And what percentage of your decisions are logical?
I used to think that I was a pretty good logical decision maker.
Until neuroscience came along and proved that *all* decisions are emotional.
In fact, the logical part of the brain isn’t even connected to the decision making part.
Logic is completely out of the loop.
Decisions are made, 100% of the time, in the emotional part of the brain.
Then, that decision gets passed up to the logical part of the brain.
And this process happens so quickly that we’re able to convince ourselves, logically, that we made that decision with logic.
But what’s really happening is that the decision gets made by our emotions and then the logical part of the brain explains why the decision was made…
…*after* it was made…
…Every single time.
What we consider to be logical decisions are simply decisions that were made in a calm emotional state.
When somebody is in a frantic emotional state, we consider their decisions to be emotional.
When somebody is in a calm emotional state, we consider their decisions to be logical and calculated.
In both cases, the decisions are made with the person’s emotions.
They are both making emotional decisions, because there is no other kind of decision.
But…
It’s usually clear that the person with calm emotions makes better decisions.
This was a hard truth for me to grasp.
I was raised to value logic, and to believe that decisions are logical.
But, once I truly understood it, making decisions has become so much easier.
And figuring out how to make better decisions is a snap.
Because, even though logic doesn’t participate in the decision itself, it does *influence* future decisions by looking back on past decisions.
Logic is still incredibly important. Just not in the way we are often led to believe.
When our emotions make a decision, it is the logical mind’s job to look at the results of that decision, weigh those results against all the possibilities, and then to pass that information back to the emotions.
And if logic doesn’t do its job, then our emotions are running blind – making worse and more frantic decisions since there’s no logical feedback to give our emotions are clear picture of where we are, and where we’re trying to get.
And that’s the key point here, because…
Our emotions are guided by the images we hold in our mind.
Those mental images, shaped by our senses and our logical reasoning, act as the “map” that our emotions use to make decisions.
If we have a clear image of where we are, and where we want to be, then our emotions can make good decisions to get us to our destination.
We remain calm and focused, the logical mind can analyze each step on the path and update that mental image, and the emotions can decide which way to go next.
But if we start with an unclear picture of where we want to be, and we aren’t paying attention to the results of each decision we make along the way, soon our emotions are stampeding – dashing back and forth between distractions – and becoming more frantic with each blind decision.
At that point it’s easy to start second guessing every decision we make. Or become too scared to make decisions at all, and decide to procrastinate on everything.
Confident decision making comes from a clear mental image of where you are, and where you want to be.
It’s a tricky concept to grasp, but, once you do, you’ll never struggle to make decisions again:
https://www.speedzen.com/shop/subliminal-cds/confident-decision-maker/