Making Sound Decisions via Emotional Excellence

Decision-Making is one of the most important activities for business leaders and professionals. And decision-making in the digital world with VUCA” characteristics is often not the simple tasks, there are many variables you have to leverage, and there are tradeoffs you should make. And it takes both hard science and soft science to improve decision-making. From a psychological perspective, how can you make sound decisions with emotional excellence?
The leaders and professionals having a balanced mind with high EQ can take tough decisions keeping their sensitivity intact: Emotional Intelligence is the ability to identify and identify your own emotions or even others’ emotions. It is the ability to harness constructive or positive emotions and apply them to tasks like thinking, decision-making and problems solving. It is also the ability to manage emotions either the historical emotional burden or the current emotional exuberance. As we know the cool-headed decision-makers have better emotional management skills for taking logic, not necessarily always about conventional wisdom, and make more effective decisions than the people with low EQ. It doesn’t mean the high EQ people do not have feelings, but it means such mindsets are more objective, accountable, empathetic, intellectual and progressive, and therefore, they can think in longer term frame, or they are able to strike the right balance of sense and sensitivity, information and intuition in making effective decisions.
High EQ decision makers can leverage multifaceted thought processes in making sound judgment and improving decision-making: Emotions are driven by thoughts, and thoughts piled by thoughts build your thinking capability and cultivate your thinking habit, which directly impacts the intellectual sophistication of decision-making scenario. The ineffective decision-making is often caused by poor judgment, and it further due to the lack of real critical thinking (your thoughts should be reasoned and well thought out/judged), independent thinking (not depending on the authority of others for forming an opinion)m  systems thinking (to understanding the connectivity between the parts and the whole or holistic thinking (leverage both analysis and synthesis for harness understanding), etc. To think critically and profoundly and avoid the trap of emotional turbulence or individual perception, you have to really dig beneath the superficial layer, see around the corner and transcend the interdisciplinary knowledge, it is critical to making sound judgment and effective decisions.
High EQ decision-makers have the emotional maturity to weigh in the multiple decision factors via communications, inquiries, and evaluations: Emotional maturity is the ability to wait, think, and respond to a situation without responding with a knee-jerk reaction. Maturity can be seen from people responding to every situation according to its severity level. Maturity is the clarity of thoughts along with self-control which helps in choosing the most appropriate reaction to circumstances, or inaction -deciding not to react to any given situation. From a decision-making perspective, it is the ability to weigh in the impact of how you make decisions or what you are planning to do and who will be impacted because of the decision outcome or the intended action. It is also the ability to dispassionately" examine alternatives, it’s about fact finding, analysis, structured thinking, objective evaluations and comparisons, the progressive pursuit of better solutions.
Leaders and professionals with high-level emotional excellence can make more effective decisions and take wise actions, also because they have the good attitude to listen and question, high aptitude to think and understand deeply. It’s the soft science of communication embedded with hard science of decision-making or problem-solving capability.


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