Decision Making Skills: A 4-Step Model to Improve Your Decisions | Jill McAbe | Skillshare


Jill McAbe, Business Coach, Bestselling Author


Jill McAbe, Business Coach, Bestselling Author

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13 Lessons (1h 8m)
    • 1. Intro to ABCD Decisions

    • 2. Octopus Dilemma + Decision Contexts

    • 3. Culprit #1 Inferior Questions - Part 1 - Yes OR No

    • 4. Culprit #1 Inferior Questions - Part 2 - This or That

    • 5. Culprit #2 Lurking Biases - Part 1

    • 6. Culprit #2 Lurking Biases - Part 2

    • 7. Culprit #3 Ego & Emotion

    • 8. Culprit #4 Lack of Goal Alignment

    • 9. ABCDecisions™ - Align

    • 10. ABCDecisons™ Broaden

    • 11. ABCDecisons™ Compare

    • 12. ABCDecisons™ Decide

    • 13. Challenges & Overcomes

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About This Class

You make decisions all day long. Some are simple. Coffee or herbal tea? Buy that new shirt or not? Other times you must make a choice with lasting implications for your future: should you go back to school? Take that job? Marry that person? Go into business for yourself?


Decisions big and small can leave you feeling stuck in circles, like a hamster on a wheel. You second guess yourself, and you’re worried you'll make the wrong decision before you even start — or worse, that you’ll make a decision that could lead to failure.

How can you ensure you’re making the best possible choice every time?

I teach entrepreneurs and executives how to make consistently better personal and business decisions, supported by decision theory rooted in psychology and behavioural science.

Good decision-making is a skill you can develop that will have a positive effect on the rest of your life. 

Every good decision improves your future. 

In this course you’ll discover:

  • The common mistakes people make when making decisions  
  • The 4-step (ABCDecisions™️) model that will make it easier for you to make better decisions 
  • Immediate things you can stop and start doing to improve your decision making from now on

Decision making is a critical success-skill that will have you getting more out of your life.

Ready to make a great decision? One your future you will thank you for?

Learn a 4-step model to make better decisions from now on.

I’ll see you in class!

Jill McAbe 

Bestselling Author of It's Go Time: Build the Business and Life You Really Want
Founder of BOOM U, an online business school helping experts, coaches, and creatives build successful businesses faster

Check out my other science-based courses to improve your performance: 

Meet Your Teacher

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Jill McAbe

Business Coach, Bestselling Author


Hi, I'm Jill. Author of It's Go Time and the founder of BOOM-U, a training and coaching company that helps experts, coaches, and creatives build successful businesses.

The quest that led me to where I am can be traced back to the day my car was T-Boned by another driver. The accident set in motion two years of suffering numerous injuries. Unable to work, my ability to work disappeared, along with my quality of life, life savings, and sense of self.

Towards the end of my recovery I contemplated how to rebuild. I realized I had been in the wrong career, the wrong relationship, and the wrong life. I made a vow to myself to figure out my purpose, do work that energized me, and stop being such a workaholic. I wanted more fun in my life!

