We need women in power. The world needs decisive, confident women leaders at all levels of business, politics and society. And leaders must make strong, confident decisions — it’s foremost in the job description.
Plus, it feels good to be decisive.
Sort of.
It feels good when the decision is clear: when you know with certainty that you don’t want to attend the webinar, take on the client, or eat that leftover sandwich.
The problem is, many women entrepreneurs’ decision-making goes more like this: I don’t know. Am I overthinking this? Can I really afford it? This seems like a good idea but I hate it. Ugh, I’m so indecisive. Why does it take me so long to make decisions? Why does this make me feel like I’m dragging my body through wet sand?
So many of the women entrepreneurs I know and work with have had these thoughts. Making decisions can feel utterly paralyzing, especially when you’re making high-stakes decisions that impact your business, your time, and your family.
Unfortunately, most women were not taught decision-making skills. Most of us have no idea how to prepare ourselves to make big decisions and how to support ourselves while doing so. This is a huge issue for women leaders because it’s our job to make decisions. So how can we get better at it?
1. Make Fewer Decisions by Eliminating and Outsourcing
Your ability to be decisive is like a jar of coins. Every time you make a decision, there’s a cost. Easy decisions, like what to eat for breakfast, cost one coin. Big decisions, like whether to hire a marketing consultant, cost ten or twenty coins.
The more decisions you make, the faster you spend your coins. And if a big decision lands on your plate after your jar is empty? Overwhelm. You genuinely can’t make the decision.
Are you spending your decision-coins on dumb stuff? To be more confident and decisive, save your coins for the highest-impact decisions. Here’s how:
Eliminate Small Decisions
We make countless decisions every day: what to wear, what to eat, what to do, when to do it, to answer that text/email now or later. How many of those tiny decisions can you eliminate?
You could simplify your wardrobe so you have fewer options to choose between. Here’s one extreme example (could you do that!?).
You could eat the same meals every day or plan your meals in advance. You could turn your phone off during concentration times, taking the choice whether to check your messages/inbox/ Instagram off the table. Removing these “micro” decisions from your to-do list saves your coins for weighter decisions.
When You Can’t Eliminate, Delegate
How many of these small, low-stakes decisions can you outsource? Like hiring a personal stylist to choose your outfits for you. Or working with a fitness trainer, to eliminate having to decide when to workout and what to do.
This is enormously important for your business. Women-owned businesses grew 21% over the past five years (compared to 9% of all businesses), many starting as side gigs or solo endeavors. You won’t get much farther than that if you don’t delegate. Many of the women I work with (including myself) spend an inordinate amount of time making small, low-stakes decisions, and it’s holding us back from leadership.
Delegating decisions might come in the form of accountability (like a fitness trainer) or full removal from your purview (like delegating social media scheduling). This saves your decision-making coins for the choices that require your full attention.
2. Support Strong Decisions with Good Data
Research finds that women tend to gather comprehensive information before making a decision. Whether we’re shopping for clothes or hiring a consultant, we want to explore our options and get input from others before making our selection.
The study also finds that women tend to be open-minded to possibilities. Rather than be attached to a specific outcome, we like to explore our options and talk to different experts. Our ability to gather, question, and interpret data is a strength: it leads to finding creative, holistic solutions and building consensus across our teams.
If you want to make a decision but something is holding you back, it could be that you need more information. However…
There is such a thing as too much information.
Beware information overload
Women, we have to beware: gathering too much data can lead to analysis paralysis. When that happens, you freeze and make no decision at all. Inaction can be the right decision — like not intervening when your kids are arguing — but it’s not when it comes from overwhelm.
Information overload can also lead to making decisions by committee, where you try to outsource a high-stakes decision to others and can’t reach consensus. While gathering data is a strength, not all data is created equal — you must be choosy about the data you trust. If you feel pulled in too many directions, take a deep breath and read #5.
3. Give Yourself Time
A lot of decision-making angst comes from fake urgency. If you’re a woman entrepreneur you know firsthand that culture has a lot of erroneous ideas about entrepreneurial leadership: that it’s fast-moving, hustling, ruthless, and certain.
No wonder you feel like there’s something wrong with you if you’re not firing off quick, confident decisions all the time.
But for most women — men too — it takes time to assimilate and integrate all the data. It takes time for our systems to reach a conclusion. I can remember when I was hiring my first business coach, it took me a full week to say yes, even though I knew it’s what I wanted. During that week I hemmed and hawed — it was more money than I’d invested in my business before, but she’d made me feel so heard and supported. Could I really afford it? Would it be worth it?
… but not too much time
I made my decision hours before the fast-action deadline she gave me, and I am so glad I did (I made back the investment and more within six months). But if she hadn’t given that deadline, I might have belabored the decision indefinitely. While it’s important to give yourself time to make big decisions, too much time leads to inaction. Which leads me to the most important point…
4. Be Ready for Backlash
Once you’ve made a strong, confident decision, you are almost guaranteed to get one or two kind of backlash:
Backlash from others
Backlash from yourself
Backlash from others is usually well-intended because it often comes from the people who love you and want you to be safe. If you make a decision that seems risky to them, they can be vocal about their doubts. You invested how much in coaching? Are you sure you can afford it? Is it really worth that much?
I recommend being very careful about sharing your decisions with others — especially people who are not entrepreneurs and leaders and who don’t have the knowledge, wisdom, and experience you do. It’s one thing to share your bold decision with your coach or a fellow entrepreneur. It’s another to share it with your best friend from high school or partner or parents.
But the more potent kind of backlash is the internal variety: the moments after you make a bold decision when your system freaks out and throws a self-doubt party. Shit, what if I’m wrong? What if I regret it? I’m not ready for this.
The best defense against this backlash is to be ready for it. Instead of seeing it as a bad sign, read it as a good one — it means you’re stretching yourself and stepping into bigger shoes. It’s inevitable that you’ll smack your head against upper limit problems when you do.
5. Trust Yourself
In my 10th grade geometry class, we had a short quiz every week. And Ms. Jones would say to us, “Don’t look at the answers next to you. Why would you trust someone else’s answers over your own? Trust yourselves.”
It’s the best math life advice I’ve received, and it’s the single most important part of making strong, confident decisions.
But trusting yourself — your gut, instincts, intuition, or whatever you call it — can be tough! We’re not taught to trust ourselves and our feelings as much as we’re taught to trust parents, teachers, bosses, doctors, and experts. But none of those people are you.
It’s especially challenging to trust yourself when your decision doesn’t seem “logical.” But here’s the thing: research shows that emotion, not logic, fuels our decisions, and that without emotion our decision-making abilities tank.
Decisions that feel right are the best kind of decisions there are. But I know — especially if you’ve gathered the data and asked for the input — it can be hard to hear the quiet voice inside of your decision.
It helps to meditate or take a walk — whatever allows you to commune with your thoughts. To notice if your body feels tight. To notice what your imagination shows you, whether from fear or excitement. At the end of the day, trusting yourself takes a leap of faith — and every time you do, your faith muscles get stronger. Practice makes… if not perfect, then at least pretty damn good.
This is the truth: when it comes to your business, there is seldom a right or wrong decision. There’s only what you decide. It’s your commitment and action that make the decision as right as it can possibly be.
So go forth and make strong, confident decisions.
Special thanks to Amy Wright for edits. Featured image by Engin Akyurt.
