Our decisions are always informed by past experiences, even if only to a small extent. Understanding the relationship between your background and future choices can prove very beneficial.
Making decisions is at the core of being an entrepreneur. Your business choices have the power to make or break your company, so knowing how past experiences influence your decision-making is crucial.
Of course, the underlying process isn’t immediately apparent, and the connections between your past and future decisions can be quite complex.
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Building Stronger Intuition
Intuition can play a significant role when there’s not enough information to make an objective decision. The “gut feeling” that informs your choice isn’t just a matter of nature – it can be built and conditioned by past experiences.
Your memories, habits, and underlying influences form a large part of intuition. Because of that, it’s vital to understand the nature of past events and how they reflected on you.
But despite what’s often promoted as true, gut feeling isn’t always right and it can even take you in the wrong direction. But if you can discern some of the factors that influence your intuition, you’ll be able to decide whether to listen to the inner feeling or not.
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Shaping Your Personality
Past experiences have a strong influence on how your personality is formed. And many things people like or dislike result from events that left a strong impression.
These influences are continually working in our subconscious mind.
Whenever you find yourself considering a decision based on personal affinities, you should stop and analyse whether those affinities align with your company’s best interests. And if you consciously choose to take your business in a direction that personally bothers you, finding out the underlying reason you feel that way is crucial.
We tend not to make decisions that go against our personality. Yet, it might be the right thing to do for our business in some instances. This is especially true if our personal preference stems from some unknown, subconscious source.
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Remembering Past Experiences
What we actually experience isn’t the same as what we remember experiencing. Various psychological factors can distort memory, such that the aspects that stick are often only the extreme highs and lows.
When drawing from the past to inform your decisions, you shouldn’t depend only on such impressions. In many cases, crucial details that could be very useful get left behind and the extremes you remember don’t provide sufficient guidance.
It’s also worth noting that the difference between experiencing and remembering also influences your customers. Same as you, they will rely on the most positive or negative points of their experiences when making a decision.
Understanding the Cause of Your Decisions
The subconscious influence on even the largest business decisions can’t be overstated.
There are many situations when objective information and facts will be lacking, and it’s necessary to rely on your inner voice. This process will happen whether or not you’re aware of it, which is why it’s essential to develop an awareness of everything that contributes to your choices.
