Following my last contribution on the application of Chaos Theory to your career, I have been inundated by messages from readers who, while they found the piece useful, also wanted advice on how to take more control over their future.

One of the take home messages I was endeavouring to communicate about the Chaos Theory idea is that oftentimes we beat ourselves up over events which we may have a lot less control over than we imagine. Successful people tend to be further along the spectrum of being over-controlling in psychological make up. So it’s easy to see how when they lose their jobs, they can become overly upset and despairing, because they take more responsibility than is warranted for their predicament.

The grave danger of an overly negative emotional reaction is that it de-motivates you from picking yourself up, brushing yourself down and having another go at re-entering the job market. The blows to self-esteem and its consequences we have covered elsewhere. We have also examined the extent to which you have control over your future employment prospects, in terms of, for example, the intensity of your job search and the comprehensiveness of your re-employment strategy.

Don’t let decision making go off the boil

One aspect of re-employment strategy I want to examine here is the need to consider the quality of your decision-making. We know that our decision-making skills can go off the boil when we are in emotional turmoil or upset. They are also suspect, by the way, if we are in the grip of strongly positive emotions. How many of us have woken up the morning after the night before and regretted something we did while euphoric?

Key decisions those looking for work need to make include how to go about searching and finding a new job, which jobs to accept when offers come in, and whether to consider a completely new career. We will examine how to think about an absolute revolution in vocation direction at a later date, but what I want to look at here and now, is a more general perspective on how to make better decisions in life.

An opponent who was comprehensively trouncing me at tennis yet again, remarked between sets, that the key difference between my game and that of a professional (I suspect there are many more differences than just this one but, hey, she was being kind) is that people who are really good at tennis simply make better decisions than I do. Like whether to approach the net or not, or if one should adjust the foot work for a deviating ball. ‘Winners basically make better decisions on the court than you do’ she remarked dryly.

I wonder now whether the very decision to take up tennis was a bad one…

This comment from the player resonated because I recalled a similar phrase from the celebrated film ‘Touching the Void’ about an astonishing heroic mountaineer self rescue from a remote and dangerous Peruvian mountain. This true story follows how a remarkably tenacious climber crawled on their hands and knees out of a perilous crevasse and back down to safety, despite severe injuries, over several days.

The mountaineer recounted afterwards that the key to their remarkable survival against all the odds was that they always stuck to making decisions, even when the temptation was to give up and let events take their course. Staying alive appeared to boil down to the basic all encompassing directive of merely constantly making decisions, no matter what. It didn’t even matter so much if they were bad decisions the mountaineer ventured.

There is a kind of analogy between the predicament of crawling off a mountain on which you have fallen and broken a leg, with losing a job and having to pick yourself up, heal your injuries and struggle back to survival.

I am not sure the climber would be alive today to make this remark about decisions if that many of his decisions on that fateful climb were dire, but since his endurance is beyond question, I will let that slide for the moment. I think what he was getting at here was of a state of mind of being conscious of taking decisions, rather than merely letting your environment dictate your future. In other words ‘I decide to rest now briefly after which I will keep going,’ rather than, ‘this mountain is too tough I am going to stop’.

For example, whilst in the gym trying to lose weight you may say to yourself, ‘It’s time to stop running on this treadmill as I’m too exhausted to carry on’, whereas a more conscious decision making act is; ‘I am making a judgment to stop’. Being more aware that you are making a choice allows you to take more control and for example decide the other way – to push on. You can get a sense of this by consciously asking yourself – what is my decision?

Sequentially better decision making

The essence I want to focus on is the idea that in order to attain any difficult goal – be it losing weight, winning at sport, finding a new job, or surviving a fall down the side of a crevasse – the key secret ingredient appears to be the ability to make the right decisions. In particular, a sequence of good decisions. The longer the stretch of great choices continues, the more likely you are to be moving closer to your goal.

So how can we learn to make better decisions? From how to choose a better partner to developing a superior career? To grasp the skill of superior decision-making it’s perhaps useful to understand what psychological research in this area has so far uncovered.

Peter Muris and colleagues based at the Institute of Psychology at Erasmus University in The Netherlands have recently published a fascinating paper on this subject entitled ‘Impulsivity is associated with behavioral decision-making deficits’ in the journal Psychiatric Research, which probes this issue.

One of the essential problems with making decisions, the authors of this study point out, is that we tend to make judgments based on emotion rather than reason. And don’t the advertising industry realize this!

The difficulty then is that, even if we are trying to lose weight for example, we resolve what to eat based on feeling hungry, tired, angry or low, and we forget all those good resolutions we made when were more rational, and not so emotional, ie hungry, angry tired or low.

Another key conclusion the authors of this study focus on is that it’s not just our emotional state that seems to have the most impact on our decision-making but our anticipation of how we are going to feel in the future once we have made a choice. Developing a more accurate view of our future emotional states is therefore key to better decisions.

The reason we do the regretful thing is that we are poor predictors of how a present act is going to generate suffering in the future.

Improving predicting our future emotional states lies at the heart of superior decisions.

Improve future decisions by reviewing past ones

One possible way of achieving this is to review past judgements, particularly ones we feel now were bad ones. Why did we make that bad choice? Was it not because at the precise time we made it we believed it would make us feel good?

The essence of a bad decision is that it seemed a good idea at the time, but with hindsight it panned out to being not such a great plan.

In order to have a better today, imagine its tomorrow, next month, or next year, and you are now looking back on this decision, what are you going to feel about it then?

Dr Raj Persaud is a Consultant Psychiatrist working in the NHS and in Private Practice and is author of many best-selling books including editing The Mind A Users Guide published by Bantam Press with The Royal College of Psychiatrists.