He who has the choice also has the torment

To take decisions wisely, consider committing to habits and routines, questioning your values and biases and give yourself some slack.

A few years ago, I went through a difficult period concerning my health, which had a severe impact on my professional and family life. It has been challenging times for my family and me.

Fortunately, I got through it without any after-effects, but I also grew up and learned a couple of little tricks.

One of the most critical aspects of this period was that my cognitive abilities were damaged, especially my ability to make decisions.

Before that, decision making had never been an issue for me. My family and friends know that I don’t hesitate to make even radical decisions and stick to them. But it had become more and more difficult.

I was indecisive about the meaningful choices and the small ones (blue or white, shirt or t-shirt, pasta, or vegetables?).

I was struck by “decision fatigue” but at this time I couldn’t name what was happening to me and it took me a long time to understand and find a way to manage it.

Step by step, I recovered my abilities and along the way, I also adopted a few tips and methods of two kinds:

- Habits to take daily to expedite and train my decision making, - A decision-making process for my important decisions

The habits to take in everyday life to expedite and train the decision making How many decisions do you make every day? 10? 20? 35000!!!! :

According to Huwaei Research, we make about 35,000 conscious and unconscious decisions every day.

The issue is that more decisions we make, more the quality of our choices made throughout the day deteriorates.

This is why some experts recommend making important or difficult decisions in the morning, and why some leaders limit the choices to make (Zuckerberg and Obama have reduced the choice in their wardrobe).

I use habits and routines.

Instead of wondering every morning whether I’m going to start with the dishwasher, dress, load the washing machine, breakfast, etc., I follow a routine built on my FlyLadyPlus app and don’t deviate from it. So I don’t have to make a decision. The same goes for the afternoon and evening routines.

In other words, I put in automatic mode or list mode everything that avails me nothing — aka for me: clothing (a specific outfit for my role as a sales representative, a uniform for the house), the domestic (a predefined list of tasks to do), a generic shopping list, it’s up to each of us to build his or her list of choices to automate.

Letting go: Delegate or go with luck.

Do I need to decide everything?

During the containment, the day to day question wasn’t only “what’s for dinner tonight” but also ‘what’s for lunch? And what’s for dinner tonight?». Several times a week I allowed my children to choose the menu. Of course, it ends up more often in pasta and MacDo, but my mental health is preserved. Think about all the little things you decide every day, several times a week I let my son choose his outfit, it empowers him, and it’s one less decision. For the furniture, I entrust my husband. It’s more important to him than to me, so I let him decide. Think about what you can delegate? Sometimes an « eenie meenie » to choose your morning outfit doesn’t hurt.

Prioritize and Prepare: not all decisions are urgent and thinking ahead about the ones that will be urgent reduces the risk of making mistakes:

A few weeks ago, we wanted to change the mattress. The mattress we liked was on a special limited-time promotion. We had seen the advertisement 2 hours before it expired. We had to choose a bed in 2 hours at the time of dinner preparation and the children’s bedtime. A sense of urgency began to build up, as did anger. At some point, we were ready to make a default choice taken by the urgency to take advantage of the promotion. That’s when I said STOP. Promotions come and go, let’s not choose tonight. A few days later, the same brand did a promotional campaign again, we made a more peaceful choice without the rush and we have a mattress that suits us. Promotional campaigns often use urgency. You have the feeling that if you don’t buy this dress right now, it’s an opportunity that will pass right under your nose. So what? You may not miss it that much.

Removing the sense of urgency is crucial because it allows you to make a more thoughtful decision and rely less on shortcuts that will distort your judgment. We can prepare for some decisions in our lives.

Example: You put a property up for sale at a price. An investor rings the doorbell, you show it to him. He offers to buy it immediately at the end of the visit, but 30% below the advertised price, and he awaits your answer in 2 hours.

Do you have all the details to make your decision? Are you ready to make the decision?

The situation described is not a hypothetical case. Real estate investors interested in a property regularly propose 30% less with for some a limited response time.

In this case, anticipation is the key. When you put a property up for sale, you know in advance that interested buyers will negotiate the price. You will have clearer ideas if/when the case arises if you did your homework before. Same case for negotiating your pay. don’t wait for the question. Think of it before. How much do you want? How much you certainly don’t want?

You don’t need to prepare the way in advance for your whole life, just pay attention to the events to come and the decisions you will have to make. Clearing the ground allows you to make more serene decisions.

