What is decision making?

Decision making is making a choice in achieving a goal

• Making the best choices consistently is the key to success in life
• Making decisions can be tough, so avoiding decisions may seem easier at times
• Making your own decisions is the only way to take charge of your life
• No one makes the right decision every time, but by developing your decision-making skills, you can increase your success rate!
• Being a teenager you will need to make many decisions
• Decisions are usually fluency by your beliefs, your family, your friends and your environment

What is good decision making?

• Making a good decision requires patience and careful thought
• Good decision making is Problem solving following a step-by-step approach and choosing a strategy to act on
• Having good general decision-making skills can help you to protect yourself in many situations

How to make a good decision?

• Selecting the most important changes to make
• Evaluating the relative importance of different options
• Selecting between good options
• Choosing between options by projecting likely outcomes
• Weighing the pros and cons of a decision
• Analyzing the pressures for and against change
• Looking at a decision from all points of view
• Seeing whether a change is worth making

What influences your decision making?

Individual Emotions and Thinking

• Your decisions may be influenced by your emotional state at the time a decision is made
• Your emotions affect how you think and behave
• When you are experiencing positive emotions, you tend to underestimate the negative consequences of your actions
• When you are experiencing negative emotions, you tend to focus on the near term and lose sight of the big picture
• Different people have different styles of making decisions
  • You may prefer to gather information before making decisions
  • You may rely on instincts and make snap decisions
  • You may be inconsistent in your strategies and often indecisive

Social

• Social pressure or time constraints may interfere with your decision making
• Your decision making may be different from adults

Peers

• Your friends and other peers can influence your decision making
• You can make good or bad decisions based on your friends’ ideas
• It is important to understand that the decisions that you make in selecting friends and the role of your friends influence your attitudes and behaviors

Community

• Your decision making alone may not be effective without involving the community and neighborhood

Media

• Your thoughts and behaviors in decision making may be influenced by the media