About Self-management and the Urgent Need to Make Decisions

06 March, 2020

By Iventa The Human Management Group (Austria)

Every day, we face thousands of decisions. From small, everyday issues such as “What to eat for breakfast?” and “Taking the elevator or stairs?”, to big decisions with regard to planning for our family, career, etc. We also have to make decisions in our daily work environment – new management trends require both the employees and managers to deal with decisions on an operational and strategic level.

How should we tackle this? What do we have to change in ourselves, in our cooperation and in our organisations to meet this change and its challenges? How can we manage ourselves in the process? We provide you with three quick tips on how to deal with the wealth of options in your day-to-day (working) life:

Quick tip #1: Take three deep breaths for a clear head.

This exercise creates deceleration and awareness of the most essential things. With the 1st breath, you consciously focus your attention on your breath. With the 2nd breath, you relax your body. With the third breath, you ask yourself: What is really important now?
In order to be able to make meaningful decisions, you will need a clear head.

Quick tip #2: Create space and a routine to facilitate decision making.

Integrate decision making as an important recurring task in your everyday life. In your personal life, this may involve taking 20 minutes a week to consciously think about important decisions. Reflect on the judgments you have already made and deal with decisions that still need to be made. In your professional life, for example, regular meetings can be scheduled to reflect on the principles related to everyday challenges: How have our vision/mission statements helped us in previous decision-making processes? In which areas can we readjust? How do we want to work together?
Practice makes the master – this also applies to (collective) decision-making!

Quick tip #3: Use orientation questions as a base for your decision making.

In times of almost infinite options, it is often not easy to decide for or against something. To facilitate your own decision making process, orientation questions have an important function: Who am I? What are my (corporate) goals? What is the purpose of my activities? These questions can set the direction, which is essential for decision-making. Only in the second step, is it a matter of implementing decisions that have been made: How do we reach our goal? What resources, time and skills do we need?
As Mark Twain once said “Having lost sight of our goals, we redouble our efforts.” You cannot make good, productive decisions without goals and directional guidelines!

Conclusion: Self-management is a question of decision-making. The Human Resources and Organisational Development Team of Iventa would be happy to support you in bringing the topic of self-management back into your consciousness.

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