We’ve all been there – trapped in an endless mental loop, trying to make the right decision, only to decide you just need to “sleep on it.” But sleeping on it doesn’t change anything, leaving you stuck at every crossroad. In today’s episode, I’m explaining why the time you think you need to make important choices might actually be holding you back from scaling your business.
I’m challenging the conventional wisdom about decision-making timeframes and revealing why most of us aren’t actually using our “thinking time” effectively. Plus, hear about my breakthrough framework that will transform how you approach decisions in your business, helping you move from overthinking to confident action without sacrificing the quality of your choices.
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In this episode, we cover:
- Why “needing time to think” about business decisions might be costing you more than just time
- The hidden reason behind decision paralysis that most high-achieving women don’t realize is affecting their business growth
- The mindset shift about “right” and “wrong” decisions instantly makes choosing easier and faster
- Why trying to predict decision outcomes might be your biggest strategic mistake, and what to focus on instead
- The counterintuitive truth about how your emotions influence your decision-making process, and how to use this knowledge to your advantage
- The connection between your identity as a business owner and how it shapes your decision-making process
- A unique decision-making framework that aligns with your intentions and who you want to be in the world
Ready to transform your decision-making process and finally break free from the endless cycle of overthinking? This episode gives you the tools to make confident choices that align with your vision as a business owner, without leaving you stuck in analysis paralysis.
What’s one business decision you’ve been putting off that you could make today using this framework? Connect with me on Instagram @kirstyknight to share your biggest takeaway from this episode, and learn how you can work with me through Time Masters, The Productive Quarter, or the School Hours Mastermind to scale your business on your terms!
Links & Mentioned Resources
Optimizing Time: Break Free From the Perfect Morning Routine Trap
Lindsay Dotzlaf
Time Masters
Productive Quarter
School Hours Only Mastermind
Connect with Kirsty:
More about The Time & Productivity Podcast for Entrepreneurs
The podcast to help you, as an ambitious high-achieving Type-A woman, master work-life balance as a business owner.
Join Kirsty Knight each week, so she can help you create the level of success you truly desire, in a business that you love, without needing to sacrifice time for yourself, your health, your family, and your enjoyment of life outside of your business. Without hustling, without working yourself into the ground, and without burning out.
Kirsty will be sharing lessons from her own business journey, business strategies, time management and productivity hacks, and the psychology you need to understand – to help you go from overworking and overwhelmed, to mastering your time and productivity, so you can be working less, and earning more.
If you are trying to build or scale your business, but find yourself struggling with overwhelm, self-sabotage, procrastination, distractions, perfectionism, people-pleasing, hustling, overworking and always thinking “there just aren’t enough hours in the day”, this podcast is for you.
You CAN have it all. And she’s going to show you how.
The unedited podcast transcript for this episode of the The Time & Productivity Podcast for Entrepreneurs
Good morning my lovelies, How are you all today?
So today I want to talk to you about making decisions. And more specifically the amount of time we think it takes to make a decision.
So I had a client this week say something that made me realise this was something that I needed to clear up and teach on. So basically, my client has a rental property, and this past week, her tenant had handed in her notice. And my client said something along the lines of – she had not managed to get much done on her business this week because of this – because she had been spinning out and thinking about what to do with the property, and needed time to think about what to do and make a decision.
And I did an episode last week on how you can still get things done, even when life happens to you, and your mind is racing, so that still applies here.
But what I thought I hadn’t yet addressed that I want to talk about today, is that decisions don’t take time.
They don’t take a ton of time to make.
They don’t require that we sleep on them.
They don’t require a ton of time to think about.
Decisions can be made in an instant.
Yet I’m sure you, and most of the rest of society will have heard and even used phrases like – I need time to think about it. I need to sleep on it.
And many of you will have postponed making decisions, procrastinated on making decisions because of this.
The trouble with this – the cost of this in your business has been staying stuck. Not moving your business forward. Not hitting your goals. Not getting data. Not getting results. Missing opportunities. You name it.
Because the thing is, decisions in business, are like a fork in the road.
And until you choose which side of the fork you are going down, you are literally stopped at that fork – not moving forward. In fact, not making a decision – is making a decision by default. The decision is stay stuck here. Until you decide if it changes.
