How to Make the Right Decisions

A number of folks in the personal development realm have said that what separates successful people from unsuccessful people is the quality of their decisions. So it comes as no surprise why people feel such enormous stress when it comes to making decisions.

We all struggle with making decisions at some point. Sometimes, the right path isn't obvious. Other times, the decision is too much work or involves painful change. It's often too easy to make no decision and just see where life takes us, but this will take us down a path where we feel like we are no longer in control of our own lives.

Once frustrated by my lack of decision making ability, I came up with a system for making good decisions that I now use for those really tough decisions. The system is based on two things: options and factors. Options are essentially your choices. For example, if you're looking to get an advanced degree, your options would be the schools you're considering.

Factors are your criteria for judging your options. Just like judged events have different factors (contestants at beauty pageants are judged on evening gown, swimsuit and talent, for example), each of your options are judged on how they affect you. Each factor should be stated in the positive, mainly for consistency. So if making the wrong decision could result in you losing some clients, you can word the factor as "lowest risk of losing clients."

So here's how the system works.

Step 1: List all options across the top of a sheet of paper. Leave space to the left of the first option and draw vertical lines between each one.

Step 2: Rank all your factors by importance to your goal and list them by importance down the left column. Try to limit yourself to no more than five factors.

Step 3: For each factor, choose the option that ranks the best. Try to avoid ties as much as possible, but if there is a tie, give each option in the tie a dash (-).

Step 4: Tally up the results for each option. Give one point for all the check marks for each option and for each dash, dive the point between all the options in the tie (two options would be .5, three .33, etc...).

In general, the option with the most points wins. In the event of a tie, the option which has the highest checkmark wins - in other words, the one with the highest ranking factor wins. You can get more elaborate by giving each factor a weighing and then calculate the value of each checkmark before tallying up your totals, but that's not always necessary.

So the next time you have a tough decision, try this method out. By making quicker and more effective decisions, you'll find yourself on the path to success.