It didn’t happen overn... See full profile

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1. Intro to ABCD Decisions: I personally don't know anyone who hasn't struggled with decision making in their life. The decisions we make are so critical, they're so important to the quality of the businesses we build, to how much happiness we're going to experience in our life. But throughout my lifetime, I have never met anyone who really confidently could just make decisions, just go, "Yes, I know, I'm going to move forward with this." Instead what I've been exposed to are just a lot of struggle as we wonder, should we do this? Should we do that? Should we do something? Should we not do something? Is there a way of making decisions with less stress and more surety? Is there something we can do, a system we can follow to make predictably better decisions and have predictably better businesses in lives. My name is Jill McABE. I am the founder of an agency called Boom You. We help freelancers, entrepreneurs, people with awesome talents, create incredible teaching and coaching businesses. I'm also the best-selling author of the book, It's Go Time. A book that teaches you how to go from stuck to unstoppable in business and life. Before I started my agency and wrote my book, I used to be a high performance trainer and strategy expert in entrepreneurial organizations, where I would help leading companies make key decisions about how to move forward in their future. In today's class, I'm going to be teaching you a tool I created called ABC decisions that's going to help you take a lot of the unnecessary guesswork out of your decision-making and make consistently better decisions from now on. In this class you're going to learn the four cobras that have actually leads so many of us to making inferior decisions. You're going to learn about how just asking the wrong question will lead you to an inferior decision. You're going to learn about vices and how they limit our ability to truly see our best options. You're going to learn about the role of emotions and sometimes even ego and how that can lead us to make inferior decisions. You're going to learn about lack of alignment and how sometimes just not even knowing where we're going is part of the reason why we're struggling with that decision. I'm going to teach you, the ABCD decisions tool so that you can make predictably better decisions from now on. This class is for absolutely everyone who wants to make better decisions in their life. If you're a freelancer and you want to figure out which set of skills do you want to focus on the most or which clients to take on board or who to collaborate with, this class will work for you. If you're an entrepreneur and you're trying to figure out how to grow your company or make your company more valuable or who you should hire, this will work for you. If you are an employee in an organization, a manager or leader, and you're charged with making decisions for that organization, this class will work for you. Or even if you're trying to figure out the best next step for your career, this class will work for you. Making a decisions is such a critical skill in our lives. There's no point, no moment where a choice we make is not going to lead us to a different future. Having a structure for that will make all the difference to you making better decisions from now on. When I teach ABC decisions to my clients, it becomes one of their favorite go to tools because making better decisions is something we can do on a daily basis. For decisions, big and small, ABCD process is going to have you making better choices, building a better business and having a better life. Let's get started. 2. Octopus Dilemma + Decision Contexts: Before we dive into the training modules, I quickly want to tell you the back story of how I got so fascinated and something of an expert in decision-making, a funny story, and also decision contacts that you have a clear understanding of what you're going to be able to learn and do after you take this course. Where did it all begin? What happened seven years ago? Well, I was hired to build and open this restaurant. By build, I mean, there was not a building there. I had to build a building, put the restaurant together, hire the management team, all of the leaders, over a 100 staff, do all of the operating systems. Anyway, it was huge job took two years and this is the lady who hired me. Her name is Janette Ze Greene, and that was her first of a number of restaurants. They've since use my operating systems for. She's now across North America. This place was in Toronto. One of the tasks that I did while I worked there it was hire this guy, Daniel Mendelow, and incredible, world-class chef. He had been near Toronto working and was actually getting ready to leave Canada, it gets too cold there, and anyway, we managed to convince him to stay, and it was wonderful to get him to be the head chef. Shortly after he started, now they got along but a lot of things, but of course they were developing the menu together and the question emerged like, what octopus dish are we going to have? That's like they did not get along when it came to octopus. Oh my God, like months went by guys, and I'm literally being asked like, Joe, what's your decision here? What octopus do we have? Janet wanted tomato sauce, Daniel wanted one that was marinated in olive oil. I was like, Oh my God, and I'm like sitting there thinking, okay, I worked for this lady, so I need to keep her happy, and this guy is a chef who's going to put it in all my operating system, so if we're not on good terms, my work is going to fail. I'm in a hard spot. Also I don't really care that much. I think truthfully, I don't. Actually like octopus. I swim with them. I gone scuba diving. I don't want to eat octopus like twice a week and argue about which sauce. Well, I eventually snapped. I literally went cuckoo and I was like guys like monthly lifestyle talks about octopus. Do you have any clue how much you pay me to talk about octopus? Well, the octopus conversations, stopped. But what started was my fascination with decisions and like, wow, why did that take so long was really interested? When I started studying decision making, over the years I've studied and now taught it. There's three contexts I want to talk about. There's personal decisions once that you have control over, even when you think someone else like a parent or a spouse has control, you truly have control over it and then there's those ones that are team decisions. Maybe that you make with a spouse, maybe that you make with a family member or people at work, and then of course, there's those leadership decisions. There's those decisions we make for other people on their behalf, and all of these contexts absolutely share some theory, but they are different, and so you are learning personal decisions, That's because I did a survey and I asked, what do you want to learn? This is what by-and-large, a lot of people said, so decision theory is not going to help you make a 100 percent of good decisions, not a crystal ball. It's more of a seat belt to making good decisions, and actually it's a seat belt against making bad ones and inferior ones, and it will definitely help you make good ones, and we do that by going through like are you going to learn to diagnose these four culprits and start to see it? Like, wow, this is happening every day. Oh my god, you're going to notice that bad decision-making happen while it's happening, and then ABC decisions is basically a checklist and you're going to learn how to use it and you can follow the check list and make predictably better decisions from now on. During the survey, I asked for some decision challenges. Some of you were so generous and share them with me. Thank you, if you did, you might hear me talk about your decision challenge through the training. I referred to a lot of examples. At the end I go deep into two want to let you know if you don't hear yours is one of the two. Check back with this course because over the coming weeks I will add more so that you actually get a chance to really hear how to use ABC decisions, and I always give me some notes about how to master the material. Pretty excited to get started. See you in class. 