How to make better decisions faster with less stress
Did you know the average adult makes over 35,000 decisions daily? As a leader, your choices carry extra weight and consequences. You can't afford to decide on the fly with so much riding on them.
Personal principles serve as a framework for making better decisions faster and with less stress. In this week’s email we will explore the power of principles and how to use them in decision-making.
What is a principle?
The dictionary defines a principle as “a fundamental truth or proposition that serves as the foundation for a system of belief or behaviour or for a chain of reasoning.” In other words, a principle is a core belief or value that guides your actions and decisions.
Why are they important?
As a leader, your principles shape everything from company culture to strategy to your day-to-day choices. By clearly defining them, you create a framework for making decisions that are aligned with your values and goals.
Principles help you:
1. Focus on what truly matters by reflecting your values.
2. Become the person you aspire to be by aligning your actions with your values.
3. Make decisions faster by providing a clear guide, saving you from deliberating over every choice.
4. Reduce anxiety and weaknesses of will that may arise from in-the-moment deliberation.
3 traits of a good principle
If you’re looking to develop your own set of principles, Stephen Covey’s “7 Habits of Highly Effective People” is an excellent starting point. Each habit, such as “Be Proactive” and “Put First Things First”, can serve as personal principles to guide decision-making and prioritization in both professional and personal life. They each resonate with me personally and form part of my principles. Great principles have three key traits: they should be memorable, relatable and actionable. The 7 Habits meet all of these.
Memorable
We often don’t do things because we forget, not because we lack motivation or willpower. You need to memorise and internalise principles to turn them into habitual actions and recall them when making decisions.
Our brains love stories; it’s how we passed knowledge down through the ages before writing. Make your principles easier to memorise using storytelling or other memory tricks.
A paper titled [“You had me at hello: How phrasing affects memorability”](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1203.6360v1.pdf) analysed movie catchphrases and found that memorable quotes can be characterized by two key features: first, they use uncommon words within familiar sentence structures; and second, they are often broad in meaning, allowing for easy application in multiple contexts.
Create your own catchphrases, and use mnemonic devices like alliteration to fire the right neurons in your brain that foster recall.
Relatable
You need to find ones that resonate with you in your life more than simply how they sound. They should be distilled directly from your values and beliefs.
That is why a good principle for one person may be next to useless for another. They are intensely personal.
To effectively change your behaviour, a principle must resonate with you both emotionally and logically. The principle should align with your past experiences and beliefs. It should make intuitive sense to you. It should also align with you logically.
Take the principle, “Keep your promises”. This is logically sound because when you are consistently reliable, you stand out from the majority of people who are not. And rationally, people will trust you more if you demonstrate it repeatedly. It will resonate strongly with you from an emotional standpoint if you can intuitively recall times in your past when keeping your promises strengthened your relationships with others, benefiting you in return.
And that is exactly what we want when we want to use them to remind us to take action.
Actionable
Principles are nothing if you don’t act on them.
Many people think they lack motivation when what they really lack is clarity. It is not always obvious when and where to take action. – James Clear
As we learned earlier, principles with broader meaning enable you to use them as more general directives that can be applied in multiple contexts and lead you in the direction of the character traits you want to exhibit.
Their ultimate purpose is to help you make a better decision that is in greater alignment with your values and ethics. Therefore, you must be able to use it to take affirmative action.
One of my principles is “Don’t drink your sugar” that comes directly from my Heroic training as one of the four food rules that I follow. It is both relatable and memorable, but most of all it is directly actionable. It comes to mind any time I need to make a choice about what to drink and it is immediately clear what I should do.
A principle will not be any good if you lack clarity in your own values or ethics. It should act as a kind of filtering criteria to make a good choice.
What are yours?
Back to you. What are your principles? You should be able to use them when you have a decision to make. It should help you to make a better decision faster with less deliberation or worry, or anxiety about making the wrong one. If you act in line with your principles and values, then regardless of the outcome of the decision itself, you can be happy you made a good choice.
Check out this week’s Thinking Time below to go through an exercise of generating a starting set of principles. To help you, here are a few of my principles and how they align with these three key traits.
“Treat others as they would want to be treated.”
Relatable: It strongly aligns with my value of fairness, and it’s no coincidence that this is one of Foxsoft’s Core Values.
Memorable: Simple, clear, and echoes the Platinum Rule
Actionable: I can apply this to any interaction or decision involving others
“Leave things better than you found them.”
Relatable: It reflects how I care for our planet and environment. It also resonates strongly in my work. I love making sloppy code better, and it is one of the major factors in why we at Foxsoft specialise in rescuing Ruby on Rails applications.
Memorable: Short, snappy, and easy to remember.
Actionable: It guides me in my choices about consumption, waste, and stewardship.
“Family comes first, always.”
Relatable: Directly states my priority of putting my family first.
Memorable: Uses alliteration and absolute language for emphasis.
Actionable: Provides a clear hierarchy for decision-making.
“Healthy body, healthy mind, each and every day.”
Relatable: Love of learning is one of my key strengths, and health and fitness is very important to me. I have made the connection between how when I act in my best interests from that perspective, I show up better in all areas of my life.
Memorable: Uses parallelism and rhyme to stick in your mind.
Actionable: Encourages me to be consistent in my daily habits and choices that support my well-being and health.
Time to take action
Our brains can’t keep track and top of mind everything we say we want to do. That’s why seemingly simple tricks like writing down things and putting them in constant view can be surprisingly powerful.
Why not create yourself a poster of your principles and hang it somewhere prominent, where you cannot fail to see it regularly. Or stick them on post-it notes and put them on your mirror and around the areas where you spend time so they seep into your brain.
You need to remind yourself of them often so that they imprint themselves on you, so you’ll more readily call them to mind when the situation arises.
In the end, the point of having these memorable, relatable and actionable principles is to help you make better decisions.
When you come to making a decision, always ask yourself: are any of my principles relevant to this decision I am considering? If you have at least one relevant principle to this decision, reflect on what it suggests you do.
To encourage you to take action now, I’ll leave you with one final principle of mine, that also comes directly from Phil Stutz via Heroic:
“Speed is a force”
⚡️ Thinking Time ⚡️
Use your Thinking Time this week to come up with a starting set of principles.
Start by brainstorming anything that immediately comes to mind. Think back to any books you may have read with catchphrases that resonated with you that encourage you to act in alignment with who you are capable of being.
Though it might seem silly, envisioning actual examples will help you define how you want to act.
Act this way, not that way. Do this, don’t do that.
Ask yourself “What does this look like day to day?”, “What does this sound like?”
What are some real-life situations you might encounter (or have encountered in the past) where this principle might apply? Try to think of situations in many different parts of your life – in interactions with different sorts of people and when you are in different physical and mental places. As you think of each situation, take a moment to consider a concrete example of how you’d apply your principle in that situation.
Build a list of at least 3-5 of your own principles. Remember, they should be rules of thumb that you believe are a good idea to apply by default. They should be rules that help you live by your values and be the best version of yourself.
If you are not confident about your principles and you’ve 10 extra minutes today, Clearer Thinking has a free tool you can use called Uncover Your Guiding Principles. It can help you build a list of your personal principles and to keep them top of mind in a fun and interactive way. You can even use it to create a wall poster they’ll print and ship to you.