Mindful Leadership For Dummies

Chapter 19

Ten Mindful Ways to Make Better Decisions

IN THIS CHAPTER

Noticing the dynamics at play when making decisions

Becoming conscious of your unconscious bias

As a leader, you’re employed to make decisions. A number of factors that have nothing to do with your intellectual capability, experience, or available information can impact the quality of your decision-making. In this chapter, you find ten mindful, handy tips that will help you to make better decisions. These include recognising the impact of fear, heuristics, and your place within your social group on the decisions you make.

Becoming Aware of Heuristics

A heuristic is a mental shortcut that you use when making a judgment or decision. Heuristics help you to reach conclusions quickly but can sometime lead you to make mistakes or misjudge situations. To avoid making poor decisions, you need to first be aware when heuristics are at play.

When investing in stocks and shares, you may judge the probability that your next investment will be successful based on whether your previous investments have been successful. In reality, the outcome of your new investments may not be connected in any way to the success of your older investments. In this instance, you’re judging the probability of an event happening based on what happened in a similar situation in the past. This is an example of what psychologists call a representativeness heuristic.

You may believe that terrorist attacks in cities are more common than they really are, ...