Do This 30-Minute Exercise Just Once to Make All Your Decisions Faster and Better
Decision coach Nell Wulfhart gives this exercise to her clients. Every entrepreneur should try it.
by Minda Zetlin
Do you have a hard time making big decisions? I certainly do. If a decision seems important, I will typically spend quite a lot of time learning as much as I can, carefully weighing the pros and cons, and figuring out a contingency plan in case I change my mind. And after all that, I might still second-guess myself.
If you’re an entrepreneur or business leader, taking too long over big decisions can be a very bad idea. It can mean missed opportunities. Worse, it can leave your team in limbo while they wait for you to make up your mind.
There’s a better way, says decision coach Nell Wulfhart. Instead, she offers her clients some bracing advice. Make decisions faster. Spend more time on experimenting and less on analysis. In a recent NPR interview, she offers a simple and brilliant exercise to help you make better decisions more quickly.
What’s the exercise? Write a list of your values. “Not moral or corporate values, but the things that make your life good on a daily basis,” she explained. “Mine include never setting an alarm clock, being able to wear sweatpants all the time, being in warm weather.” Once you’ve written out your list of values, she says, rank them in order of importance.
Take 30 minutes or less
Wulfhart doesn’t say how long you should spend making the list, but I think half an hour should probably be the maximum. Deciding what you value most should come to you almost by instinct. Take too much longer than 30 minutes and you may overthink the question. Keep in mind that your list won’t be written in stone. You can, and probably should, update it periodically as your values evolve over time.
You can do this exercise any time. You don’t have to wait until you’ve got a big decision in front of you. Either way, when the time comes to make that big decision, your list of values can become a road map. “Go down the list and see which one of your options checks more boxes on that list of values,” Wulfhart advises.
She also advises imagining what your ideal life would be in five and 10 years. (There are detailed instructions for doing this in my book Career Self-Care.) One of Wulfhart’s clients did this exercise and, as a result, refused an offered promotion. Instead, the client started saving money and making plans to fulfill her bigger dream of starting her own company.
Stop worrying about regret
According to Wulfhart, one reason so many of us take so long to make big decisions is that we fear regret. Instead, she says, we should accept that regret is part of life. Most of the time, we make the best decisions we can with the information we have. We can’t see the future, or predict what things may go wrong.
On the other hand, when we take months or years to make a big decision, we lose a lot of time we could have spent trying out something new and learning whether it really is right for us.
One reason I love Wulfhart’s values list is that it makes it much easier to cut down on that long decision-making time. Having a list of your values, in order of their importance, should make it easier to see quickly which choice is right for you.