3. Culprit #1 Inferior Questions - Part 1 - Yes OR No: Getting started with the four culprits, of poor decisions. The first one, limiting, wait, scratch that, inferior questions. Your outcome in any situation and decision you have to make is going to be proportional to the question that you start with. Albert Einstein has a terrific quote. "If I had an hour to solve a problem, I'd spent 55 minutes thinking about the problem, and only five minutes thinking about the solution." That's not what we see happening in real life. We see people just going, solutions, very quickly asking questions, and jumping to solutions, and then working on them for a while, and then ending up somewhere, and then not being all that happy. If you've seen that happen, that is usually a case of starting with the wrong question. It's really risky in your decisions to ask the wrong question because you'll end up with the wrong answer and you'll put money and time and effort behind something you won't be happy with what you got. There's two of the most famously bad, there's lots of inferior questions, but these are the ones that are so easy to look out for and so easy to fix. The first one is yes or no questions, and the second is this or that. We'll take a closer look at these, both of them fall under a category known as false dichotomies. A false dichotomy occurs when an argument presents only two options and ignores other alternatives. Wait a second, we know there's more alternatives than two ways to go about things in the world, and yet it's so common. I worked with 22 cultures, it's so common for everyone I've met to start with these limiting questions. Yes or no is by far the worst question that you can begin with. Research has shown that 52 percent of the time it's going to lead you to a bad decision. No, you don't want to fail more than half the time. Here's a great concept framed as a bad question. One of the decision challenges that came in, was a gentleman who had gone to university, and it didn't go well, he just didn't like it, and then he ended up working. Then he got interested in the subject again and was thinking like, "Hey, should I go back to university or not?" Listen, interesting question and I'm all for everybody getting the education and living the life they want, doing things that interest them, but not framed this way. Was too limiting. He was actually pretty stressed about it because there is financial considerations and not sure if he could afford it, asked the parents for money, and they might not want to give it anymore. Could he even travel there? Afford it? There were so many things, didn't even know if he could. But the truth is, that was a really limiting question. Now, there's a lot of ways you could frame that question. He could say, "Well, what are my options for getting a great career? Or what are my options for getting more education?" There's a lot of places that we can get education other than universities. These days even Harvard is online for crying out loud now. I mean, we can get incredible education online now that can help us improve our careers. We could take one course to see how we like something or go part time, or, or, or. But when we start with this yes or no, it creates maybe unnecessary anxiety. Watch out for whatever your situation is that you're not asking yes or no and wondering what other great options there might be. An interesting example of a yes or no question leading to an epic failure. It's a surprise. Listen, my mum, retired teacher, and so I guess that's why I became a teacher, and she helps me, I send her my stuff and she gives me feedback, and I can improve things before I share them with you. She knew I was recording today and then she calls and she's like, "Guess what." I'm like, "What?" She's like, "I made the most delicious shake this morning." I'm like, "Oh, I don't have time for this right now." I'm like, "She's my mum." So I'm like, "Let's talk about it, okay? Tell me what you shake." She's like, "No. It's about your course. I made the shake and it was so good, so I drank it all. But I gave myself terrible indigestion, and now I don't feel well." I was like, "Oh, I'm sorry to hear that mom." She's like, "No. But it's about your course. Because I realized the reason I drank it is because I asked myself this is so good, should I drink it or throw it away?" She realized after watching my material, and she was like, "You know, that was the wrong question. Had I considered other options, I might have frozen it. I might have had it another day. I'm not sure why I thought I had to drink it or just throw it away." She was pleased learning the material. I think she'll be surprised when she sees that it made the course on a slide. But, I think yes or no questions lead to indigestion in life in kind of way. They're leading to inferior futures. What do I want you to take away from this section? Yes or no? No way. We say no to you, yes or no questions. We do not want to fail 50 percent of the time. Let's progress into the next section here, and we'll go into this or that questions. Marginally better than yes or no, not that much better. 4. Culprit #1 Inferior Questions - Part 2 - This or That: We're on to Part 2 of Inferior Questions. Now we're going to look at This or That questions. This or That questions are marginally better than Yes or No questions. When Yes or No fail as one in two times, This or That have been shown to fail us one in three times. Over 30 percent of the time it's going to fail you. So still too high. I want you to look out for them. Now, this next question is one in the pre-course survey that I got a lot. Despite a few different things, but essentially it was, "Should I stay on the path that I'm on or start something new?" In the pre-course survey, the context was mostly about work. Should I stay in this career, I feel like the opportunities in future might be limited, or should I switch to a new career? I don't know if it's too late, if I've invested too much in my career. Or somebody was asking about a business, they start a business but weren't sure that the business was quite right. One thing to be careful of, whatever your situation is, This or That, is that that false dichotomy is almost never the case that you only have two choices. What I'm going to do is show you a couple of options that you can, just out of the gate, if you do have a This or That question, that you can right away see that maybe that is limiting. The first technique that you might apply in this case. Because of course we can't just stand the same path or start something now. In the case of work, we might be able to do a little bit of both. We might be able to stand the path we're on and maybe start a side hustle or maybe drop to part-time on the path we're on and start something on the side or take another job or we may be able to take a short break and try something. So there might be a few different options if we throw that end in there. Another way that can open up possibilities for you, is if we say, "Should I stand the path I'm on, start something new, or what else could I do?" That's another way of potentially take a break or try something new or maybe even try to make the path I'm on, maybe there is a way to a brighter future here. Who knows? But the point is, we want to look for it, because the more options you start with, the more likely your success. So be very wary of false dichotomies. We see the world in this false binary way. This way, right way and a wrong way. That's not the case. Even out of walk in the road, we can go straight through the middle or sideways or behind us if we feel we were on the wrong path. Always try to remember that the more options you have, the more likely you are going to succeed. It's just a mathematical situation you want in your favor. For me, when I see like Yes or No, there's just options, these two doors, This or That, I immediately force myself to go look for a third option. That's the very minimum, folks, you want a third option and a really good option. But you can just keep going. You can look for additional options. In fact, I know where it shows six doors here, but if you look for up to five options, you're actually in an optimal place, especially if they're excellent. So it's time for you to practice this. I want you to practice spotting inferior questions. I want you to ask, "Is your question framed as either a Yes or No or This or That. If it is going to have to apply some of the quick techniques that you got already in this section to see if you can improve your question right away. Whether your question was framed as a Yes or No or This or That or not this particular one, I suggest you make a decision right now to see how many times you can spot yourself and other people framing what they can do in their life with either This or That. Should I or shouldn't I? Or should I do This or That? Because that's leading to these 33 percent or 52 percent failure rates that of course we don't want. This wraps up the Inferior Questions Module. I'll take a moment now and do your activities. Then I'll see you in the next module on lurking biases. 