice decision maker to:

• Understand the connection between need fulfillment and decision making
• Recognize the two types of decisions – Habitual and Deliberate
• Recognize the Struggling Moment
• Recognize Up-Regulation
• Recognize The Deliberate Pathway Steps
• Recognize causes of Down-regulation
• Recognize the Behaviors of the Automatic System

Tools and Resources To Learn Faster

Our proprietary decision making tools not only support making decisions now, but also support learning the best way to support the inherent decision making systems, resulting in ongoing improvement in decision making over time.

• Understand how to the use the Weekly Needs Assessment
• Understand how to the use the Struggling Moment Worksheet
• Understand the use of QuickSteps and when to use it
• Understand the DIY DDM and when to use it
• Understand the purpose of the 20 Minute Decision
• Understand the benefits of the Group Mentoring for DDM Pathway
• Understand the benefits of Decision Making Pattern Recognition
• Understand the impact of the conceptual framework on selecting the best measurements and metrics to evaluate progress
• Understand the impact of having competing interests during decision making

Continue to explore the website and Your Personal Account to learn more about the following Deliberate Decision Making offerings:

• Free Member Learning
• 1st, 2nd, 3rd , 4th presentations
• Weekly Needs Assessment
• Struggling Moment Worksheet
• Articles and Examples of Decision Making
• Courses –
• Making Better Decisions – A 90 Minute Useful eBook
• QuickSteps – Course and Online Tool
• DIY DDM – Course and Online Tool
• Core DDM and Workbook
• Age Related Learning and Workbook
• Consulting
• 20 Minute Decision for Big Decision that are time sensitive
• Group Mentoring of DDM Pathway
• My Decision Making Patterns Consulting
• My Decision Making Platform Consulting

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