View moments of doubt not as a sign of inadequacy, but as a positive signal and an opportunity to learn and grow. This perspective prevents giving up and instead encourages seeing doubt as an investment in future capabilities, similar to feeling the burn during exercise as a sign of getting stronger.
Shift your mindset from seeking a single ‘right answer’ to actively ‘making a better answer’ in complex situations. This involves dealing with doubt effectively, running small experiments, and testing hypotheses to find workable, usable, and good enough solutions.
Actively address and overcome perfectionism in your decision-making process. Perfectionism often leads to endless analysis, preventing experimentation and the acceptance of workable solutions.
When you feel yourself rushing or overly certain, use these feelings as ‘mindfulness bells’ or alarm bells to pause and become more aware. This helps you step back, take a breath, and get curious about what’s happening, especially in novel circumstances, to avoid rushing into bigger dangers.
When flooded by negative emotions or anxiety, actively find ways to connect with your core purpose or motivation. This activates your ‘pursue system,’ reminding you of the valuable and positive aspects of addressing the challenge, helping you move forward instead of fleeing or freezing.
Break down large, overwhelming uncertainties into smaller, manageable questions or actions, specifically identifying what you don’t know. This allows you to move forward with confidence on one aspect, gathering information and making progress, rather than being frozen by the scale of the overall problem.
Conduct small, low-stakes experiments to gather data and learn about your approach before making a difficult decision. These experiments provide valuable insights, hone your strategy, and make you more capable when facing the actual hard choice or conversation.
Change your physical environment or context when strong, unhelpful emotions arise. This disrupts the habitual feedback loop that sustains the emotion, making it harder to maintain the negative feeling and allowing you to channel that energy elsewhere.
Actively redirect your attention away from reinforcing negative thoughts or emotions by looking for ‘disconfirming data.’ This breaks the reinforcing loop that narrows your vision and intensifies the emotion, allowing you to consider alternative perspectives and break the negative cycle.
Challenge the initial story or interpretation that leads to a strong negative emotion by seeking alternative explanations. This creates a pause in the emotional cycle, allowing you to regulate yourself and prevent building frustration or anger by considering other reasons for a situation.
Consciously choose a different, often opposite, behavioral response to a strong emotion than your habitual reaction. This demonstrates that your behavioral response to an emotion is optional, allowing you to channel the energy productively and healthily, rather than being dictated by habit.
When facing analysis paralysis, prioritize decisions that keep your options open and are reversible or allow for a return. This prevents making irreversible decisions, especially when emotions are high, and allows for greater flexibility and learning.
Reconnect with your overarching goals, motivations, and the broader benefits of solving a problem. This helps you move forward by accepting ‘good enough’ solutions rather than striving for unattainable perfection, aligning actions with your deeper purpose.
Acknowledge that positive outcomes, even unforeseen ones, are possible when making a decision. This counteracts the negative rumination typical of analysis paralysis, making the situation feel less negative by opening your mind to potential benefits you couldn’t initially imagine.
Before making a decision or running an experiment, define the maximum amount of resources (time, money, effort) you are willing to lose. This principle frames learning as a good investment, even if the outcome isn’t the one initially desired, preventing overcommitment to uncertain paths.
Focus on both the quality of your decision-making process and the desired outcomes, recognizing that a good process is more likely to lead to good outcomes. This helps avoid simply making decisions ‘willy-nilly’ or solely focusing on outcomes without a sound approach.
When making and implementing decisions, prioritize how you do things (e.g., showing care, maintaining connections, being true to values) as much as what you decide. The ‘how’ creates its own set of outcomes that significantly shape satisfaction with a decision and can radically alter the experience of an event.
Categorize decisions based on their novelty and your experience with similar situations. This helps you apply appropriate processes, relying on intuition for familiar decisions and stepping back to learn for novel, complex ones, expanding your toolkit without abandoning proven methods.
When facing a decision, actively consider how it differs from past experiences, not just how it’s similar. This prevents overconfidence and helps you appreciate the unique aspects of a situation that might require a different approach or skill set.
Conduct a ‘premortem’ by imagining your decision has failed in the future and then working backward to identify potential causes of regret or failure. This allows you to proactively address potential problems, making it less likely you will regret the choice or that the decision will fail.
Pay close attention to subtle signals or deviations from your expectations, looking for ‘anomalies.’ Noticing these quickly allows you to anticipate and address issues faster, preventing them from escalating.
Deliberately pause a decision-making process when you know specific, valuable information will become available later. This allows you to gather more data or await specific events that will make the decision easier or clearer, but requires clarity on what you’re waiting to learn.
Develop plans with multiple options or built-in pivot points, imagining different future scenarios. Flexible plans allow you to learn and adapt to changing circumstances, preventing the temptation to force a single option to be ‘right’ when the world shifts.
Engage in short cycles of thinking and doing, learning by taking small, deliberate actions. This approach, often called ‘crawl, walk, run,’ reduces uncertainty more effectively than endless planning, building confidence and knowledge through iterative experimentation.
Foster an environment where team members feel safe to take interpersonal risks, admit concerns, and fail without fear of negative judgment. Psychological safety is critical for resilience, allowing individuals and teams to bounce back from stumbles, openly discuss weaknesses, and collectively work towards solutions.
Structurally integrate dedicated time in meetings or discussions for identifying weaknesses, poking holes, or playing ‘devil’s advocate.’ This makes it easier for people to voice concerns, as they are playing a defined, beneficial role for the team, leading to stronger ideas and plans.
Design systems or initiatives with built-in ‘wiggle room’ or small-scale investments. Buffers ensure that inevitable stumbles or errors are affordable and manageable, allowing for quick recovery and preventing minor issues from escalating into unrecoverable failures.
When assessing trustworthiness, gather evidence from past interactions, references, and observe others’ willingness to sacrifice for others. This helps distinguish when it’s wise to be vulnerable and cooperate, rather than making a ‘blunt strategy’ assumption that everyone is either trustworthy or out to get you.
Instead of immediately going ‘all in,’ engage in small, low-risk interactions to test and gradually build trust with others. This iterative approach allows for a positive, cooperative working relationship to develop based on earned trust and mutual vulnerability.
When assessing responsibility for a suboptimal outcome (for yourself or others), consider intentionality, causality, capacity, and obligation. This framework helps clarify confusion around blame, allowing for a more nuanced and fair understanding of accountability.
View relationships (personal and professional) as having an inevitable pattern of ‘rupture and repair,’ rather than expecting constant perfection. This heuristic helps manage expectations, encourages focusing on repairing disagreements or annoyances, and prevents prematurely abandoning relationships over inevitable conflicts.
After any decision or action, conduct a structured ‘after-action review’ by asking four questions: What did I expect? What actually happened? Why? What will we do differently next time? This closes the loop between learning and action, allowing you to gain insights from past experiences and apply them to future decisions, shortening learning cycles.
Regularly assess key life domains (nutrition, sleep, relationships, exercise, work, meaning/purpose) to understand their impact on your capacity to make difficult decisions. This audit helps identify areas that might be eroding your decision-making capacity and allows you to shore up your foundation, providing the necessary resources to navigate life’s inevitable difficult moments.
Actively seek out and engage with multiple, even conflicting, perspectives on a problem or business idea. This approach, though uncomfortable, allows you to notice patterns quicker, understand different expert viewpoints, and make more successful, thriving decisions by addressing doubts early.