Do you make quick decisions or put off making decisions? Do you prioritize the factors involved and use the most effective method to decide how to resolve your problems or attain your goals? If interested in making better decisions check this out.
Every decision we make is based on our rational and emotional memories that pertain to that situation. Unfortunately too high a percentage of our decisions are based on emotional memories rather than rational memories, creating problems. Important decisions should be based much more on rational memories than on emotional memories.
Most daily decisions are automatic, like when to wake up or sleep, when and what to eat, etc. But new decisions require more thought before making them. Decision-making like personality, involves both nature (genetics) and nurture (learned memories). Genetic Fun Fact-1: Right-brain people strongest in the director or socializer style are quick decision makers who frequently revise their decisions. Genetic Fun Fact-2: Left-brain people strongest in the analyzer or relator style are slow decision makers and frequently leave new decision making to others. Memory-wise, anyone can learn how to make better decisions, whether right-brained or left-brained, to better resolve their problems or attain their goals.
Prioritized Decision Making:
All decisions have factors that need to be prioritized in importance (1st, 2nd, etc.) to effectively resolve the situation. Sometimes you need to not only prioritize these main factors that resolve the situation, but also the main factors that caused the situation. All too often the goal is not attained or the problem not effectively resolved because the priority of the factors are erroneous or missing. And sometimes a main factor cannot be attained or resolved until its prioritized sub-factors are. This is a lot to consider when making important decisions to resolve problems or attain goals. For an example of all of this considder the goal: “to have an efficient, effective daily schedule.”
The main factors are: your staffing, your treatment facility/equipment, your treatment sequences and your patients’ cooperation. But which of these factors are the most important? Typically the priority is: 1st your staffing, 2nd your treatment facility/equipment, 3rd your treatment sequences, and 4th your patients’ cooperation, all of which seems reasonable. But, your schedule is composed of numerous types and amounts of Tx Appointments that provide your patients’ treatments. Thus, accurate Tx sequences (of DR & DA Tx times) should be the most (1st) important factor. Your staff must know how to provide those Tx sequences to run your daily schedule, so that should be the 2nd most important factor. Your facility/equipment needs to be able to handle your daily patient load so that should be the 3rd most important factor. Finally, the management of your patient’s non-cooperation (lateness, missed appointments, SOS and emergencies, etc.) is the 4th factor. And to resolve each of these prioritized main factors you may have sub-factors to resolve. For example, the staffing main factor can have the sub-factors: 1st organize them into positions, 2nd hire new staff if needed, 3rd train new staff or retrain your present staff. Your facility main factor may also have sub-factors: 1st its adequacy, 2nd its layout, 3rd new equipment needed, etc. Bottom line, you need to resolve every sub-factor before you can resolve a main factor to attain your prioritized goal “To have an efficient, effective daily schedule.”
Moving on:
In certain situations, assigning a priority (1st, 2nd etc.) to a factor may seem obvious, but not necessarily. If one factor is overwhelmingly important it is obviously 1st, but it is important to know how the other factors affect that 1st factor. For example, if the problem is: “I don’t have enough Tx chairs to treat my patients”, then the obvious 1st factor resolution is to buy another chair/unit. But there are other factors that make that solution more complex: “Can I afford the chair/unit?” or “Do I have enough space to fit the chair/unit?” If you have the money and space than these factors are minor and you can just buy and install the chair/unit—problem solved. But, if you don’t have the money or the space, they become the 1st and 2nd most important factors to resolve. If you have adequate space and can get an equipment loan, then money is not a significant factor—problem solved. But if you don’t have the space (making it 1st) then an equipment loan doesn’t matter. If you can afford to refurbish the facility (with a construction loan), than the space is not a significant factor—problem solved—buy the chair/unit as part of the refurbishing. But if you can’t afford any reconstruction you can’t resolve this problem—yet.
This introduces another important factor; “can I grow my practice” (i.e., marketing and starting more patients) to pay for those loans—thus practice growth now becomes the 1st factor with all other factors next in priority—this creates a many factored problem to resolve (illustrated in the example below).
Making Prioritized Decisions about Health:
We all are human and thus have physical maladies from time to time, creating the situation, “How to get over my illness?” There are factors that cause the situation (illness) and factors that resolve the situation. Prioritizing the many factors that cause and resolve an illness can be difficult and sometimes seem impossible. I have found that if I first prioritize the cause factors and then prioritize the resolving factors that I have 80% of its resolution—unfortunately, that prioritizing can change with time.
A Real Life Health Example: Like most of you, I have dealt with lower back pain most of my life, forcing me to investigate the many factors involved in causing and resolving that pain. The factors causing the lower back pain might include: occupation, lifestyle, disease, sports, injuries, sitting/sleeping habits, etc. The factors that can remedy the lower back pain might include: painkillers (ingested, injected or topical), a lifestyle/job change, chiropractic adjustment, stretching exercises, bio-magnetism, trigger-point massage, acupuncture and spinal surgery. Sometimes it is difficult or impossible to resolve all of the causes of pain (like occupation or past injuries), requiring you to seek remedies that allow you to live with some level of pain.
Once you have prioritized resolvable causes you need to prioritize the remedies. Depending on what you have tried in the past, you might assign painkillers as 1st, chiropractic as 2nd, stretching exercises as 3rd, lifestyle changes 4th, bio-magnetic therapy 5th, trigger-point massage 6th and spinal surgery 7th. Using only the 1st, 2nd and 3rd prioritized remedies (that work for you) might help at first, but it may not reduce the pain enough. When this happens you need to try other remedies to resolve your lower back pain as it occurs. Once you have identified all of your remedies you have a choice of what to use as your pain increases starting with your high priority remedies and continuing down the list until one of them works.
