Daisy.
Fight Overthinking,
That Destroyer of Decision Making
Martin Turner and Jamie Barker
When making decisions under pressure, many professionals
are plagued with a fear
of making the wrong choice, selecting an
option that could lead to business failure.
This fear of failure, in itself, is not a bad thing.
In our new book What Business Can Learn From Sport
Psychology, we examine how a fear of failure can actually provide powerful
motivation for athletes and business professionals.
But that's only if the fear
of failure inspires thoughts of success and taking assertive actions toward a
desired goal.
So where does the fear of failure stem from? Often it
originates from the fear of making the wrong choice, which more often than not
is caused by overthinking.
The root of
overthinking.
With overthinking, people want to make the right decision
so much; they worry that they won’t
be able to and lose sight of what it takes to make good
decisions: a clear mind.
By worrying and ruminating about a decision, they can
slow down the mental processes
that underpin decision making. They try to force the
brain to complete the complex process
of making a
decision in a way that it is not comfortable with.
Take driving for example. Driving is an extremely
complicated process involving coordination of mind and body to perform
intricate movements safely and proficiently. If you've been driving
for some time, no doubt you make the complex decisions
for doing so without thinking
about the precise processes involved. You have developed
expertise after all, and decisions can
be made without having to process each alternative and
consciously weighing the pros and cons.
But maybe when you were learning to drive this wasn’t the
case.
When someone is learning to drive, each choice is
made intentionally and deliberately.
But if you had to take your driving test again in order
to continue driving (and had to make sure
your performance was flawless), you would probably
abandon your automatic decision-making process and instead break down the
choices into their component parts, asking yourself,
Are my hands in the right place? Have I checked the
mirrors? Am I in the right lane?
The trouble is, by examining all the component choices,
you would be making decisions
in a way that's very odd for your brain. You are an
expert, remember, and all this intricate
and in-depth procedural decision making is not needed
anymore. So what would normally
be a smooth and proficient decision-making process would
become a slow
and uncoordinated state of confusion. That ultimately
would damage your performance.
In golf, overthinking the skill execution has been the
ruin of many a professional.
Like all elite athletes, professional golfers have
undergone thousands of hours of deliberate practice to ingrain technical skills
into their mind and body. This learning process means that when
they perform, they don’t need to think about the
individual component parts of skill execution.
When putting, they don’t need to consider the complex
sequence of coordinated movements
in their hands, arms, shoulders, back, trunk, legs and
feet. They can just think about
where they want to the ball to go and execute the move
automatically.
But when worry emerges, in those pressure situations when
a putt will win the championship,
many golfers start to break the skill down and try to
make the putt as if they were novices performing the skill for the first time.
No longer is putting a smooth automatic process.
It becomes an uncoordinated and rigid process.
And that can turn a simple putt into a performance
catastrophe.
When working memory isn’t working.
So under stressful, pressured situations, when
making a decision is vital,
worrying can cause overthinking. The working memory is
someone quickly calculates risk
and weighs the pros and cons in the brain. It is also
where worrying takes place.
Because worrying takes up vital space in the working
memory, no longer can the person efficiently process the information needed to
make that all important decison.
Instead, he or she tries to grasp every little component
part of making that choice
and break down the skill of decision making into a
mechanical process.
Just like the driving example, however, this isn’t
how the person normally makes accurate decisions.
Be instinctual.
If you encounter those stressful high-pressured moments,
instead of overthinking
and risking paralysis by analysis, carry out your
business analyses and evaluations,
think about the issues and then go with what feels right
rather than trying to function
like a computer with a calculated output.
In other words, consider the information you have and
then trust your instincts.
Your gut reaction is informed by your vast experience of
being a business professional
and also from your experience of being human. You make
decisions all the time without overthinking them. You, as a human being,
are an extremely powerful and efficient decision-making machine.
https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/236137
You can TCR software/engineering
manuals for spontaneous
recall – or pass that exam.
I can Turbo Charge
Read a novel 6-7 times faster and remember what
I’ve read.
I can TCR an academic
book around 20 times
faster and remember what I’ve read.
Perhaps you’d like to check out my sister blogs:
All aspects of regular, each-word reading and education.
Turbo Charged Reading uses these skills significantly
faster
www.innermindworking.blogspot.com
many ways for you to work with the stresses of life
www.happyartaccidents.blogspot.com
just for fun.
To quote the Dr Seuss himself, “The more that you read,
the more things you will know.
The more that you learn; the more places you'll go.”
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