5. Culprit #2 Lurking Biases - Part 1: Moving down the list of the four culprits of good decisions, we're on culprit number two, which are lurking biases. Biases are like hidden puppeteer behind our choices. We often don't even know they're there. More technically, a bias is a strong inclination of the mind or a preconceived opinion about something or someone. A bias might be in favor of or against an idea. Problem is, we don't really often overtly know we have them. So let's look at how biases are formed. Every day in our life, stuff happens to good stuff, bad stuff, medium stuff. But sometimes the stuff that happens causes us to form an opinion about what happened, form a belief about what happened and we subconsciously kind of take note we're like, "Got it". We make rules for ourselves in our mind. We say, "From now on, I will believe this" or "From now on, I will do this." Sometimes these protect us and help us succeed in the world. But other times they really limit our ability to move forward because sometimes these things that we noted really weren't true. Maybe somebody wants told you, "Oh, you'll never be a successful" whatever, or "You're not as good as so and so", and in your mind, actually, you might believe that and it could become a bias. So one of the things to do is to notice some biases that you have when you're making important decisions because you always have the power to overrule a bias. Biases are only failing you when you can't see them. Just like when you're driving in a car, we have this illusion that we can see everything. But we all know who've driven that there's this blind spot that the mirror doesn't see. Of course, we can turn and look over our shoulder and spot it, and that's what you need to start doing to make better decisions. Now I'm quickly going to illustrate to you just how many biases there are that we have. You can see here there's 20 and then we're going to dive into five of them that I think you really need to know about. So I'm quickly going to show you just all of these biases that I grabbed from this article and you can find the link as well to go see that article yourself. But what we're going to do is we're going to look closely here at anchoring bias, conservatism, recency, zero-risk and confirmation bias. The first one we'll look at is anchoring bias. Anchoring bias occurs when we are over-reliance on the first piece of information we hear. This is when we make a decision and we got too influenced by the first thing we heard. This is really famous in a play when you're trying to buy a car or negotiate for your salary. A lot of people are wondering like, who should state their price first? Well, the research shows that whoever states their praise first, the final decision is actually closer to that price. So state a high price and the price will be higher, they state a low price first and the price will be lower. But it's also important to know, just like I mentioned in the last slide, that sometimes that anchoring bias was someone telling you you weren't capable of something when you were younger and you anchored to that. So it's really important to be wary of an anchoring bias. Next, there's the conservatism bias. This occurs when we favor prior evidence over new evidence or information that has emerged. It's like we just think, well because we heard it first, it's got to be true. Famous example of this, of course, is when everybody thought the world was flat and had a hard time adapting to new information. There is new science being revealed all the time and we need to be careful, there's a lot of progress being made in the world and we want to make sure that we're not just living in the past. So I thought it would also be fun in light of conservatism bias to look at recency bias, the tendency to weigh the latest information more heavily than older data. Because data is old or because it's new doesn't make it right, we have to come to things with a critical mind and we have to be careful that we're always not just like rubber necking and going, "Oh, I agree with that and I agree with that and I agree with that." An example, when I was doing my leadership masters and you read all these people who are studying leadership and it's simply can't all be true and so you have to look at things that three or four or more people have found to be true because that helps create assurance that it wasn't just an accident and so it's important that, one of my clients in Singapore would say, we don't swing like a coconut tree every time we hear new information that we come to it with a critical mind. Next, I want to cover zero-risk biased. Sociologists have found that we love our certainty. Of course, even if it's counterproductive to us though. Eliminating risk entirely means that there's no chance of being harmed. Now listen, a few people who wrote into the pre-course survey were like, "I want to do this, but I'm afraid I'll fail." I want you to know if that's you, be careful, to some degree, we might need to take risks, to leave the house or to live a life that will look back on with pride. Everybody has to find their own balance of how much risk. But if you're really afraid of taking any risk, just maybe you have a zero-risk bias. Look at that. 6. Culprit #2 Lurking Biases - Part 2: Continuing with lurking biases part two, confirmation bias and it's activity time. Confirmation bias, keep talking, I'm not listening. What's going on? We tend to only listen to information that confirms our preconceptions. It's not really a very good thing because it means that if we don't already know absolutely everything, which of course we don't, then we're really not coming up with anything new, most of us, when we go to make decisions, we're limiting ourselves as to what we could know. I can give you an example and it's actually causing a lot of division in the world. Of course, the internet is a wonderful thing and it allows us to become more global and connect and it's incredible. But I think most of us have heard that there is a shadow side of the internet that they're constantly tracking our behavior and they're constantly seeing what do we like? What do we look at? They're showing us more of what we like. It's affirmative, everything we see, we just see more of that. Everything, becomes more and more and what's actually happening is we're getting less and less likely to encounter information that doesn't confirm what we already know. Spoiler alert, this is incredibly limiting and something to be extremely cautious of. It is beyond limiting for all of us to not take in new information and to be stuck on something just because it's what we think we know. It's really important to go past what we already believe into new territory, and I've got some news for you. You know that pros and cons method of figuring out what we should do? It's terrible. Decades of psychology research have proven that all you do when you do that is actually list your confirmations of what you already think. We're not coming up with any new ideas here. So pros and cons is pretty much just good for figuring out what your conformations are, and yes, I know some of you are thinking, "Chill, you went after pros and cons. I love pros and cons." Believe me, I did too before I realized how limiting they were. I really want you to watch out for at least these five biases and potentially go read that article and read about more because anchoring bias means that whoever said something to you first is more likely to get more what they want and you not yours, so think about that. Conservatism bias means you're living in the past and maybe not looking for new data. Recency means you might just be a little bit too quick to jump on a new bandwagon and you might need to slow down and get three agreeing points of reference before you go, "Okay, I like that." Zero-risk, of course we don't leave the house, but I think you're going to want to look at how much risk can I tolerate and how much do I need in order to look back on my life and go, "Oh my gosh, I'm so happy with the life I lived. Life is too precious not to live one that you feel great about. Find your risk tolerance and just notice it. Confirmation bias, this is huge, guys, huge. Please, we just tend to reconfirm what we already know and this is beyond limiting. I want you to really, spoiler alert, we might not know all the right stuff, let's try to stay as open as we can to another point of view. It's activity time. This time, of course, I want you to take a look at your decision and think about which bias or biases you think might be influencing you. Of course, biases can be positive and they can be negative but for sure there are always some that are hiding from us things that could be really good for us. You want to be as truthful with yourself as you possibly can, and then I want you, for each bias you identified, think of one or more arguments for why that bias isn't true, even if you currently believe it's true. This is a great activity to help you explore alternate ways of thinking to where you're at now. I hope you enjoyed this activity in looking at your biases. We're moving on to ego and emotion, the third culprit of poor decision making. 