
While you can’t predict the ups and downs of life, you can pre-decide how to respond to them. The power of pre-deciding is a strategy that you can use to help promote consistency and reduce decision fatigue. By pre-deciding how you want to respond in certain situations, you free up your mind to devote energy to the less predictable outcomes. This gives you more bandwidth and reserve so that you’re not feeling drained and emotionally exhausted at the end of the day.
So how does it work? You may be thinking that there’s no way to pre-determine how I will respond to things when I don’t even know what I will be responding to. However, as we go through this together, you will see that many of life’s decisions/situations are similar and occur daily.
For example, think about some of the conscious and unconscious decisions you make each day. Unconscious decisions are the ones you’ve committed to muscle memory such as getting up, getting dressed, making food/eating, driving to work, etc. These situations are almost a given.
Now think about the conscious decisions you make each day such as when your child gets sick and you need to decide who’s going to stay home with them, or you’re on your way to work and you find out there’s construction on the main route that you take. At a deeper level, maybe you realize there’s something you need to share with your spouse or significant other, and you make a conscious decision not to because you don’t want to cause a fight.
As you start to think about these things, you may come to notice that our day is made up of more decisions than you previously realized. Being aware of the amount of decisions you make each day brings attention to the amount of energy you are expending on decision making. My goal today is to help you develop a method of pre-determined decisions so that you can spend less time expending unnecessary energy.
In order to pre-decide how you’re going to respond in situations, it’s important to look at your values. What are you trying to prioritize in your life and what is being prioritized?
Map out your priorities and values to see how they align with what is actually being prioritized/taking up the most time in your day to day life.
Here’s an example:
Priorities Values
Family Relationships
Work Finances/Skillset
Exercise Physical Health
Friends Social Connection
Once you complete this, ask yourself how you make decisions based on these values. For example, if you value your family, what does that look like? What decisions are you making to communicate value or devalue to your family?
For instance, if my family is my first priority, but I spend more time at work or with my friends than I do with my family, I need to pre-decide how to re-prioritize my time to spend more with my family. Similarly, if exercise is a priority for me, but I haven’t used my gym membership in 4 months, I need to pre-determine how I will respond when I feel unmotivated to exercise.
Last but not least, pre-deciding is step one. It’s an initial way to help maximize the rate of follow through. If you already have a predetermined answer/decision in your head, you’re less likely to make rash/impulsive decisions. Step two is to follow through with the plan. The strategy of pre-deciding has no benefit if you predetermine an action but fail to follow through with the action. To increase follow through, ask yourself how likely are you to follow through with this decision on a scale of 1-10. If the likelihood is less than 10, ask what barriers might be in the way of following through, and do what you can to eliminate or reduce the barriers.
The next time you’re feeling run down or overwhelmed by your circumstances, look for ways to build a pre-determined plan to regain stability and minimize stress.
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