How to Manage Your Mood to Improve Decision Making Ability

Image by Јerry via Flickr

Are you sunny or are you blue? That’s either the title to a really bad song from the ’70’s or a serious question every business leader should ask before making a decision. Let’s take a look at your mood filter.

Filters. We all have them and look through them at the world around us. We are a product of the socioeconomic environment in which we were raised and the fortune or misfortune of personal and professional events. We use these filters consciously or subconsciously to make countless business decisions each day.

We can be in a good or bad mood. Executives are not immune to feelings of joy, sadness and other common human emotions. You must recognize when a mood filter is in place and adjust decision-making to account for your state of well-being. Feelings of excessive happiness or gloom can be especially harmful during financial decision-making. The executive can suffer buyer’s remorse after a major business purchase or financing if the mood filter fogged the decision-making process. Your personal and business legacy is at stake.

The world around us causes mood changes. Sometimes you can’t change your circumstances but you can adjust your condition or response to the situation. Develop a toolbox of responses to different external events.

Be aware of your filters. Simply noticing your mood is the first step to making better business decisions.

Making Great Leadership Decisions (georgepapalexandratos.wordpress.com)
Importance of Decision Making in a Business (thinkup.waldenu.edu)
Strategic Business Decision-Making (thinkup.waldenu.edu)
How To Make Better Decisions (jimdew.wordpress.com)
Erase Your Bad Mood with a Healthy Excerise (socyberty.com)
Subconscious thinking and how it influences our actions (chiefkevinblog.com)

About Michael Shelton

Your Business Coach Facilitating Delegation and Work Group Engagement Michael Shelton has over twenty-five years of business and military accomplishments, including extensive experience with one of the largest, publicly traded real estate investment trusts (REIT). He is a qualified business coach with assignments in cross-functional work group management, strategic planning, unit leadership, joint venture acquisitions, executive education, mentoring, training and merger integration. Michael has accumulated best practices for building committed work groups from more than $4 billion of capital markets transactions and commercial property development. He served as a commissioned officer and helicopter pilot in the U.S. Army, and earned his MBA from The University of Arizona. Michael has served as a major conference panelist and is the author of Cash Flow Rich, Winning Ways to Evaluate and Finance Real Estate. Today, he helps business owners get more work group engagement as President and CEO of Shelton Business Services, LLC in Scottsdale, Arizona. Disclaimer: I don't offer investment, legal or tax advice. Talk to your broker, accountant or lawyer for investment, tax and legal help. I might own stock in the companies I mention on-line. My posts, tweets and other on-line activity are my personal thoughts and don't represent my employer or company.

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