Six Ways To Conquer Indecision

Don't feel bad: Even the greatest leaders suffer from indecision. What distinguishes the best from the rest is the ability to get at the fundamental cause of their mental roadblock-and then set dynamite to it.

Chronic indecisiveness can be one of the toughest psychological demons to banish. Here are six ways to help you pull the trigger when a big part of you would rather do anything but.

Forget About Always Appearing Smart

Plenty of talented people, even those who have made a killing, go to exhaustive lengths not to appear dumb.

Actually, the smarter you are, the more likely your indecision is born of this anxiety. A kid building a startup can be wrong, fail, and feel no shame: "I'm a kid... what do you expect?" Not so for someone with an established reputation to protect. This fear of shame is pernicious, mainly because it's useless. Let it go.

Trust Your Gut (It's Savvier Than You Think)

As Malcolm Gladwell hammers home in Blink, mistrusting emotion-driven decisions can be dangerous. What you refer to as "your gut" is actually a wealth of knowledge marbled with empirically validated facts that you aren't in touch with at critical crossroads.

Better yet, recall the breezy mantra: "If you don't make the right decision, you can make the decision right." If that sounds like cold comfort, set up a straw man—your gut—to absorb criticism if you end up making a poor choice. By making your gut the scapegoat, you protect your analytic self (your cortex) from blame, and prime it for triage, if necessary.

Beware The Paradox Of Choice

Really smart folks often fare poorly on multiple-choice tests if they view all the possible answers to a question rather than answer the question and then see if their answer is one of the choices. That's because the better the test, the more similar "wrong" choices are to the correct one.

Similarly, getting outside perspective is wise only to a point. Shopping for advice does only one thing: It lengthens your list of possibilities, and that can grind you to a halt—or even make the choice you eventually do make less satisfying.

Channel Winston Churchill

Sociopaths aside (and after 30 years in psychiatry I've met a few), people generally know what the "right" choice is. Yet they allow themselves, if only for a second, to ponder a lesser, lower path—and that slope gets slick and steep in a hurry.

If you want to snuff indecision in its tracks, repeat after General Churchill: "The only guide to man is his conscience; the only shield to his memory is the rectitude and sincerity of his actions. It is very imprudent to walk through life without this shield, because we are so often mocked by the failure of our hopes and the upsetting of our calculations; but with this shield, however the fates may play, we march always in the ranks of honor."

Accept The Limits Of Analysis

The road to hell, we're told, is paved with good intentions, judicious decisions and exhaustively analyzed strategies. Wars have been lost owing to unexpected weather conditions; data-wielding sports scouts draft college players who fail in the pros.

Bottom line: Avoid paralysis by analysis. Act, examine your results, make adjustments, and move on. (This approach, by the way, is gaining serious traction in the world of technology startups.

Flip A Coin

"When you have to make a choice and don't make it, that is in itself a choice." The eminent psychologist/philosopher William James said this, and he was dead-on, "If you feel like a hung jury that's taken 18 successive votes and is still deadlocked, use a coin to break your psychic logjam."

Remember: Indecision is all about avoiding 1) the choice between two negative alternatives, one of which has to be adopted, or 2) the choice between two fairly equal courses of action. In both cases, the solution may well be heads or tails.