How Do Indecisive People Make Decisions?
Recently, I took a “career compass” test, composed of questions where you essentially ranked yourself whether you were an expert or just mediocre at. Unsurprisingly to me and perhaps you too (from this title), the area I can improve upon is decisiveness. (Problem solving was my strength, if anyone’s wondering.)
As a result, this fueled my curiosity on what crippled decisiveness relating to career decisions and how to overcome indecisiveness in general. Let’s go on an adventure and put my strength to good use.
Wait, is Being Indecisive Bad?
Without much hesitation, indecisiveness is culturally perceived as bad, just about anywhere you googled on the internet [1, 2, 3], especially when it comes to business intelligence and data making science.
Outside of the cultural perception, the degree of “not a bad idea” to “bad” about decisiveness greatly varies based on the circumstance. There are some upside though [1, 2 ].
In some context such as career decision, I’ve always felt like there are always some degree of indecisiveness for most people, even the strong-headed ones.
Where Indecisiveness Comes From
- The Conscious Perspective
According to some article on the internet, there can be underlying psychological conditions. Alright… trust an internet blog to tell me what’s wrong with me. Insecure — ok I guess. Perfectionism, sure. Overprotective parents, check. “Lacking” mentality — well, lunch ain’t free.
While some of these “symptoms” resonates with me, I sought more validation where indecisiveness come from through science literature. Haraburda did a series of studies about indecisiveness. To summarize, the subjects who has higher tendency of indecisiveness are more likely to be neurotic and have psychological symptoms. That seemed to echoed the previous internet articles.
Volunteering as a tribute for this example, I can rationally connect how my upbringing led to psychological symptoms that enabled indecisiveness. Things such as growing up in an overprotective family perhaps had make me second-guess my decisions if they’re ever good enough. If I’m honest, my career decisions are skewed through my experience as dirt poor immigrant fueled into a strong need for certainty and financial security to make all the sacrifices my single mom went through worth it.
People learn to move on, starting with awareness. Now that I’m aware of these mysterious psychological symptoms, I’m more inclined to categorize my indecisiveness as a habitual trait that is like a tug-of-war between what I un-admittedly want versus the “should” predicament in my mind.
It’s also important to note a habitual trait is more troublesome than simply being a state of undecided.
2. How do you know if you’re indecisive or just in undecided state?
The short answer: it’s hard to tell. I’m not alone in agreeing that it’s next to impossible, especially when it comes to long-term decision like career decisions. For shorter-life-span of decisions like what to eat for dinner, what color blouse I’m going to wear today, etc., my rule of thumb is if you take more than 30 seconds to do, you need less than 30 seconds to decide. For most things, if you spend more time deciding than the action itself, you’re sinking into crippling indecisive area.
Let’s take a look at harder decisions that are typically long-term: career decision. An example of career switching decisions from my personal experience was made based on how much I hate my current situation. Hate is a strong word. Perhaps a little more diplomatic version is how I wanted to get away from something that deep down bothered me and that I didn’t know how to resolve going forward — except clicking the escape button. The uncertainty outside of my control.
To sum it up, a paper by John Longeway wrote:
The function of escapism, then, is to compensate for irrational patterns of belief formation, and to maintain effectiveness (for the sake of continuance of the species), insofar as that is possible, in situations in which a rational person would succumb to despair and suicide.
That last part there got a little darker than it seems. In translation, we escape to maintain effectiveness. Otherwise, we can succumb to further self-destruction (to put it nicely). In this context in escapism (and potentially self-deception, but we’re not going to there today), there can be other rationalizing reasons that attributes to being a state of undecided that seemingly long instead of a trait. This could just be me trying to justifying my thoughts. At the end of the day, it’s a gray area.
A Rational Approach to Decision-Making
When in doubt, I revert to breaking down my problem into steps and questions. After some research, I found Eric Rassin’s model that stated: indecisiveness is a result from the experience of 3 decision problems.
- Lack of Information
- Valuation Difficulty
- Outcome Uncertainty
This leads to side-effects of indecisiveness: a) delay, b) tunnel vision, and 3) worry (plus other long list under the fine-print of indecisiveness trauma).
Given such a model, we can determine the next steps in our decision making process and arrive at a decision with an assurance of certainty.
As an analyst, you can you ask a series of questions in each category to solve the problem. For example, when there is a lack of information, we can ask:
- What information can we use?
- Is it possible to obtain the information? Is it available?
- How can we obtain the information we need in time by?
For evaluating difficulty of decision, we can navigate through:
- How can we reduce the difficulty through leveraging resources?
- Are the perception of the difficulty validated?
- What are the determining factors that affect the difficulty?
For dealing with outcome uncertainty, we can measure the confidence levels and establish outcome plans for the accepted possibilities.
In practice, I always use a pro and con list to structure my list for information, including how I feel. Often than not, how I feel or would feel upon a decision plays a huge role in the process. That “intuition” or “instinct” or “gut feeling” is not something to undermine.
The Deciding Emotions
There are extensive research and many people studying the impact of emotions and decision-making processes. Undoubtedly, there are correlations between emotions and indecisiveness.
“Don’t know how to deal” is what I call the common indicator of my decision-making process to the escape button. In a sense, it’s an emotion summarizing all 3 problem areas above — more so with the latter two of the three.
What stood out to me is a study that found negative emotions such as depression can be an antecedent of indecisiveness. This prompted the question: If I am in a different state of mind (or moods), would my decision change? Would I accept the risks any differently?
If so, I try to take a step back to analyze the state of mind that I want to be in the outcome of my decision. If I’m not ready to be my own therapist, I will come back to the decision-making in a different state of mind as an experiment.
The way I’ve learnt to deal with emotions is to rationalize them (boy, do I sound like a robot from West World or what?) and break down my expectations for the outcomes even if it feels uncomfortable just to think about it. From writing down something like:
- Option A —The chance of getting the outcome feels slim. The process can be exciting. If I don’t achieve the outcome that I want, I will be slightly sad and will do path X.
- Option B — This option might make me feel really sad right now. If I don’t achieve the outcome I want, I will still feel ok and pursue path Y.
From here, I draw out your mind map (provide a sense of outcome plans) and rationalize my emotions (face the difficult value of your decision) to some degree further. If I’m stuck, I close my eye and pick the decision out of a hat. How I feel about the selection by the stroke of luck is usually the last indicator to the final decision.
Does this sound like over-thinking? Perhaps… At least it’s a step forward.
Concluding Thoughts
All in all, exploring this topic of decisiveness and decision-making process has a compelling effect on me personally and professionally, especially being an analyst for many years. This undying itch of not wanting to feel unsure or showing signs of indecisiveness ironically pushed me to become more and more analytical in my career and pursuit of peace.
To move forward, indecisive people (like me) learn to make decisions through rationalizing our thought process or pick the answer out of a hat, frankly. The more we understand ourselves, perhaps it will lead us to make the choices we want to make, not the past that conditioned us.
How do you feel about your own decisiveness? Does it come easy? Do you use certain tricks in the process when faced with a difficult decision?