And then there is also the cognitive load we are carrying from having these open loops in our head, taking up brain space. Because although we aren’t actively thinking about them constantly, we will have some heaviness that we are carrying around because this thing hasn’t yet been decided upon. The decision will be looming over us. As something else to do.
Now I will say, that I think sometimes it is completely fine to not want to make a decision yet.
And sometimes there are benefits to be had by doing that.
You might be due to go away at the end of the month for a break from the hustle-and-bustle of the daily grind – and so you might be waiting to think about it then, because you think you will be more able to tune into your body to sense what you most want to do when you get there, than right now with you in the thick of it.
You might be in the middle of a crisis and not have the capacity or desire to properly think about your options and make a decision on this particular thing right now. It might not be a priority to spend any brain power on this decision at the minute. Or allocate even five minutes to it right now.
You might actively be gathering new data to help inform you of the potential outcomes. So you need to do that, before you make a decision.
Or you might be ok with waiting til enough time has passed, that you do get an entirely new perspective and shift and aha that brings you more clarity to the situation and the decision.
In those cases, totally fine to take some time to decide.
BUT in my experience, 9 times out of 10, these are not usually the reasons why the decision isn’t being made.
There is no holiday booked where we are going to think about it properly.
There is no crisis we are in the middle of. Or nothing unusual to the day to day normal.
We aren’t actively gathering new data.
And we aren’t getting a completely new perspective from the time that has passed – because it’s never usually that long.
We are just procrastinating on the decision – and telling ourselves we need time to think about it. Time to decide.
But then we aren’t using the time that we do have spare, to actively think about it.
So what is going on?
Why are we doing this?
We are doing this usually to avoid making the decision. Because there is some underlying fear or anxiety about us making the wrong decision. Or us making the decision and then having to do something uncomfortable about it. Us having to then take action.
So let’s talk about some things you need to realise about decision making, in order to be able to stop putting decision making off, and make the decisions you have to make in super speedy time…
So the first thing I think you have to really become aware of, is how you are currently avoiding making the decision you need to make.
With just a little bit of conscious awareness, I think you will realise that when you think you’ve given yourself more time to make the decision – what you are really doing is thinking about the decision, maybe stressing about it, spinning about the options, telling yourself you don’t know what to do, catastrophising, thinking the same thoughts over and over and nothing much else.
OR you are thinking about it briefly – the same kind of stuff as I just outlined, and then switching off from making the decision completely, while you go back to your day-to-day, and then maybe thinking about it again briefly – same stuff as before, before you check out again.
And this is really what you are doing when you think you are taking time to make a decision.
Noticing this, becoming aware of this – will help you move to a more intentional place of wanting to make the decision. Because you will know there is no benefit to delaying it. You aren’t going to make a better decision in 3 days time than you will right now, if you continue with the way you are doing it. But you will be able to avoid the pressure, and overwhelm and spinning out about it if you get it done now. And that alone, will feel like a load off.
The next thing I want you to realise – about decision making, that will help you make your decisions faster and with less mind drama, is that there is no such thing as a right and a wrong decision.
Whaaaat? You’ve been told your entire life there is, right?
Now I’m not saying that there might not be consequences to making a particular decision, that you might have to face.
But here is the thing – you can still decide it was the right decision for you.
The ONLY thing that makes a decision RIGHT or makes a decision WRONG – is your thought, that it was right or wrong. Your labelling of it being right or wrong.
This means that every. Single. Decision you ever make from now on, you could just decide it was the right decision you made. You could decide to have your own back no matter what.
Because not having your own back, and beating yourself up for the decisions you have made, is one of the things that will prevent you from making speedy decisions.
Because you will be afraid of yourself – and what you are going to make it mean about you – and how you are going to talk to yourself after you made that decision. Particularly if that decision leads to some unwanted circumstances. And particularly if you are a bit mean to yourself usually.
Having your own back by deciding that you always choose the right decision, eliminates the need to guess which one is right or wrong at the forefront of making it.
The third thing to consider when it comes to making decisions, is that how we usually try to make decisions, is by predicting what outcomes will occur, and how we are going to feel about those outcomes. Are we going to feel happier with option A or option B? Will this happen with option A, or will this happen with option B?
Yet we cannot ever predict the actual outcomes of our decisions. We can never 100% know what is going to happen. It’s like us trying to predict the weather forecast, but without any instruments to measure rising pressure and water content, and without any knowledge or skillsets of how to predict the weather.