Breath Deeply, Write

Distinguish what is urgent from what is important. Sometimes we have a big decision to make, something that commits us for life or affects our children’s lives. Our heart races, our adrenaline rushes to the ceiling as if there were a lion in the savannah watching us and we are about to fight or run at full speed.

Then we need to breathe deeply. Breathe deeply again. Take another deep breath. Practice deep breathing. Deep breathing allows us to act on our vagus nerve, to calm ourselves. Once calmed, the sense of urgency dissipates and we can make an essential decision.

Sometimes a likeness of peace settles in, but our mind continues to go wild, we imagine the worst, we ruminate repeatedly.

That’s when getting out a pencil and paper helps to clear our mind, clarify our thoughts, and allow us to be in the right frame of mind to make a decision.

Breathe and write. When panic or confusion sets in, take a deep breath, and write.

And for my most significant decisions: How do I do it?

When it comes to making big decisions, we’re not all in the same boat. When some seem to be able to decide easily and quickly regardless of the consequences, others will be labeled as uncertain because they have trouble deciding which sofa they want.

There is no magic formula when it comes to decision making. Otherwise, our life paths would be less confused, wouldn’t they?

Making a decision is not just a matter of columns of FOR and AGAINST.

It is rather a mixture of conditioning, self-knowledge, methodology, and acceptance of our limitations.

We already discussed the conditioning, - On self-knowledge: it is interesting to have previously questioned and analyzed our values and biases to take responsibility for our choices, - On methodology: Several decision-making methods exist. Professional, Personal. I’ll discuss my favorite one. The regret, - On accepting our limitations: It is difficult to decide and sometimes we make bad choices or mistakes. That’s life. The trick is to not get stuck.

Who am I? Values and Bias

“I don’t believe in the Republican Party. I don’t believe in the Democratic Party. I only believe in genitals.” Samantha — SEX & THE CITY

When I make a decision, my choice is guided by two things, my values, and my cognitive biases.

Making a decision is simply choosing the value that is most important to me.

Example: Coralie had to choose between “ensuring her financial security for her and her family” or choose the unemployment insurance option that was less helpful for her but more convenient to her company.

Coralie was torn between the value of “ensuring family security” and the value of “commitment to her business”. To make matters worse, the sympathy bias made Coralie want to please her boss.

It’s easy from an external perspective to analyze this process in retrospect, but how do you identify the values and biases at play when we are torn by our emotions, the anxiety of the consequences, and the sense of urgency?

Reflecting on one’s values upstream helps

I understood my values after reading an article by Mark Manson entitled [Personal Values: A Guide to Figuring Out Who You Are | Mark Manson](https://markmanson.net/values/personal-values-guide).

I have read it at least ten times and I still come back to it regularly.

“Knowing who we are” allows us to be more comfortable and less torn in our choices.

For Coralie, the “Family Security” value is paramount.

She lives it unconsciously but knowing it consciously and intentionally will allow her to not feel guilty when she puts it forward. It is her identity. DOT.

Identify My Biases

Thanks to Olivier Sibony [Understanding cognitive biases during a coronavirus crisis with Olivier Sibony | Le HuffPost](https://www.huffingtonpost.fr/entry/biais-cognitifs-conference-boma-olivier-sibony_fr_5e837cb3c5b62dd9f5d6e9d1) that I discovered cognitive biases.

According to Wikipedia: A *cognitive bias* is a distortion in the cognitive processing of information. The term /[bias](https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biais_(distortion))/ refers to a systematic deviation of logical and rational thinking from reality. Cognitive biases lead the subject to give different importance to facts of the same nature and can be detected when paradoxes or errors appear in reasoning or judgment.

Two hundred cognitive biases influence our decision-making. They relate to attention, memory, judgment, reasoning, and personality.

On Wikipedia, you will find a fairly complete list of these biases. List of cognitive biases — Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases) It’s good to know your personal biases and try to recognize those around you. And at what times they serve you or not.

