Aptus Consultants

Every day we face choices and we make decisions. Trivial or important, knowingly or unknowingly, pretty well every action or even inaction represents a choice.

Making choices is a skill and you can do it badly or well. How good are you?Let's not worry too much about the trivial choices (White bread or brown? Skinny Latte or Capuccino? - yes I'm writing this at close to elevenses).

Important choices come your way often, and these choices are important because of the possible outcomes that they offer. With choice comes risk and it is the severity of these different outcomes that provides the risks in decision-making.

The important choices may be personal, financial or career-related, but they come your way all the time and it can be easy to miss the implicit choices you make. For example, every day that you stay in a job represents a choice not to leave that job, a choice that most of us consider pretty important. This may seem a trivial or contrived example, but I've known good friends stay for years in jobs that made them miserable, with profoundly negative consequences for them and their families.

Most of us can think of examples of friends or family in unhappy situations who find it very hard to make the choices that will help them escape their difficulties. Why is it so hard to make good choices when you are unhappy?

A big part of the answer is that we do not make choices rationally, but emotionally. We need our emotions to make decisions that we are prepared to act upon.

Unfortunately, if we change our emotions, the decisions we make will also change. If you make choices under the influence of a strong emotion the chances are that your choices will bad, or at least different to the choices you would make when calm, with your emotions in balance.

As an example, depression represents a severe emotional imbalance that can sometimes paralyse decision-making to the extent that even trivial choices become very difficult. Struggling to make the choice between white bread or brown, paralysed with indecision, seems laughable to those whose emotions are more in balance, but it is no joke when when you're experiencing it.

It should be no surprise then that it can be very difficult to make big decisions when your emotions are out of balance, and even more difficult to make good choices. In fact, the stress of struggling to make a big decision can further upset your emotional balance, producing a damaging downward spiral.

But what about rational decision-making? Many of us like to think that we are 'rational', especially if (like me) you have a scientific or technical background.

Emotional versus rational tend to be presented as alternatives, with a 'rational choice' equated to a 'good choice' and an 'emotional choice' as a 'bad choice'.

Well, the reality is (as usual) more complicated and this portrayal of the roles of emotion and rationality in decision-making is unhelpful.

A 'rational' explanation is a sequence of cause and effect, where each step in the explanation conforms to widely accepted rules and assumptions that are considered the best, or optimal. It is a sort of story, one that an audience will understand and can accept if they accept the underlying assumptions or rules.

However, when our emotions come into play with our choices, they apply a rich, complex and varying mix of influences from past and present, and they can do it very efficiently and very quickly.

We may try to explain our choices to others using a 'rational' explanation, but such explanations are necessarily extreme simplifications at best.

No rational story can encompass all the influences embodied in your emotions. No-one knows all the influences that go into your decisions via your emotions, not even you.

A rational explanation may help you explain to others, but you should be careful not to kid yourself that it is the whole story.

So don't make the mistake of thinking that your decisions are rational, or even that they should be.

Well then, how should you make good choices?

To come to a good decision, you need to combine rational thinking with your emotions in balance. In particular, you need to look carefully at all the possible outcomes of your choice and assess the risks realistically, putting each outcome into perspective.

You need to understand the role your emotions play in this. It is your emotions that contribute most to the judgement of severity, and rationality that should provide both the list of outcomes and determine your assessment of the likelihood of occurrence, putting outcomes into perspective.

This can be more difficult than it sounds, especially as we all naturally tend to concentrate on the outcomes that we want, ignore the outcomes that we do not want and fail to put any of the outcomes into perspective.

Judging risk involves figuring out both how likely an outcome is, and how severe its consequences are, then comparing both of these aspects for all the outcomes. To do this effectively you need to consider the most likely or most severe outcomes. To put these into perspective, you should consider all the possible outcomes.

Let's consider the example of a friend unhappy in their job.

Here are some possible outcomes of staying:

• Unhappiness is cumulative, the longer you are unhappy, the unhappier you will become. This is a very likely outcome.
• Sharing unhappiness does not diminish it, and your family may suffer as you suffer. This can be severe for children, with long term consequences.
• You continue to earn the money essential to house, clothe and feed your family. This is true provided you do not lose your job.
• You could lose your job anyway. In today's climate this could have very severe consequences, since finding a new job while unemployed can be much more difficult than otherwise.
• Is your job really so bad? You could die. You could be arrested and imprisoned, beaten up by the police and die in jail, or be run over by a bus. You should remember that you are not immortal. It may also help to remember that you have a comfortable house, a loving family and that most of your colleagues are good friends.
• You tackle the cause of unhappiness at work and are no longer unhappy.
• You take up an activity outside work that helps you cope with work.

Here are some possible outcomes of leaving:

• You could fail to find a job, losing your house and family after you lose your job.
• You could find another job that is paid worse, less enjoyable and makes you even unhappier.
• You could find a job that is no better overall than your existing job.
• You could find a job that is better, but you are still unhappy because it wasn't the job making you unhappy in the first place.
• A better job solves your problem after all.

Just adding the other possible outcomes to the list helps a little in putting each outcome into perspective. It may also reveal that you have more choices than you thought.

It doesn't take much imagination to dream up a much longer list of possible outcomes. Only you and your emotions can figure out which ones apply to you, their likelihood of occurrence or their severity.

Finally, no choice is entirely free of risk and taking no action is still a choice. Make sure you understand the potential outcomes and risks of your choices. You can make your choices knowingly or unknowingly, but you cannot avoid making choices.

Don't kid yourself that you are playing safe simply by making no changes or by doing the same as everyone else, or by doing what others tell you.

If you do not knowingly make your choices, carefully considering the risks, then you are effectively letting others make your choices for you, ignorant or uncaring of the risks you run.