7. Culprit #3 Ego & Emotion: We're on to the third of the poor culprits of poor decisions talking about ego and emotion. We're going to start by talking about the brain because this is where it all begins. Those of you who have seen my other courses know sometimes I got really into the brain perspective. Here we just need to know a little bit. We need to know that the limbic brain is where we have emotions and feelings reside there. In our neocortex over top, we need to know that our rational or thinking brain is there. It's also really important that you know that only one part of your brain is going to be functioning or active at a time. They don't work in harmony at the same time. They're very turn-taking. It's like no, you go, no, you go. I don't know how they do it, but anyway, it's one at a time. Another thing you need to know is that we're making our decisions from our limbic brain almost all of the time unless you're really paying attention and then using that confirmation bias to rationalize our decisions, but the true decision is usually sourced in the limbic brain. But we don't really want our decisions sourced from our limbic brain. It's like there's a rational part of our brain. Lots of research has shown that people with diminished abilities in their emotional centers actually make way better decisions for themselves because they're more rational. Even though rational decisions can be a little more boring, they actually lead you to better outcomes. We're going to look at some scenarios that limit your good decision-making and what could be getting in the way of you and your best future. We're going to look at overconfidence and we're going to look at embarrassment and escalating commitment. These are all things where the ego could really get bruised. Then we're going to just look at emotional, irrational decisions. Starting with the ego and overconfidence. This is why we're so sure we're right. It's actually important to be aware of that because that means your limbic brain is a fire in. Research with doctors has shown that when they were a 100 percent sure they were right about diagnosis, they were wrong 40 percent of the time. This is a problem and overconfidence gets in the way of us being able to rationally determine where we're at. Be aware of overconfidence and get people to question you. When you're feeling that way, question yourself, but it's not good if you're too sure about something. Now, ego and fear of embarrassment can also lead us to make subpar decisions. It's when we have a bruised ego sometimes don't want to face it, we're like no, I'm just going to do it this way. One of the decision challenges that came in the pre-course survey was a fellow who told his parents, I don't need your money anymore because he didn't want to go to university, and then he thought, well, maybe I do want to go to university. He was worried about money, but whether or not he could get it from his parents or not, it's possible. I wondered is a bruised ego from that experience, stopping him from going back and asking. Who knows? But I think we all know there's those cases where we said or did something and we don't want to embarrass ourselves by changing our mind. We have to think about what future you be best served by that decision. Another thing that happens a lot is fear of embarrassment in the future. Other people wrote in and said, I want to do this thing, but I fear I'm going to fail and that would be embarrassing. Well, I don't know, but will that limit you in life? Is that going back to that zero risk bias? Whatever it is, please stop. It's really important that if you want to live your best life, don't let temporary embarrassment get in the way of something that could be really great for the rest of your life. The final note. I want to make to your very ego and escalating commitment is keeping your focus on winning. There's actually something called the dollar auction game, which describe situations where people transition their focus from winning to not wanting to lose. That's called escalating commitment. What happens in this game is, a buck goes up for option and people go, I'll pay 10 cents for it, I'll pay 20 cents for it, I'll pay 30 cents for it. But the issue is that whoever loses actually have stuff fork over that amount of cash and sometimes that auction goes well above a buck. There's actually cases where it goes like 50 bucks because the person who wins only gets a buck. Clearly the person who's paying like 50 buck both of them are not trying to win, they're both going to lose, they're avoiding loss. But here's the thing, when you're just trying to avoid loss, it actually means you're not playing to win and you got to be careful. Think about that. There's a line that I always think about no matter how long you've gone down the wrong road, the minute you know that's the wrong road, it's time to turn back. Now, I don't want you turning back too early either, but if you keep your focus on winning, you should be okay. Finally, we're going to talk about emotions and irrational behavior either when we're really sad, or really angry, or extremely elated. Any of these things are definitely for sure telling you you're operating from the limbic brain, and you don't want that. Whenever you are in your limbic brain, whenever you have strong emotions of any sort, that's okay, that's a part of being human, but it's a sign that somehow you got to transition. You want to transition to your neocortex because again, they don't play together. They each take turns working, and you want to become more rational. A fast recap of ego and emotion. That third of the poor culprits support decisions. Don't make decisions when you're feeling too confident. A little bit of humility will serve you in making better decisions. Don't let embarrassment get in the way of you and your best future. Sometimes dealing with a little bit of embarrassment today, lead you somewhere better tomorrow. Always play to win. Escalating commitment, throwing good money after bad or continuing on a road, that just, it's not going to pan out. Be careful that you always play to win. When your emotional, you are irrational, so make sure that you keep your emotions to a minimum when you make your final decision. Here is your activity for this section. I'd like you to do an ego or motion scan as it relates to your decision. Just weigh yourself on a scale of 1-10, one being very mild and 10 being extreme. To what degree do you feel overly confident, fearful of being embarrassed? To what degree you've focused on not losing versus winning, or feeling strong emotions? Whatever you've got, we're going to come back to that in A, B, C decisions, and I'm going to help you get into a good rational head space before you make your decision. We're going to move on to lack of alignment in the next module. 