3 Decision Lessons I Learned from Bird Watching

It was the first time I did bird-watching. Joining an enthusiastic group of nature lovers, we camped in Philip's sanctuary which is located west of the city.

One early morning, we wore our dark shirts (nothing colorful to be noticed by birds), sat down for some quick instructions to calibrate our binoculars, and walked toward the forest. 

From the couple of hours trekking and stopping and moving with intermittent browsing of our book on birds, I gathered 3 lessons about decision-making. 

1. Keep silence to listen to any movement of leaves and bird sounds. When you are making an important decision, treat silence as your best friend, as it will help you listen to your own thinking. Silence can help you imagine the consequences of your options. It can even set the stage for these outcomes to take form in your imagination in persons that will be affected by your decisions. (When the famous speaker and author Mel Robbins talked about the quiet and noisy decisions, I think she is referring more to the environment of decision-making than a characteristic of decisions themselves.)

2. Be patient. Stand still for five minutes and wait for the birds to come. Thinking through your problem, your goals in solving it, and your options and their possible consequences take time. The best ideas cannot be forced to come by. Then, even the most logical decision-making will need to consult the heart. One course of action might be the most rational thing to do but the heart or your emotions won't take you through the implementation phase. So the logical mind has to be patient and cede to the second best option until the heart is ready. So I do take the middle option. Decision-making is not a purely brain work. But neither should you let your heart lead the process all the way.

3. Look straight at the bird first and bring up your binoculars to your eyes. Pay attention to your decision criteria. These criteria are the goals and values you define at the beginning of your decision-making process. You need to define your criteria becuase solving your problem is only a means to an end, and your criteria are your ends in mind. Perhaps you wanted to be happy, to make a contribution to the common good, to reduce a pain in your life or business. Whatever that is you have selected, keep your eye on it. Evaluate each of your possible solutions on the basis of how they will make you happy, or make a contribution, or reduce the power of that pain. A common mistake I see in decision-making frameworks is to immediately make a decision after listing down the options.

Tell me which of these lessons you will apply the next time you make a decision.