I can pinpoint times throughout my life and throughout all the businesses that I’ve had, where decisive action was the catalyst that brought me to the next level. I am often asked how I built Decisive Minds so quickly, and the answer lies in what I call my Decisive Action Plan. This is the 4-part plan that helped me grow my business. Today we are going to talk about the 1st step in the plan.
How to Make Decisions
The truth of the matter is that your business is being blocked by your indecisiveness! When you are unable to make a decision, your business suffers. Maybe you can’t decide what exactly you “do”, what you offer, or what type of clients you want to work with. Maybe it’s the whole Shiny Object Syndrome, that flip-flopping back and forth between whatever new service or product catches your attention. Perhaps you can’t decide on a marketing strategy and stick to it.
Teleseminars are being offered constantly – there is no end to the new, bigger, and better “thing”, I know! I remember in the early stages of starting Decisive Minds in 2010, I was listening to all those teleseminars and trying 15,000 different things.
It didn’t take long for me to realize that I needed to focus, make decisions, and stick to whatever decisions I made. Are you stuck? Maybe you just can’t decide on your marketing strategy or whether you should go to that live event or this networking event. How about website design? All of this indecisiveness will stop you from building the business that you want.
3 Step Decision Making Strategy
1. Fact Finding: You have to start by gathering the facts. Be careful to only gather the facts. No opinions and no guessing. You need the information about what’s going on so that you can make a decision. Sometimes this just takes a minute, other times this might take days.
Whether you are trying to decide what your business does or how you are going to put together a program that people want to buy, you must start by gathering the facts. Start by asking questions. Who would be interested? What is my competitor's price point? What keywords would be successful? What do people think they want?
2. Interpret the Facts: When you look at the facts, are they presented clearly enough for you to make a decision immediately or do you need to go back and find more facts?
Let me give you an example. Recently I did a VIP day with a new client. She was trying to figure out what programs to offer her clients. She knew who she wanted to work with and the process to take her clients through, but she wasn’t sure how to put them together in a way that would sell.
We started with fact-finding, then we went into interpreting those facts and asking more questions. How do I feel about the facts? Am I 100% unbiased in my interpretation? Do I need an outside opinion? Do I need more facts? Can I make a decision at this point?
Now I want to give you kind of a warning here, you need to be really careful when you are interpreting the facts – to not let fear or doubts affect your judgement. In this step, you have to be completely unattached from the outcome because if you interpret from a place of fear or doubt you are going to arrive at the wrong interpretation.
3. Opportunity: Then once you’ve interpreted your facts, guess what? It’s opportunity time or option time… I like to see opportunities. There are so many times in life when the path is right in front of us, but since we can't make a decision, we move on and the opportunity passes us by.
I also want you to know that in order for you to be 1st to market or be seen as the expert in your arena, you will frequently need to make decisions quickly and take massive action.