It’s the sketchiest way to make a decision – and we certainty don’t want to be taking up tons of time and tons of brain space making our decisions this way – because we are literally making it up as we go along.
We also have to remember that it isn’t ever our circumstances that dictate how we feel. How happy we are. How pleased we are. The sentences in our brain, the thoughts we have about our circumstances are what create our emotions. And we actually have power over how we think. Not just what we think about. But how we think about them. We just don’t remind ourselves of this often enough.
But we could just decide, similar to deciding the decision we made was the right one for us, we could decide how we are going to think and feel on purpose, no matter what the consequences of the decision are.
Another thing to consider and factor in, is that there will be pro’s and con’s to every single decision we make. Even if the con is just a cost of feeling discomfort. And whilst for some decisions, the lists are skewed in an obvious way and so you could use that as a method to help you decide, for others – where the lists are similar, it doesn’t help to use this strategy to decide. Because there won’t be an obvious choice. And so we could just be spinning out over the decision.
Another thing to consider is that we have the power to sell ourselves on a decision if we truly want to. We can find a way to think it is the best decision – by selling ourselves on it. So if we have this in our wheel house, we don’t have to agonise over which decision to make. We could just flip a coin (I’m not saying do that – but this is just to make a valid point), we could then sell ourself on the decision based on the coin landing – and feel great about the decision that was chosen.
Something else to consider is that sometimes the temptation is to ask others what decision you should make. And I really urge you not to do that – because you are the one who has to live with the decision and the consequences – and it is far better that you choose a decision for you, that feels good to you, rather than one that someone else is telling you that you should make.
So rather than asking externally, and outsourcing our decision, it is always better to tune inwards.
In addition to this, any time you tell yourself you “don’t know”, you are blocking yourself from your own internal wisdom. And slowing yourself down in the process. What you are really saying is, “I’m afraid to pick the wrong thing”. So instead of that, try on the idea that you do know, and that you can make any decision RIGHT for you. Or just take a guess at what you might want more.
And then lastly, consider that we don’t have to take action straight away. Sometimes I think we stall on making the decision for fear that as soon as we’ve decided, we need to get the ball in motion right away. And we may not want to do that for whatever reason. Or maybe there is some anxiety or fear around the taking action part that we want some time and some coaching to work through. Let’s just remember that we are adults, and we get to decide when we move, and how fast we move. We could still make the decision. And then wait to be ready to take action after that.
So with these things in mind, these things you have to know about making decisions, the strategy I actually do use with my clients – the decision making framework that I help my clients make decisions with – is one that is instead based on our intentions. Who we want to be in the world. Rather than pros and cons, or choosing the right or wrong decision.
So what I do, is I get my clients to take a sheet of paper, and then divide that page into columns for each option they are considering. With option A, B, C etc written at the top. And then I get them to focus on each one in turn, imagining they had made that decision. And writing down all the reasons why they made that decision.
I repeat this for each option, once they have exhausted all of their thoughts about why they would choose each one.
And then I get them to step back and identify the column which has the reasons they like the most. The reasons that align with who they want to be in the world, and how they want to show up.
And what you typically find, is that one option will stand out more than the others. One option will have reasons that feel good, and brave, and daring, and exciting. Versus reasons that feel bitter, or fearful, or resigned.
And then they get to decide who they want to be in the world, by picking the option that matches up with that.
It’s efficient, it’s fast, it’s empowering, and then whatever they pick, they get to still decide it was the right decision for them, have their own back on it, and sell themselves on why it is the best decision through and through.
Versus spending hours in limbo trying to decide between the pros and cons of each, telling themselves they don’t know, that there is a right and wrong decision, that other people are saying they “should” do this, and procrastinating and spinning out in indecision for no reason.
I love this framework – I think I got it from a coach, colleague and friend of mine, Lindsay Dotzlaf. And my clients love it too.
So the next time you have a decision to make, and you don’t want to stay stuck for longer than you have to, try it out, and if you want further support with it – there are 3 different ways you can work with me right now – Time Masters will help you with all your time problems, The Productive Quarter will have you growing your business every single week, and The School Hours Only Mastermind will help you make the decisions you need to scale your business to 6-figures, working school hours only.
You can find out more about any of those options in the links in the shownotes, or simply reach out to me on IG and we can have a chat about what you need.
That’s it for this week, my friends.
Happy decision making and I’ll see you next time.
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