Mindfulness simply doesn’t come from riding on a wave of silence and stillness. It’s a brilliant tool for making key strategic decisions, including spur-of-the-moment decisions. It can help you filter out all the mental clutters, and weight your options on a realistic frequency, put your intuition to proper pitch and make a decision that can give a leg up.
You can start by getting in a mindful state. This takes between 20 seconds to 10 minutes. Focus on your breathing. Observe all the thoughts that wander through your mind, your emotions and physical sensations that you perceive. Be present in the moment.
It takes a couple of things to become mindful. The state of mindfulness bolsters more blood to your prefrontal cortex, which further helps in improved decision making. Most importantly, it decreases the anxiety that regularly comes when settling on key decisions. Reducing this anxiety brings down cortisol levels, which helps give you access to your optimal mental faculties.
While weighing your decision, pay more attention to any outside influences that might be affecting your choices. For example, is there is one decision that you think your superiors would like more? Would you be afraid of making a rather confrontational choice?
In case you’re not mindful of these outside influences, they can apply an unintended emotional constrain in the whole decision making process. You could even wind up settling on a choice that you don’t feel 100% behind, because you were affected by outside forces. Be more mindful of everything influencing you before you decide.
To conclude, listen to your intuition. It can be a little difficult to do so, when you’re lost in the momentum of the environment. Be present in the moment, even if it’s only for a few minutes. This would eventually help use information, filter and take a judgment call based on past experiences. In the long run, this practice would help gain quality control of decision making, without compromising with your inner confidence.