8. Culprit #4 Lack of Goal Alignment: We are at the fourth of the four culprits of poor decisions. When you are not aligned, you are definitely going to be wasting your time. What is alignment? It's an arrangement in which two or more things are positioned in a straight line, or parallel to each other. In this case, in the case of you making better decisions from now on, you always want to make sure your decision is aligned to your goal. I can tell you that there's a lot of the time where we actually forget what our goal is. If you think back to the escalating commitment in the ego and emotion segment, that's exactly what's happening when people stop trying to win, and they're trying to avoid losing. They are like, "I've invested so much in this, I just have to keep it going." But it's like no, we have to keep our eye on the prize. In this case, you really need to think about in any given point in time what does an A plus look like, what would cause me to give myself an A plus? That's your goal, and it's incredibly important that the goal be extremely clear and extremely measurable. Because when it is, then you're empowered to make that goal happen. Then you can be like, "I know why I'm making this decision and I want to make the best decision, so I'm not going to let bruised ego get in my way. I'm not going to get let over-confidence get in my way, not going to get emotions, not going to get biases get in my way, not going to use inferior questions because I want to give myself in A plus when this is all over, and I need to figure out what that is first." We know when we have a lack of alignment. A lot of people think they have a clear goal, but really don't. You'll know that you have a lack of alignment when you find yourself in something called analysis paralysis. Your choice will seem unnecessarily daunting and you'll struggle to decide. Analysis if you're not familiar with the term, it just means you're like, "I can't decide, and I don't know want to do, " it's just like you feel like you're talking and going in circles and circles and you can't seem to get ahead. Professionally, I can tell you whenever I find a group that's lost and doesn't know where to go next on a decision, is because they actually forgot where they were trying to go. Back to the Octopus Dilemma. Should it be grilled with tomato sauce, should it be cold with olive oil? If it had been aligned to the goal, what's the concept? If we could just stop for a second and gone, "I didn't know this then by the way." Okay guys it's the Southern Italian Grill. I think at that point, it would have been very easy to say, "We need it grilled with tomato sauce." Tomato sauce being the more southern Italy preparation and cold or room temperature with olive oil being the more northern preparation. It could have literally saved months and a lot of money. It's really important to set clear goals to determine what you want in advance. If you are not already trained in setting really clear outcomes, I'm going to encourage you to check out this course here on the platform as soon as you can. Because it's going to teach you that, if your goals are in your subconscious, you're working way too hard and for sure, your decisions, you're going to have a hard time. It's really important to make sure every decision is aligned to a clear goal. Now I'd like you to stop and look at the decision you are facing right now, and ask how clearly have you articulated what you want as a result of this decision you need to make? Have you figured out what will cause you to give yourself an A plus? If you've not stated a clear outcome, please take a minute to do that now, and then when you come back, we're going to be looking at the ABC decision model. 9. ABCDecisions™ - Align : You are now aware of four of the co-operate support decisions, reasons that so many people make a higher percentage of bad decisions they really don't need to. Of course you've got to replace that with like, "Surely, I know what not to do." Now we're going to talk about what to do. The ABC decisions model will help ensure you make better decisions from here on-out. You're just going to follow a step-by-step process. By doing that, you're going to increase the number of great decisions you're able to make. The four steps of the model A is align to what you want. B is all about broadening your options. Once you know what you want, we want you to have lots of good options. Then your next step is going to be C, compare contenders. Then finally D, you're going to detach, emotionally detach before you decide. I wanted to get started with aligning to what you want. Aligning with what you want is all about before you make a decision about anything, clarify what you want to be true as a result of that decision. In other words, what's your goal? In other words what will have to happen for you to give yourself that A plus? I've got a number of questions that I'm going to offer you on how you can find alignment. Because there's a lot of different ways that we can align to what we want in a decision. Not all of these ways are going to affect all of your decisions. The idea here behind the model, is to always ask questions that might be appropriate in this case. One of the things that we can do to find alignment with a decision that you're making, you simply ask yourself what makes you happy? You can look at your past, but what you really want to know is what makes you feel good in life. Evaluate the types of things you do that make you feel good. It doesn't necessarily have to be laughing this much, but just things that you're like, "Yeah, I enjoy myself when I do that." It could be reading or contemplated work. It could be anything. But that is something you might want to align to. Another thing that really works for alignment, is thinking about what values you uphold. You could have the value of believing in other people. You can have the value of honesty or integrity of teamwork. There's all sorts of literally hundreds and hundreds of values. But, thinking about your values and the person that you want to be. Then really committing to make decisions that are in alignment with those values can be another way to approach things that will really help you make better decisions. Now another thing that you might want to align to is, what do you want long-term. What will cause you to look back on your life and go, "Yeah, that was a good life. I feel good about that. Like, that's a big thing for me because I nearly had my life taken in a car accident. For me I have to live my best life." Here the idea is dream, big. Way better to fall a little short of huge expectations, than fall short of low expectations, or even meet low expectations. It really might be time when you're making decisions, be like what would the ultimate outcome be? Let yourself go there. It's really worthwhile. No, don't worry, I'm not going to cause you to go after some pie in the sky dream without thinking about your near future. Of course, we all have considerations, about what do we need now in our lives. We can't just think about the future. There's going to be a balance. But the way for you to align to your goals, is to know both of these things and not just one or the other. When you've done this you just stop and you say, what's my ultimate goal right now? It's really just capturing all of the information about what makes you happier? What do you enjoy? Your values? What you want long-term? Short-term? Just figuring out a sweet spot for you. What's going to make you happy? I want to give you a quick example of how you might use that activity. In the question, should I start my own business? Many people had this question. You might go, what makes me happy? Or I really like being my own boss. I really like being in charge of my own time. What values do you want to uphold? Maybe you have a family and you're like, "I do want stability for my family. I don't want to put them at huge risk while I open a business", you might have to think about that. What do you need short term? I need X number of $ for bills and whatever. What do you desire long-term? "Oh, wow. I really want to be able to take my family wherever they want, and I really just want to live on my own terms." What's my ultimate goal right now? This might come out of left field. You might think about all that and go, "Yeah, I am going to go after my own business, but I'm going to do it on the evenings and weekends. I'm just going to nurture it until such a time it might make sense to do it full time. That's what that might look like in that example. Now it's your turn. Thinking about the decision you need to make, I want you to answer these questions since they're the very same questions. Just go through them, and get the bigger picture of where you want to end up. Just make sure that at the end of it you are aligning to a clear goal. What is your A plus when you arrive? 