How to Make Effective Decisions to Achieve Your Goals

August 5, 2019

Effective decision-making occurs when you first outline your vision, values and goals so that you and your talent can be more aware of how to align daily choices to impact results. However, if you set goals from your ego — a fear-based or grandiose mindset — it will be difficult to achieve results without perspired action. We’ve all been there: striving and driving to achieve outcomes, only to have arrived exhausted and unfulfilled because we were headstrong instead of aligning our decisions with our gut, heart and head.

Making decisions from a holistic perspective is not just some mystical yogi practice. There is a notion that we have three decision-making centers within us, connected by the vagus nerve, which travels along the brain-gut axis. I believe that this nerve can take the unconscious knowing of our gut and heart and make it conscious in our head. I call this heightened awareness, this “aha” moment, gut intelligence (GQ). We have an intelligence quotient (IQ), which measures our cognitive capacities, and emotional intelligence (EQ), which is the ability to recognize our own emotions and the emotions of others. GQ is the ability to synthesize the information from our gut, heart and head, allowing us to make effective decisions that align with our vision, values and goals in the moments that matter most by raising our level of consciousness.

But for this decision-making to be effective, we need to first develop our vision, mission, values and goals with greater GQ. This occurs when we stop and get curious to discover our purpose, which, I have found, is often derived from a profound life experience that has taught us a lesson. When we consciously examine our experiences, we can see how the journey led us to something bigger than ourselves, which can impact the world in a positive way.

Take Walt Disney for example: At age 4, Walt’s artistic talent was sparked by a neighbor who asked him to draw a picture of his horse. This led him to fall in love with drawing and copying the cartoons from his father’s newspaper. Then, at 7 years old, Walt used his artistic talent to help his struggling family by selling his drawings to neighbors and family friends. At the age of 10, Walt and his family moved to Kansas City, where his uncle employed him to sell snacks and newspapers along the railroad. These profound experiences formed the purpose and passion that can still be seen in his theme parks today. Had Walt not been curious about his purpose, we would have all missed out on his cartoons, engaging movies and entertaining amusement parks. Disney’s vision, “to create happiness by providing the best in entertainment,” was derived out of Walt’s talent, experiences and awareness of the importance of happiness.

To create your vision, values and goals and make effective decisions, use my take on the S.T.O.P. Technique. This S.T.O.P. Technique will increase your GQ by helping you breathe deeply while focusing on a problem-solving question. This technique can be used to create your vision, values and goals and to better align your decisions for greater goal achievement. By slowing down and focusing on the breath, we increase our GQ and improve our ability to be more curious, conscious, courageous, compassionate, communicative, connected, collaborative and committed to goal achievement.

Here’s how the S.T.O.P. technique works:

Slow down and breathe for at least 20 minutes a day to create greater consciousness of your purpose and decisions to reach goal achievement.

Tune in to any gut alert and heart’s desire that prompts you to focus on a topic (this could be setting the vision, values, goals, key initiatives or decisions).

Observe what is happening and the cues that caught your attention. Form a “How might I…?” problem-solving question.

Perceive the best possibility by listening to your gut, heart and head so that you can consider the input from all three information centers and eventually arrive at that “aha” knowing — a heightened awareness that tells you what decision is right for you.

When we use the S.T.O.P. technique, we can become more conscious and committed to goal achievement. Slowing down to become aware of what our gut, heart and head are telling us to do may seem counterintuitive at first because we live in a fast-paced world where thinking with our heads alone is the norm, which can be impulsive. In other cases, impulsivity leads to emotional decisions, where instant gratification feels good in the moment, but does not yield optimal results. Those who quickly react to that ping in their gut can often do it impulsively without adequately engaging others or considering all possibilities before deciding.
Do you need to use the S.TO.P. technique to make more effective decisions to achieve your goals?