Think you’re not great at making decisions? Think again! While you might stress about big choices like choosing your subjects or planning your future career, you’re probably already building solid decision-making skills through everyday activities. Here are three surprising signs that show you’re better at decision-making than you think.
You’re the go-to person for your friend group’s plans
If your friends often turn to you to finalise weekend plans or resolve group chat debates about where to meet up, congratulations – you’re flexing some serious decision-making muscles!
This kind of social planning requires balancing multiple factors: different people’s preferences, time constraints, budgets, and accessibility. When you successfully navigate these competing needs to land on a plan that (mostly) works for everyone, you’re demonstrating advanced decision-making skills like weighing options, considering consequences, and finding compromises.
Even better? If you’re the person who can confidently say “let’s do this” when everyone else is stuck in an endless loop of “I don’t mind, whatever you want to do,” you’re showing you can handle the pressure of making final calls – a crucial decision-making skill.
You’ve successfully managed your gaming or sports strategy
Whether you’re choosing your Pokémon team, making split-second decisions in Fortnite, or deciding when to pass the ball in football, you’re actually building sophisticated decision-making skills.
Gaming and sports require rapid assessment of situations, quick prioritisation, and strategic thinking about both immediate and long-term consequences. Every time you decide which weapon to pick up, which character to level up, or when to take a risk versus play it safe, you’re practicing the same decision-making processes that leaders use in high-stakes business situations.
The best part? Because you’re doing something you enjoy, you’re learning from both successes and failures in a low-pressure environment – exactly how the best decision-makers build their skills.
You can put together a decent outfit (even under pressure)
We’re serious – this is actually a complex decision-making process! When you’re choosing what to wear, you’re simultaneously considering multiple factors: the weather, your day’s activities, dress codes, comfort, style, and what’s clean and available.
If you can regularly pull together appropriate outfits without major drama, you’re demonstrating key decision-making skills like:
- Gathering relevant information (checking the weather, your schedule)
- Evaluating options against multiple criteria
- Making quick decisions under time pressure
- Adapting to constraints (what’s actually clean and available)
- Learning from experience (what worked or didn’t work in similar situations)
Where you’ll use this skill in the workplace
Decision-making skills are crucial in virtually every workplace role, but here are some specific ways you’ll use them:
Resource allocation
When managing budgets, time, or team members, you’ll need to decide how to best use limited resources to achieve maximum results – just like when you’re managing your study time or gaming strategy.
Crisis response
Whether it’s handling an urgent customer complaint or responding to a system failure, you’ll need to make quick, informed decisions under pressure – similar to those split-second gaming decisions.
Product development
Deciding which features to include, what to prioritise, and when to launch requires weighing multiple factors and making trade-offs – just like when you’re balancing different factors in social planning.
Team leadership
Leaders constantly make decisions about task delegation, conflict resolution, and project direction – skills you’re building when managing group activities or team sports.
Quality control
Determining whether something meets standards and deciding how to address issues requires confident decision-making – like when you decide if an outfit works for a specific occasion.
Event coordination
Coordinating events requires constant decision-making about timing, resources, and contingency plans – similar to organising social activities.
Building your decision-making skills
The best news? Decision-making is like a muscle – the more you use it, the stronger it gets. Every time you make a choice and observe its outcomes, you’re building better decision-making skills for the future.
Want to level up your decision-making even more? Start paying attention to how you make everyday decisions. What information do you consider? What factors influence your choices? The more aware you are of your decision-making process, the more you can refine and improve it.
Being good at making decisions doesn’t mean never making mistakes – it means being able to gather relevant information, weigh options, and move forward confidently with the best choice you can make with the information available. If you’re doing any of the things mentioned above, you’re already on your way to becoming a skilled decision-maker!
Find out more
Curious to know if you’ve mastered any other skills? You can read more blogs on important skills for work on our website here.