10. ABCDecisons™ Broaden: Now we're going to look at broadening your options. Once you have aligned to what you want, it's time to get some great options and we do this before you decide anything. Know what are people currently doing? Over and over people are just coming up with so-so options. They're the first options that come to mind. They don't really dig and dig and dig for great options and so-so options lead to so-so futures. It is absolutely critical if you want your best future to take time when you're making important decisions, to make sure you have actually 3-5 great options. This is the scientifically proven number that you want. By great options, you can't have great one, it's as if when you here these two Kernel ones. No, they all have to be so good you can't decide between them. That's how you get to a better future. I'm going to be going through some techniques that you can use to broaden your options. Just like the alignment activities, they're not all going to apply to your situation, but they all apply to broadening options at some point. On covering them all here, you can come back to this training when you have other decisions. First, we're going to review techniques to overcome or get false dichotomies that I told you earlier and also add a new one. You already know the end game. You've got a false dichotomy in front of you. Your first thing is, wait a second, can I do both of these things? Just test because often time you can and also fun and easy one. I lived on number three, four or more. What else could I do? You're thinking about your options and you're, like wait a minute there's no way these can be my only two options. That's just not how life works. You just keep asking that question, what else could I do? I got this from Chip and Dan Heath of a book called Decisive. I think it's a great book if you want to read more on the topic of Decisions. They introduced this to me, what would I do if this were an option? It's a great question. They say sometimes people are so fixated on their answers, they can't think beyond them. This is a neat technique to just imagine that was possible. What would you do then? Next I want you to see through some biases. I want you to use these techniques. I am going to help in other situations when sometimes biases that we don't even know are there are leaning us one way or another way. First of all, it's just incredibly important that you just ask yourself every time, what biases are influencing me? There are always biases influencing you. Not a bad idea to print off that article up business Insider that I left the link to and constantly go I wonder which one is getting me here. That's an important one and just say, well, is that really in my best interest?" Another question and this works in this case and in all instances, is to say, what's my opportunity cost? What can I do if I didn't do this? This one is like when you're on your way to making one decision which by the way you've already formed most decisions at some point in your limb brain. The whole point is you're trying to take rational control here. The opportunity costs really helps you do that because you go, hey wait a minute what can I do if I didn't do this? What can I do if I didn't buy that $20 line chart? What could I do if I didn't say yes to helping that person? What would I do with the time? This can help us be very rational and make very good decisions in the moment not formed by biases or anything else. Finally, a few techniques to switch off ego and emotion. I love this one. What would future me do? Current me gets embarrassed. Current me has all sorts of maybe overconfident. Current me can get wound up in emotions, but future me is very clear. Future me wants its best life and there's no way it's going to let me sabotage it with emotions. That's a great one. Data. I can't overstate this enough. The thing is what is data? I want you to get information that informs your decisions. You can get information from people. You can get information online, but watch out for those confirmation biases. You can get information from a lot of different places but what I want you to do when you get information is make sure you get it from someone who succeeded before you in the area where you have to make a decision. Most people who succeeded in an area are happy to share advice about how you can succeed in that area, or at least to where a lot of people are. Please get data to inform a wise decision. How much data do you need? well, to make sure you overcome that recency bias, you might want to get at least three data points that line up that say, yeah this would be good. Finally, multi-track. I love this one. This is when you might try two or more options before you decide. I have to do this when I'm hiring. I'll be like I'll make little assignments and I'll pay a small amount to see if we have a good flow working together. Actually recently did this to hire a dentist, because I was having such a hard time hiring a dentist that I actually went and paid for multiple appointments with different people to get what I lived with. Totally worth it in the end. Remember, when you've got to make a decision please don't start analyzing what to do until you have three to five great options because that will insure your better future. It's activity time. I'll just get you to go ahead and pass this slide and go through these and remember, they're not all going to apply. Use the ones that you do. When you've got 3-5 great options that you've just can't decide between, then it's time to jump into the next model where I teach you how to compare your top contenders. 11. ABCDecisons™ Compare: I have some great news for you at this point in the training. You have already done the really heavy lifting behind making a much better decision. If you have aligned to what you want to come out of this decision, if you've figured out what's your A plus and you have broadened and you have three awesome options. I mean, come on, think about it like already, you're in great place. Now you're just comparing the best of the best. I'm going to teach you how to do that. My teacher had a ditch that confirmation, bias and cheer for all your top options. Let me teach you a technique for comparing your contenders. Step number 1, just go identify the best of your options. At this point, you should be looking at things that you're like, "Oh my God, I really can't decide." Which means, you're not that much of a risk of making a mistake, which takes a lot of pressure off. But you're going to go through the discipline, you're going to recall that goal. What do you want to align to? What's your A plus? Then you're going to compare your options and you're going to do that. No, just kidding. You're not going to do that using pros and cons. Because pros and cons are a great way to identify what your confirmation biases. That just tells you what's in your emotional region of your brain really. But we're going to skip that and we're going to look at another way of thinking about this. What would have to be true? Now I want you cheering for each and every one of your great options by doing the activity. You just keep asking the question, "What would have to be true for me to give this idea of Gold star? What else would have to be true?" What you're doing here is you're really making a case for each of your possible decisions. By making that case, you can look at much more rational data. To give you an example of this, we use the example earlier. Should I go into my business for myself or do a side hustle? Well, you might say so should I do this or not? What would have to be true? I could still spend two nights a week with my family or what would have to be true? I could afford my mortgage or rent payments every month. Or what would have to be true. I was really enjoying it that the time I spend on is actually time I like spending, so it's fun and it feels like an activity. You never know what these things are going to be. Of course, you have whatever your decision is to make. But I want you making that great argument for each and then you should be in a position to make a great decision. It's activity time. Go ahead and think of your decision. What you want and answer the following questions. What are your 2-5 best options? I do want you to have a minimum of two amazing options before you proceed with this activity. Three is better. Then of each one ask, "What would have to be true for this to be my best?" Keep going until you run out of answers. In the next video, I will take you through how to make that final decision. 