As an entrepreneur, you will need to make a lot of decisions. If you’re the sole owner of the business, the final decision on everything will be made by you. And while you may have started your business so you could call the shots, it also can be quite stressful.
Even the most confident leader can get bogged down trying to make a decision on the big strategic issues. These decisions will have consequences, and the problem with entrepreneurship is you are frequently doing something new and different, so there might not be an obvious best choice.
There often isn’t certainty in entrepreneurship and outcomes are unknown. For decisions that are relatively low stakes, take your best guess and go with it. If it doesn’t work out, at least you will have learned something.
If you struggle with perfectionism, you will have an even more difficult time making decisions. Striving for excellence is good, but perfectionism can be a problem.
A perfectionist might want to have 99 percent certainty, but that will likely never come. Instead of overthinking, overanalyzing, and spinning, licensed therapist Dr. Scott Eilers suggests that you try to take that threshold down in order to more easily make a decision. He recommends you start with 95 percent or even 90 percent, and maybe aim for 85 percent over time.
He also says in the video below, “All of the variables you would need to be able to assess in order to know which decision is correct do not make themselves known until you make the decision.”
This is an important point. You only have all the information after the decision has been made and you have learned about the factors you weren’t able to anticipate.
Or, maybe everything turned out exactly as you had hoped. If so, congratulations.
As an example, if you were choosing between two or more software vendors, you would do your research, check reviews, watch a demo, and talk with a sales representative. You might even talk to some existing customers. If it was a major investment, you might evaluate the responses to your request for proposal (RFP), and then choose who to go with. Try to remember that you made the best choice you could with the information you had at the time.
Eilers says, “So you’re always working with an imperfect dataset and you usually end up making decisions not because you finally felt ready or because you felt confident, but because you simply ran out of time and you had to pick one even though you didn’t feel completely good about it, which is not ideal.”
It is not ideal, but it is what frequently happens when you’re an entrepreneur.
Photo by Sophia Kunkel on Unsplash
