The rental video chain, Blockbuster, invested heavily in physical retail stores and continued to focus on its existing model, even as streaming services like Netflix gained popularity. The mobile phone company, Blackberry, stuck with its physical keyboard design and proprietary operating system, despite the clear market shift toward touchscreen devices and mobile apps. These are examples of the sunk-cost fallacy, where we continue to invest time, money, and effort into something after we know that benefits may not be realised. In the above examples, a business invested in a strategic direction but failed to adapt as the market environment changed. A personal example could be when you continue to watch a terrible film until the end because you have already sat through the first hour.
Confirmation bias is another cognitive challenge to decision-making. This is the tendency to interpret new information as supporting an existing belief, theory, or ideology. How news is reported is a good example, as many news agencies bias their reporting around the media owner’s views. Another is when managers hire people in their own image and fail to be open and objective when valuing people from backgrounds that are different from their own.
We are always making decisions. One way of describing your situation in this very moment is that it is the sum of all the different decisions you’ve made in your life up to now: the big ones, like education, career, and relationships, and the less conscious and habitual ones like checking your email or deciding what you’ll have for lunch. When we make decisions, thoughts, emotions, and intuition are involved, but not always consciously. We are also influenced by external factors that can remain hidden, like cultural norms and advertising. To make good-quality decisions, we need to be in the right state. If we are stressed, anxious, or experiencing strong emotions, then the quality of our decision-making will suffer. So, when we make decisions, how aware are we of our thinking, emotions, intuition, and external factors?
Intuition is our ability to know something directly from the bottom up, outside of conscious thought, which works from the top down. Through mindful awareness, we become more attuned to our feelings and felt sense and more open to the subtle messages that the rich network of neural connections in our body provides.
Here are some ways that practising mindfulness can improve decision-making:
Awareness of Biases
- Recognising cognitive biases, reducing the influence of sunk-cost fallacy, or confirmation bias. By fostering a non-judgmental awareness of thoughts and emotions, mindfulness allows you to approach decisions more objectively.
Improves Emotional Regulation
- Mindfulness strengthens your ability to manage emotions, reducing stress and anxiety that can interfere with clear thinking. When emotions are regulated, decisions are more balanced and less driven by fear or frustration.
Strengthens Focus and Clarity
- Mindfulness enhances concentration and reduces mental noise, enabling you to evaluate options more effectively. This focus helps you with clarifying goals, framing the decision, and resolving trade-offs.
Reduces Impulsive Decisions
- Mindfulness gives you the choice and space to pause and consider options of how best to respond skilfully, rather than reacting impulsively.
Practicing mindfulness can help you access your full range of inner resources with improved attentional focus, cognitive clarity, emotional intelligence and resilience, and intuition. By cultivating awareness, emotional regulation, and focus, mindfulness empowers you to make decisions that are balanced and aligned with your values and goals. Although you can try this out in the sandwich shop, the research shows that practising mindfulness can make a significant difference when it comes to important decisions.
Suggested weekly practice
- See if you can notice the decisions you make during the day, from mundane ones like what you have for breakfast to the important decisions at work or in your personal life.
- Find a decision and explore using the whole of your inner resources, including thoughts, emotions, and intuition. Also include your inner state, whether this is stressed and agitated or calm and relaxed.
- Reflect on some of the decisions you have made recently and explore how you made the decision and what inner resources were involved.
Guided practice
Find somewhere undisturbed and sit in a comfortable, dignified, and upright posture, where you can remain alert and aware.
There are two guided practices for this session. You can close your eyes or lower your gaze while the meditations play.
- Play the settling practice, then read through the session content, which you can print off if that helps
- Then play the second audio to gently explore and experience being in the right state for mindful decision-making, including cognitive clarity, awareness of emotions, and intuition.