12. ABCDecisons™ Decide: Congratulations for getting to this point where we're now talking about deciding. How do you decide? You might feel ready to decide already, you might already know what you want to do. But there's one last thing that we can triple check to make sure that you have a good decision, like triple washed salad, triple checking and I'm being serious here, has an exponential benefit over just double-checking. It's really worthwhile making sure you're making your decisions from your rational brain. I want you to remember that all of your decisions are actually triggered in your limbic brain. What we're trying to do here is a pattern interrupt with the ABC decisions model that actually help your rational brain be more in control. But to make sure that you're really ready to make this decision, I want you to ask yourself, are you emotional? Are you still feeling confident or fear of embarrassment, or are you still just feeling some emotion? If so, I want you to hold off until you're rational, you will make a better decision. Research proves that emotional decisions have a high chance of failure. If you are emotional right now, I want you to try these. These are things that can help reduce emotional control. One, is going to the gym and no, you don't have to punch a punching bag, I was being silly, you could go for a walk or a run or bike ride or anything that you like to do. You could meditate as a way, that can actually temper your emotions. Listen to music that you love. You know that even drinking a cold glass of water or even a warm tea can be healing to the emotions and help balance you, and you know that talking to a good friend can help you put things into perspective sometimes too. One of my favorites, sleep. Sleep one night, two nights, three nights, sleep for three weeks if you need to, but get yourself to the point where you're detached. Because when you are detached and you start with three great options, and you know you're working from your neocortex and you're like, no, I'm super neutral here, you're in a position to make your best decision. This is so important. To get you going on this, this is what I'm going to ask you to do to make that final decision. Are you neutral? Which decision of the ones you looked at, do you believe in even if it doesn't work out, and why? Why can you believe in that decision right now, knowing that you can't? You don't have a crystal ball, you can't be a 100 percent sure of anything, we don't want that over-confidence. But why can you believe in this one? Does it align with your values? Does it seem like it's a good bet? Have you just really thought it through? One other question, can this decision be conditional? Is there any turn back point? If yes, how will you know when it's time to change your mind? That can be really smart and important to help you keep your eye on winning and not getting into that avoiding loss scenario, that escalating commitment where we switch our focus. That can be a good thing to know. In some cases it might not apply to youth, but it might and then you're ready, you can decide. Guess what? Activity time, it's here. I really support you and cheer you on as you make your decision. In the next video, I'm going to come back and I'm going to recap everything you've learned. That's a really important part of actually remembering the learning as recapping. I don't know if you know that, but it's incredibly important, it's why all those teachers like to do it. Then after that, I've got some optional case studies, you can stick around for those. That might help bring this model to life and help you use it and see, oh, you've used some things and not other things and this is how it might sound as you go through it. Pause this and go ahead and work on your decision, and when you're ready, come back and grab that recap so you can really start to remember all this material for your decisions, big and small. 13. Challenges & Overcomes: It's now time to quickly recap what you've learned. I'm going to talk about some of the challenges, and how you can implement ABC decisions more effectively in your life. I've got a little gift for you as well. Let's start with that recap on ABC decisions or, first, talk of those problems with decision-making. Those culprits that are happening all the time that lead us to make inferior decisions for small source questions. We don't want to be asking, should I or shouldn't I? Or, don't want to be asking, should I do this or should I do that? 55 percent failure for the first one, 33 percent failure when we have only two options? It's too higher failure rate [inaudible]. Then, of course, we want to make sure that we're really looking out for those biases. Biases are hard to see because, there are biases, those preconceived things we think we know. But, they're just our biases. We really want to watch for, "Do we have all the information we can have?" We also want to be careful about that ego and emotion. If you're super fearful that people will judge you, that's probably stopping you from looking at the data properly. Even if you're overconfident, you're absolutely sure of your success. That's also possibly going to keep you from looking at the data objectively. Secondly , you're not going to get caught in that trap of no alignment. You are going to make sure that, when you're making a decision, you have first clarified what your goal is. Where you want to end up? Then, you're going to go ahead, and you're going to put that ABC decision tool to use in your life to make better decisions. From now on, you are going to: A, you're going to align to what you want. You've got all those questions that I gave you in the handout. You're just going to be able to go through those steps, and really start to think about what you want, and, maybe, put a few things, and put them in order of importance to you. You're going to broaden your options. You're always going to push yourself to come up with that third option of something that you could do using, again, the questions that I gave you to help open your mind to possibilities. c, sadly, we have to say goodbye to that pros and cons lists at such a shame because that's such a handy tool but, it's okay. You're not going to miss it. We're just going to start comparing contenders. That is just as easy as, if I look at this option, and I look what I want to align to, with this option, get me there. That's all that takes. Finally, d; detach and decide. Make sure you've got that neutrality that you might have when you're giving a friend a face where you have that ability to step back. If you can never say whether this turns out well or not, I believe this is the right decision, then you'll have probably detached before you have decided. I think the biggest thing that gets in the way of people succeeding with the ABC due process is just not using it. When I work with my clients who are freelancers, coaches, artists and they come to me because they want help putting together a more valuable business out for some more predictable income from now on. They're making big decisions about their lives. When I teach them this tool as a way to navigate what's right for them, what's the best path forward for them, it's extraordinary to see what happens because it's so helpful to have this structure to follow. To really figure out like, Okay, what do I want here? Okay, what are some other options here? Okay, which of these options is likely to get me what I want most? Do I feel really cool and neutral about moving forward? That's how it has worked with so many of my clients. I'm sure that's how you can put it to use to start building your way better business, and way better life. In closing, I just want to say, thank you for taking this course. Once again, my name is Jill MCAbe. I am the best-selling author of a book called, "It's go time." I would like to give you as a gift, a copy of my book for free. There'll be a link on the screen. You'd go visit that link, and grab a copy of the book. Or, you can go to my bio page, and there'll be an active link that you can hit there. It's a powerful book, and it's my pleasure to give you a copy. I hope you enjoy it. That is it for this class. I am rooting for your success, for your awesome decisions from now on, and your awesome business and life.