Your Decision-Making Mindset Guide
This is the Mindset for Life podcast, a place for personal stories, coaching, neuroscience and my favorite positive psychology tools to master life, relationships and work. I'm your host. Bethanie Hansen. Read on for an episode summary, action items from the episode, and coaching tips. A transcript is available in the podcast player tool. And, if today is the right time for you to work with a coach, the contact form is available on this page.
Episode Summary:
The summary of the podcast episode is:

Bethanie Hansen discusses the importance of decision-making and shares strategies from Chip Heath's and Dan Heath's book "Decisive."
She emphasizes the need to move beyond simple pro-con lists and gut feelings.
Hansen identifies four villains of decision-making: narrow framing, confirmation bias, short-term emotion, and overconfidence.
She outlines strategies to overcome these, including widening options, reality testing, gaining distance, and preparing to be wrong, all strategies from the book "Decisive."
The WRAP process is mentioned, with ideas to apply these strategies.

Action Items:

Consider multiple alternatives and weigh their pros and cons when making a decision.
Seek out information that challenges your assumptions about the decision.
Try to remove yourself from the immediate situation to gain a clearer perspective before deciding.

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Coaching Tips:

Life and executive coaches can apply these conflict resolution strategies with clients by:

Widen Options

Help clients brainstorm multiple alternatives beyond their initial binary choices
Use techniques like mind mapping to explore different paths
Challenge clients to generate at least 3-4 potential solutions to their dilemma

Reality Test Assumptions

Ask probing questions that challenge clients' existing beliefs
Encourage clients to seek out diverse perspectives from experts or people who've faced similar decisions
Help clients identify and examine their hidden assumptions

Get Distance

Teach clients techniques to step back from emotional decision-making
Recommend journaling or meditation to gain perspective
Suggest waiting 24-48 hours before finalizing a major decision

Prepare to Be Wrong

Create decision trees or scenario planning exercises
Help clients develop backup plans and flexibility
Normalize the uncertainty of decision-making and reduce fear of making the "wrong" choice

Use the WRAP Process

Walk clients through each step systematically
Use the process as a structured coaching framework
Help clients recognize and overcome the four decision-making villains (narrow framing, confirmation bias, short-term emotion, overconfidence)

These strategies can help coaches guide clients toward more confident, thoughtful decision-making.

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This episode's theme song is "Take It Up A Level" by Bethanie Hansen and SUNO AI. Used with Permission. Like what you read here? In this podcast, I’m sharing some core principles I’ve learned in coaching that have completely changed my life. And I share them in workshops with my clients. With a personal coach, you can take it deeper, to make these changes a lasting part of your life. You can figure out where to start and how to get the changes you really want.