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Welcome to Agua, a weekly newsletter where I provide tactics and stories to help leaders magnify their potential.
Today’s Top Takeaways
Fear clouds judgment and leads to short-term decision-making, making it crucial to manage fear-based responses in high-pressure situations. This can be done by identifying triggers of fear, recognizing physical and emotional signs of fear, and adopting strategies such as mindfulness practices and visualization techniques.
Making informed decisions in high-pressure situations requires gathering and analyzing accurate and relevant information, evaluating different options, and considering potential outcomes. Balancing intuition with rational analysis can also be valuable.
Evaluating past decisions and identifying areas for improvement can help refine decision-making processes in future high-pressure situations. Building resilience and viewing failures as opportunities for learning and growth also helps maintain motivation toward achieving goals.
Fear Is Your Worst Advisor
The Ultimate Guide To Making Better Decisions In High-Pressure Situations
via Midjourney
The last time I remember collective action being taken from a place of fear was in March 2020.
Our world was in complete panic.
Social media was in chaos.
There was utter uncertainty for countless people. Companies were shutting down and folks were desperate to ensure survival.
This is now happening in a different dimension with SVB.
As we saw during the times of COVID, actions made from fear resulted in missing toilet paper and exposure to U.S. supply chain flaws. We’re now exposed to the flaws of the U.S. banking system.
Yet, what actions this time around are made from fear?
The collective fear of a threat now almost always compounds to something worse than the initial threat.
— Terrence Rohan (@tmrohan)
Mar 11, 2023
In high-pressure situations, making better decisions is key for not only survival, but it’s essential to use that situation, as a catalyst and opportunity to think bigger and increase your impact.
Here are 4 steps to mastering your fears and making better decisions in high-pressure situations:
Understand Fear And Its Impact On Decision Making
Fear is defined as an emotion that arises in response to a perceived threat or danger.
In high-pressure situations, fear can manifest as anxiety, stress, or panic. When you’re afraid, your body's fight-or-flight response is triggered, which can cause you to become hyper-focused on the threat and ignore important information. This clouds your judgment and leads to poor decision-making.
“Fear and anger give bad advice.”
— Matt Mochary (@mattmochary)Listen to my interview with Matt Mochary: https://t.co/pGc5LL9bdI
— Tim Ferriss (@tferriss)
Mar 3, 2023
There’s a high chance you feel intense pressure to make the right decisions for your team or company's success.
If you allow fear to control your decision-making, you may make choices based on short-term gains rather than long-term goals. Fear can paralyze and confine your thinking. This results in decisions that harm your company or team in the long run.
An example of this is Sears' Bankruptcy in 2018.
Despite early warnings about the rise of online retail, Sears continued to focus on traditional brick-and-mortar stores and cost-cutting measures to boost short-term profits. This decision ultimately led to the company's bankruptcy, as it failed to adapt to changing consumer trends and invest in long-term growth.
Their fear of not meeting short-term profits resulted in their lack of openness to adapt to changing markets and consumer trends.
Identify Your Triggers, And Recognize Fear-Based Responses
Amidst uncertainty, ambiguity, and high-pressure situations, identifying common triggers of fear is essential.
Triggers of fear often include fear of failure, fear of making the wrong decision, fear of the unknown, or fear of disappointing others.
To recognize the physical and emotional signs of fear, pay attention to your body language, breathing patterns, and thought patterns. Common signs of fear can include a rapid heartbeat, sweating, nervousness, or a sense of impending doom.
To manage fear-based responses, you can adopt strategies such as mindfulness practices, deep breathing exercises, and visualization techniques.
Once you’re in a clear state, take a step back and consider the long-term consequences of your decisions to make strategic and effective choices that benefit your company and team in the long run.
To better prepare for the next high-pressure situation, practice role-playing. This can also help reduce fear by increasing familiarity with the situation and building confidence.
By developing a toolkit of strategies for managing fear, you can maintain clarity in high-pressure situations and make more effective decisions based on rational analysis and sound judgment.
Make Informed And Rational Decisions
Gathering and analyzing information before making a decision is essential to mastering high-pressure situations.
Without accurate and relevant information, it's easy to make decisions based on assumptions or incomplete data, which leads to negative outcomes.
Instead, you can gather information through research, consultation with experts, or seeking feedback from your team. Evaluating different options and considering potential outcomes is also essential for making informed decisions. You can use frameworks such as the Cost-Benefit Analysis, SWOT Analysis, and more to define how each decision will impact your goals and values.
Balancing intuition and gut instinct with rational analysis can also be valuable, as sometimes your intuition can provide valuable insights that aren't immediately apparent from data analysis. However, it's important to balance this with rational analysis to ensure that decisions are grounded in sound judgment and logic.
An example:
In the early days of Airbnb, the founders were struggling to gain traction and attract new users. They had a hunch that professional photographs would improve the appearance of their listings and help them stand out to potential renters.
However, they didn't have any data to support this assumption.
Rather than relying solely on their intuition, the founders decided to test their hypothesis by hiring a professional photographer to take pictures of a few select listings. They compared the performance of these listings to others that didn't have professional photos and found that the ones with professional photos performed significantly better. This data helped them make the decision to invest in professional photos for all of their listings, which ultimately helped Airbnb become a multi-billion dollar company.
Evaluate And Learn From Past Decisions
Reflecting on past decisions is crucial for learning and growth.
By evaluating the outcomes of past decisions and analyzing what went well and what didn't, you can identify areas for improvement and refine your decision-making processes.
Building resilience and bouncing back from failure is also important if you are often faced with high-stakes decisions. Self-compassion and growth mindset practices can help you maintain a positive outlook, even in the face of setbacks or challenges.
In an interview with Fortune, Indra Nooyi, the former CEO of PepsiCo, emphasized the importance of reflecting on both successes and failures. She said,
"When something goes wrong, I look at the decision-making process. What could we have done differently? What was the decision-making process? What did we miss?”
By viewing failures as opportunities for learning and growth, you can stay motivated and continue to make progress toward your goals.
It’s easy to allow fear to hijack your ability to make effective decisions, especially in high-pressure situations.
Yet, understanding fear, its triggers, strategies to integrate, and how to learn from previous decisions, allows you to use the situation as a catalyst to magnify your potential.
See you next week,
Rachel
Bonus Tip
When making decisions in high-pressure situations, it can be helpful to have a trusted advisor, mentor, or coach to bounce ideas off of and provide an outside perspective. This can help you identify blind spots and consider alternative options that you may not have thought of on your own.
Whenever you’re ready, here are 3 ways I can help you:
CEO Coaching: CEO coaching for high-growth founders. I work with top CEOs and founders to unleash their superpowers, surpass their goals, and thrive in the process while scaling their companies. Learn more here.
Self-Paced Courses: Learn proven strategies, systems, and tactics to perform at your best, maximize your potential, and achieve lasting results. Check out Master Your Inner Game and Magnify Your Potential Masterclass.
Speaking: Inspire and motivate your organization with the power of creativity, decision-making, productivity, innovation, leadership, and mindfulness. Get in touch here.
How was this post?Reply to this email or mention me on social at @racheldweissman when you test out anything I shared above. I’d love to hear what resonates, or not, and what other approaches you tried. In the meantime, how was today's post? What can be improved? |
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