Aging considerations—the factors that cause your lower back pain change as you get older and all of the possible factors need to be re-prioritized as you age. I was a gymnast for eight years and had the usual spinal injuries, making me try every remedy possible to relieve my lower back pain. At first it was the old crack-the-back chiropractic adjustment once or twice a month for 28 years, which momentarily relieved the pain, but didn’t resolve the cause of the pain. I later tried trigger-point massage, lower back stretching exercises and bio-magnets, which significantly reduced the pain for a decade until lumbar spinal stenosis set in. The lumbar stenosis caused intense lumbar pain that was 85% resolved by sophisticated new-age chiropractic adjustments. I still have manageable lower back pain mostly caused by the way I sleep, or sit too long like driving long distances. My present priorities to reduce these causes are: 1st don’t seep on my left side, 2nd don’t sit too long. My present remedy priorities to reduce my lower back pain are: 1st sleep on my right side or back, 2nd do weekly self-chiropractic adjustments and bimonthly chiropractor adjustments, 3rd use bio-magnetic therapy, 4th use trigger-point therapy with a “massage-gun”, 5th use Voltaren ointment, and 6th do daily stretching exercises. In the future a remedyI might be spinal lumbar surgery, but that I will resist. Bottom line: update and reprioritize the causes and remedies of your lower back pain as you age.
Making Prioritized Decisions about Livelihood, Companionship, etc.:
Some of us inherit or win money, but most of us have to work to earn the money needed to pay for our desired lifestyle. The 1st factor is what kind of work do you really want to do? The sub-factors may include: your skills, your work ethic, your education, your passions, who you know, how long you are willing to take other jobs until to end up with the job you want, etc. The 2nd, 3rd, etc., factors might include: how much money do I need to make, where I want to work (company, city, etc.), family factors, etc. Some of us believe in karma and allow it to guide our decisions, but most of us at least have an inkling of what we want to do, pursue it and end up doing some variation of it. Again, prioritizing the factors into the most and least important will help you discard some and concentrate on the most important to effectively resolve the situation, “What kind of work do I really want to do?”.
Being social animals the majority of us want a spouse and family and thus we have the situation: “Who is the best person for me and me for them?” The factors may include: pleasing your family, your self-image, your personality (people-oriented or task-oriented), where you work and play, your use of “dating sites”, men (finding someone like their mother), women (finding someone like their father), LGBTQ…(the same), etc. Again, prioritizing those factors into the most and least important can help you discard some of them, concentrate on the most important and effectively resolve the situation “Who is the best person for me?”—of course, “that bonding oxytocin feeling” helps a lot.
The above are just a few of the important decisions we need to prioritize to lead the best life possible, which should kick off your own important quests—and the method below can help.
A Useful Method for Prioritizing your Decisions:
The 9-step method below can be used to effectively remedy important situations (problems and goals). Use this method until you think you have the solution—then put it aside and get back to it a few days later, after you have had time to mull it over. You may not need all of the steps below, but going through them should assure you that your situation was effectively resolved.
1) Precisely state the situation that needs resolution—write it down or type it into a Word® file to make it easier to prioritize and re-prioritize the factors.
2) Below the situation, make a list of all of the main factors that cause the situation aqnd then a list of main factors to remedy the situation.
3) Prioritize each list with what you think is: 1st (the most important main factor), 2nd (the next most important main factor), etc. You may discover new factors to add and prioritize as you re-prioritize each list.
4) Review your prioritizing and determine which factors have sub-factors that need to be resolved before that main factor can be resolved (but don't overdo it).
5) Re-prioritize all the factors in 3) and 4) above.
6) Again as in step 4), review your re-prioritizing and add/prioritize any new factors not initially listed.
7) Rarely needed: repeat step 6) until all of your prioritizing is completed.
8) Look at the final solution and decide whether it sufficiently resolves the situation.
9) If resolvable, resolve the 1st main factor on the final listing, then the 2nd, etc., until the situation is resolved. If the situation cannot be resolved, consider another situation that can be.
EXAMPLE of this method for: “Buying a Needed Tx Chair”:
Situation: “I don’t have enough Tx chairs to treat my patients”
List of cause Factors:
My patient load has outgrown my ability to treat them within my present facility (a good cause)
I don’t have enough Tx chairs for the Tx days I work
List of remedy Factors:
Decide that you can work more Tx days
Decide that you can afford a new Tx chair/unit
Decide that you have enough space to fit the Tx chair/unit
Decide on the Tx chair/unit needed and where to buy it
Re-Prioritized the remedy factors if you can afford the Tx Chair and have enough space for it:
Decide that you won’t work more Tx days
Decide on the Tx chair/unit needed
Decide where to buy it and have it installed—Situation happily resolved
Re-Prioritized these factors and add new ones if you don’t have enough space for the Tx chair/unit:
Decide that you can’t work more Tx days
Decide that you do not have enough space to fit the Tx chair/unit
Decide on whether you can afford a construction loan to refurbish
If you can afford it, refurbish with an extra chair/unit—Situation happily resolved.
Re-Prioritized these factors and add new ones if you might be able to afford refurbishing:
Decide that you can’t work more Tx days
Decide that you need to refurbish for more space
Decide how much you need to increase your fees to help pay for that refurbishing
Decide on how much to refurbish and whether you can afford the construction loan—if not:
Decide on whether you can grow your practice enough to pay for that refurbishing
If you can grow your practice (and resolve all of the sub-factors involved with that growth), refurbish with the new Tx chair/unit—Situation happily resolved.
If you cannot grow your practice or afford to do any refurbishing or increase your fees—do without that Tx chair/unit and work more/longer Tx days—Situation unhappily resolved.
I hope that this discussion was helpful and that you can now make more effective decisions to resolve important situations and attain your goals.