Here are a few examples:

• *Base Rate Fallacy* or for fans of Grey’s Anatomy, remember Dr. Bailey: We tell our interns, “When you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras. » This bias was pointed out by Daniel Kahneman and A Tversky. It consists of the tendency to ignore general information and focus only on information relevant to the specific case, even when the general information is more critical. - *Sympathy bias* for example widely used in home shopping models. The Charlott’ lingerie saleswoman is sympathetic to us, so that we will buy some models from her. “Barbara, our very friendly Charlott’ lingerie saleswoman, is also a good friend. Being aware of the sympathy bias allows me to assume that my act of purchase is largely motivated by my sympathy for her, my desire that my hostess friend has her gift and the good time we all spend as friends, but also allows me to take a step back and therefore consciously study the value for money. ». - *Zero risk bias:* This is what makes us prefer to make a small risk disappear rather than see a significant risk decrease sharply. This bias is triggered when you buy a more expensive product but with a 30-day money-back guarantee. It is this bias that tortured me for two weeks during the Covid-19 crisis. I had to decide whether I send my daughter back to school. At the same time, the cases of children affected by the Kawasaki-like syndrome were increasing. My first reaction motivated by this was not to send her back to school. At the same time, during the confinement, she was facing isolation, her mood was deteriorating. I was more and more afraid that she would fall into depression. At the time I was faced with this decision, here are the data in France: 1 to 5% of Covid-19 cases were pediatric and only 0.16% of Covid-19 hospitalizations concerned. Kawasaki-like syndrome occurs in a small fraction of children who come in contact with the virus. On the other hand, I did not find any figures on the impact of not going back to school on my daughter’s mental health but I could see her deteriorating, losing concentration, being on the edge of her skin. What was decisive was that the recognition of a Kawasaki-like syndrome was widely propagated by the media, which reassured me about my ability to recognize it. So I decided to give it back to the school. In other words, I decided to lower the probability of 2 risks instead of focusing on eliminating one risk.

The method of regret

/Looking back, it’s easy to see when a mistake was made, to regret a choice that seemed like a decent idea at the time. But if we used our best judgment and listened to our hearts, we are more likely to see that we chose wisely and avoided the deepest and most painful regret of them all: the regret that comes from letting something amazing pass you by. / / *Meredith Grey* — /’Take It Back’/ (Season 10, Episode 13)

We’ve been looking at ourselves to understand our mechanisms of choice. It’s time to tell you about my preferred method of choice. It is through my reading of Mark Manson’s articles that I learned this vital decision-making method. https://markmanson.net/finding-your-purpose-in-life/life-decisions

Mark advocates basing his choice not on success versus failure or happiness versus suffering but rather on the avoidance of regret.

Regret is a “negative emotion that we feel when we imagine that we could have been better off if we had made a different choice” (N’GBALA, 2014).

Regret, by definition, is an emotion we feel after an act or non-act. Anticipated regret is the estimation of regret thought after an action or inaction. That is to say that we imagine how we would feel when we play the scene in action or non-action.

Anticipated regret has been studied since the 1980s as a model of economic theory to develop models of choice in a context of uncertainty.

According to this theory, every individual consciously anticipates the regret potentially felt for a choice and integrates it into his thinking for his decision making.

Consciously is the word. Getting into the habit of asking ourselves two questions about anticipating regret allows us to apprehend our choices better.

- Will I regret doing x? - Will I regret not doing x?

It’s simple, straightforward. It seems obvious. But very often, we consider the question from only one of these questions. Asking both is much more enlightening.

Accept our limitations:

It’s hard to decide, and sometimes we make bad choices or mistakes. That’s life. The trick is not to get stuck on it.

/Life gives you a lot of opportunities to screw up. Which means it gives you just as many chances to succeed! “/ Carrie SEX & THE CITY /

A few years ago, we made some real estate investments that turned out to be nonprofitable. We made a mistake. How bad is it? Really bad. Is it fixable? Slightly. Did we get anything out of it? Yes, from the tax exemption. Have we lost a lot? Yes, but it will be worse if we don’t take action on it.

And the two most important questions: What do I do about it now? What have I learned?

When we realize that we made a wrong decision, regret shows up, sometimes remorse. And sometimes, when faced with the consequences, few waves of panic sets in and prevents us from seeing beyond our initial error in judgment.

It is good to remember that we are only human and that our ability to make choices undoubtedly comes with the great freedom to make mistakes.

That being said, accepting our mistakes is not simple and easy. But hoping to limit one’s mistakes is illusory and leads to stagnation in one’s life.

Remember when your child learned to walk. How many times did he fall before he could put one foot in front of the other?

It’s the same for us. Here is the first article I’d like to submit to Medium. It is littered with all kinds of mistakes I made as a beginner writer. But only by doing, doing wrong, and accepting and learning from my mistakes will I improve.

That’s what life is all about. Decisions, choices, mistakes, and successes.

My inspirations: [How to Make Important Life Decisions | Mark Manson](https://markmanson.net/finding-your-purpose-in-life/life-decisions) Olivier Sibony Leo Bablauta Cecile Dussoulier Dr. House