Our major, complex life decisions will define our future and, ultimately, who we will become and who we are in all walks of life. Our attitude toward the importance of decision-making will allow each of us to have an equal opportunity to maximize all aspects of our lives, including the achievement of our entrepreneurial dreams. In addition to an individual’s decision-making style, there may be other influencers that affect how they make decisions, such as their support system, confidence level and financial status.

The statistics below allow us an opportunity to greatly improve our overall personal and professional well-being:

As we get older, decision-making becomes increasingly more important to our overall personal happiness and well-being. As you can see by the statistics, while human beings are planet Earth’s smartest species, we seem to reduce ourselves to our gut instincts and intuition when it comes to major life decision-making. How many people in your life have you met who are passionate about decision-making? Most likely, very few, if any. 

At our core being, we all have the desire, and deserve, to live deep, balanced and enriched lives. There is only one way to achieve your desires… become a world-class decision-maker. Following are the 3 types of decision-makers:

Reckless (F)

Twenty percent (20%) of all decision-makers are simply the lowest producers. Decisions are typically made by being self-serving, impulsive and reactive. There is very little self-regard or a feeling that they are worth being completely fulfilled and happy in their lives. They have an impulsive pursuit of personal urges without any genuine concern for how their decisions may affect other people and, more importantly, themselves.

People in this category may conduct harmful and even criminal behaviors. Others will make daily decisions that are less severe but are harmful to their own health as well as the well-being of others. Hopefully, those considering entrepreneurship as a career path will have the natural ambition and thoughtfulness to avoid this reckless category of decision-making.

Emotional (C-D)

The majority of all decision-makers fall into this category. These decision-makers are a marked improvement from the reckless group. However, one half of this group fall under the 50^th percentile and continually struggle with the important decisions in their lives. The best way to describe these decision-makers is they may have a “chip on their shoulder” and/or may view life as being unfair. As a maturing adult, they will live most of their lives blaming their childhood (e.g., parents, teachers, coaches and friends) for harming them. This victim mentality of self-pity grows into a projection of blame versus accepting responsibility for each of the important decisions in their lives. This negative attitude triggers a reactive decision-making style, which results in more impulsive choices. Once the decisions do not work out, they assign blame, causing these decision-makers to move onto the transition point that makes them feel comfortable in life. This person’s decision-making style is a vicious cycle that causes them to continuously start over within all endeavors of their life.

Let’s take a look at the behaviors of the other group of emotional decision-makers. Although the second half of individuals in this category are improving, they may not have any proactive personal or professional approach to their major life decisions. Their priorities will shift by the nature of opportunities that present themselves as they over-confidently rely on more reactive gut instincts and intuitions to make major, complex life decisions. This individual is at risk of being overly enthusiastic, too eager and over-confident. This emotionality increases their level of vulnerability to be sold a franchise or existing business by a well-intended professional franchise sales executive, business broker or franchise consultant. This results in an individual making decisions based on what they wanted to hear and see and matching themselves to the wrong business, which does not result in a profitable outcome. Essentially, this business owner will struggle or break even until they are emotionally drained and give up on their endeavor. This category of decision-making is the epicenter of where individuals will succeed or fail, and yet they do not discover this until it is too late.

Ironically, this individual has put forth good intentions, effort and enormous research. They may have asked a substantial number of meaningful questions that they felt were important to making this decision. However, because of emotionality, they will overlook what are usually the most important questions that will have the greatest impact on the success or failure of their business. 

This method of decision-making is not a foundation of decision building blocks, and there is no logical structure to the sequence of decisions that allows them to eliminate all of the NOs until the highest probable decision with the least amount of risk is achieved. It wasn’t their lack of research but, rather, a lack of a structured decision-making process. An emotional decision-making process equates to a human brain connecting decision points without any structure, sequence or order. As Steve Jobs once said, he would eliminate 1,000 NOs before he made a final decision.

World Class (A-B)

These decision-makers are best-of-class and are peak performers in every aspect of their lives. Yes, they do encounter all of life’s normal setbacks and are, by no means, perfect. Like the rest of us, these individuals are inexperienced and make mistakes, but they have an opportunity to learn from these mistakes.

The major reason these individuals will achieve the deeper meaning, purpose, hope and success in their lives is that they are the highest quality decision-makers. Their success is a result of the sum total of their life choices.

These decision-makers are grounded in the right core values, which allow them a better sense of self-worth, translating into a higher regard for the feelings of others through the course of their lives. These individuals accept responsibility for 100% of every decision they make. They will never blame another person for why they are in the situation they are in regardless of the emotional or financial pain it has caused. This willingness to accept responsibility gives the individual a competitive advantage in their personal and professional lives. Accepting 100% responsibility maximizes success, while assigning any percentage of blame guarantees failure.

While they will include emotionality (gut instincts and intuition) within their decisions, they have a self-protective quality that is grounded in the humility to realize that they don’t know what they don’t know, and that what they do know will need to be verified and cross-checked. This individual will utilize a highly effective, structured and logical sequence of decision-making, which improves their opportunity to match themselves to the right business.

Your goal is to continually self-examine what type of decision-maker you are. This honest recognition will allow you to deeply analyze how your own self-regard and attitude contribute to improving your decision-making.