How to Make Choosing Easier
Psycho-economist and author of The Art of Choosing, Sheena Iyengar, through her research at Columbia
Business School, shows one common issue people often face while making choices:
the choice overload. She stated that nowadays, this became a common disturbance
on the decision-making process.
For that problem, Sheena Iyengar propose four potential solutions:
1. Cut, getting rid of the extraneous alternatives;
2. Concretize, making the choice more real;
3. Categorize, with less choices and more categories;
4. Increase gradually the complexity, to keep the chooser engaged.
Summarizing,
and defining the four techniques/ methodologies in one word, I would say “simplify”.
The simpler it is, with less alternatives, quantitative and qualitative
speaking, the easier and more probable it is a potential chooser to choose,
according to the research.
These techniques,
in my perspective, can be applied in every choice to make, not only as a
consumer or customer, but also in daily personal and professional choices.
Cut and My Personal Implications
Hoch (2001)
mentions experiments suggest that if there is too
much stimulation, decision makers may try to simplify their behavior and thus
choose less variety, or exhibit less creativity and openness to new ideas
This week I
was listening to a podcast with Brian Tracy, speaking about building confidence
and time management, and he mentioned that lack of focus or distraction is the
main barrier to achieve success. I personally believe that information technology
heavily affects the choices I make towards my personal success, due to the
several choices I can make with an electronic in my hand. Every communication
channel in a mobile phone, tablet or computer, nowadays, offer hundreds to
thousands of links to click.
For an
instance, I choose to distract while having my coffee in the morning, watching
videos online (informative comedy), looking at my personal email, replying to
my close friends and family, playing an easy game (sudoku, solitaire) and so
forth. While doing so, I often realized that I spent more time that I planned
to do so, just distracting before starting my day. Knowing that, last year I
canceled all my social media accounts. It helped me to get less distracted and decreasing
my procrastination, however I am still in the process of avoid distraction and
alternatives that will not help me on achieving my personal and professional
goals. The next step I made was deleting all game, news and video apps from my
mobile phone, and in case I want to access something specific I do so through
the website.
I believe
these are potential practical solutions to cut extraneous alternatives, however
I also defend the idea that cutting alternatives involves the little and often neglected
choices one makes daily, as checking a device first thing in the morning for example
or choosing to occupy your mind while having breakfast.
Concretize and My Professional Implications
Making my
choices more real would imply in focusing my attention and work in one thing at
a time, and automatically improving the quality of the results. For example,
when people ask me what I want to do with my master’s degree, or what is my
professional goal, I reply that I have short, medium and long terms goals. My
short goals are working as a leadership trainer in a commercial airline for
employees in the front line, my medium term in participating in researches and assisting
coaches to get more experience to achieve my long term goal, which is being a
Leadership Coach for Leaders. Because I aim the top of the stairs, I struggle
to feel my short-term goal real, and I do not spend time working on it.
I know it is
a step to achieve the long-term plans, but because I do not see it concrete, I
cannot feel it. A possible solution would be doing researches and making a structure
plan to enable me to climb the first step, and gradually achieve goal by goal,
which brings me to the fourth methodology shown by Sheena, when trying to avoid
complexity.
My own potential solution
Stop
procrastinating and looking for distraction, I believe is a powerful way to
increase my ability to make decisions. Even knowing the benefits of the two
current I have, I realized they regress my learning and development process.
References
Hoch, S., Gunther, R., Kunreuther, H. (2001). Wharton on Making Decisions. New York, NY: Wiley.
Iyvengar,
S. (2011). How to make choosing easier. https://www.ted.com/talks/sheena_iyengar_choosing_what_to_choose.
Retrieved on January 19t, 2019.
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