Emotional Decision Making

How many times have you heard “let’s take the emotion out of this decision” or “Let’s look at this rationally”?  

As a man with 2 business degrees - I’ve been taught so many strategies for making decisions “rationally.”  I’ve worked through NPVs, expected values, pros and cons frameworks and much much more. But lately I’ve been learning to understand the importance and the centrality of emotion in decision making. It is a powerful signal (maybe the most important one) and one I was taught to ignore for much of my life. 

I am by no means an expert on the subject, but a few things I’ve been thinking about based on looking inward and hearing from my clients recently:

Emotions drive action - while “thinking” can often delay or dilute action. Emotions are a powerful motivator for action, and often underpin how we make decisions big and small whether we like it or not. Ignoring that or denying that can actually lead to making worse decisions.  

That said there are all sorts of ways emotions can impact our decision making that may not be “optimal.” I read a study that showed that stock markets actually do better when it’s sunny outside. Crazy right? Just because it is sunny doesn’t mean we should be buying though. So we do have to ensure we are aware of how our emotions - especially ones unrelated to the decision at hand - play into decision making.  That starts with understanding our own emotions, where they come from and what they mean. This is very different from ignoring or suppressing them. 

And for a vast swath of people - especially men, there is a negative perception of relying on emotions in our decision making. We’ve been taught this in a million ways growing up and in the business world. What a damn shame. Not only is the undertone of misogyny impossible to miss in this “wisdom,” my guess is that this aversion to integrating our emotional wisdom into decision making has made us all a lot less happy.  

Who is this “wisdom” serving? How much of this “wisdom” about removing emotions from our decision making has kept unhappy people “productive” in a job or a life that doesn’t suit them? “Suck it up and keep working!”  Oof… That makes me really really sad.