I am an investment advisor I help people make decisions. I have a degree in finance so I understand complex investment information but if I can't help investors make their own decisions about this information I'm not really doing my job. So, I read books about how people make decisions. When you are making complex decisions may I suggest that based on what I've learned so far, you try these steps?

Less choice is better - Don't think the very best way is to examine all 165 options of a thing. In tests of customers at supermarkets when 16 choices were offered in various jams barely 3% of customers purchased anything. But when only offered 5 samples 30% of customers made a decision and bought a jam. When overwhelmed with options people, according to psychologists, 'decide NOT to decide.' So if your goal is to MAKE a choice, to decide on something, don't trip yourself up, don't make that impossible, by feeling you need to investigate every possible option. Remember your goal.

Go with your gut -researchers have found is that you kind of already know what you want to do. If you are a reasonable person learning more information, so long as it's not too overwhelming, backs up what your gut tells you. Many of the time, maybe most of the time, that initial 'gut feeling' is good. Don't dismiss your instincts. Keep putting wise ideas into your mind so those instincts can be relied on.

Be content to not be 100% certain- You will not know the future. So the decisions that you're making affecting something and your future, is going to be missing 100% certainty because an element of the equation is missing, and that is knowing what will happen exactly in the future. Since you can't know all, you will need to be content.

Don't second (or third) - guess yourself- Well, you don't NEED to be content. But if you second, third, fifteenth - guess yourself and your decisions you will never have peace. According to research the happiest people are the ones who choose to believe their decision, once made, was a good one, and then they let the worry and anxiety go. In extreme examples, second- guessers spend years hobbled by doubt about decisions that are many years behind them. I don't want to be that person, though sometimes I find myself wondering…

If you follow these steps it may help you feel better and be better able to make good decisions.


Citations:
Jam choices- The Paradox of Choice, pg. 20


Marion R. Syversen, MBA - President
NorumbegaFinancial
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Marion@NorumbegaFinancial.com
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