001: Decoding the 3 decision instincts: How to keep your head, heart and gut in check

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Podcast Transcript:

My sister can walk into Home Depot, pick out a paint swatch from the wall, and walk out with five gallons of paint — having never done a test swatch. Me on the other hand, has to Photoshop about 12 different paint colors first onto a picture of my wall, then go to Home Depot and get about five samples, come home, paint them on multiple surfaces within the room, and probably still go back to Home Depot for more samples.

We all have different ways that we make decisions. So today we're diving into the three decision instincts. These are three subconscious ways that you make decisions, and this is your head, your heart, and your gut.

I want you to think of these like a pie chart where you likely use all three of them in your decision making, but one might be just a sliver of the pie and another might be most of the pie, or you could have somewhat equal distribution.

I want you to think back to a decision you made recently or maybe a few decisions you've made. What were your main instincts when you made those decisions? This could be buying a house, a career move, a decision within a relationship, a small decision like what to eat or what to wear, or a big decision like having your in-laws move in with you.

So, how did you make this decision? Were you leaning towards your heart and what your emotions said you should do? Did you go with your mind and what was logical? Or did you follow your gut?

Now you could have different tendencies depending on the different decisions you're making. So perhaps with your relationship decisions, you follow your heart, and maybe for financial decisions and investments, you go with your head. And maybe for outfits or food and picking out what to eat/what to wear, you go with your gut.

Overall, you probably lean towards one specific decision instinct, and if you don't know which one yours is, I do have a quiz for you over on my website, anchoreddecisions.com/instinct. You can take that quiz, it's real short, and figure out what your main decision instinct is so you can learn to make better decisions.

Today. We're going to dive deeper into each one of these to look at the benefits and the downsides, so you can incorporate all three into your decision making process and determine which one you should be using in different circumstances.

The first decision instinct is your heart.

This is me. This is how I make decisions. It's heart-based. It's emotions, out of love, compassion, empathy. These are your desires and how will this outcome make you feel. For example, if you're picking out somewhere to go on vacation, you'll probably think about places you've dreamed about or you picture yourself in that location and think how will this make me feel?

If you're thinking of adding another child to your family and you're a heart-based decision maker, you're probably thinking about what you’ve always dreamt that your family would look like. You're picturing your Thanksgiving table down the line 10, 15 years from now, or even when you're a grandparent one day, and that helps you determine how many kids you wanna have.

If it's a career decision, you're thinking about something that gives you purpose or something that you'll enjoy. You think about how you feel while you're working.

Now, the good thing and the positives of using your heart to help you make decisions is that generally these decisions will make you happy. You want to enjoy life, and when you are enjoying life, those around you enjoy life more. But there are some downsides because when you're following your heart, often you're brushing the red flags or reason under the rug.

You are often looking at just the here and now. You might be thinking, “Oh, this luxury car I want to drive — I could picture myself pulling into work, stepping out, feeling so confident and having this smooth, beautiful ride.” But if you financially can't afford that ride, what is that financial strain going to do to your relationships, to your happiness? Ain't so happy anymore after you're struggling financially and getting in fights with your husband or not able to take that vacation that you want to take because your car payment's too high or not able to purchase things that you want to purchase or save for retirement down the line because of your choices today, that feel good right now in the moment and make your heart happy now.

One thing with heart decision makers is they often are people pleasers as well, and you think of what others would want you to do or expect from you. This is because you're trying to please their hearts. Your heart wants to make others happy, and so you're aligning your decisions with what other people want or expect from you.

Heart-based decision makers can also make decisions out of fear. Fear's an emotion. You're an emotional decision maker, and fear can cause you to hold back or even hold off on making a decision. You might have a fear of judgment from others, fear of failure, fear of disappointing yourself or disappointing others.

And fear based or people pleasing based decisions can lead to regret or bitterness because you're not actually appeasing your heart, you're trying to appease others. You're giving in to these emotions rather than thinking logically. So that leads us to our next decision instinct.

Head Based Decision Makers

And this is your head. This is logistics, facts, data, looking at reviews, checking the finances. This is what makes the most sense on paper. Or maybe you're looking for the best deal out there.

Head based decision makers are often cautious. They take their time. You make quality purchases and wise investments. You think of the long-term benefits. So while I said I was a heart-based decision maker, my husband, Josh, is a head centered decision maker. He reads all the reviews, looks at all the data, the information, checks the specs, does comparisons.

And sometimes it drives me crazy because we'll be walking downtown looking for a place to eat and I'll smell something delicious, and my heart and my gut say, “This is it. We're stopping. We're gonna eat this right now.” And Josh will look up reviews on Yelp and say, “Well, they don't get very good reviews. Let's keep walking.”

Or maybe there's a product that a friend suggests to me that they rave about, so I want to immediately go buy that same product and Josh reads the Amazon reviews and says, “Eh, not so much. Let's get a different one.” And that causes some tension in our relationship.

But at the same time, it does keep me from making bad purchases or pursuing my next crazy idea that pops into my head because it's not logical, it's following my heart. There have been times when I've bought something on Amazon and I have not read the reviews, either because someone referred it or I just followed my heart and said, “okay, this one looks nice. I'm not even going to explore more options.” And then I get it and it's a flop. And Josh will kindly ask, “Well, what did the Amazon reviews say?” And that's where I'm like, “Uh, didn't really check 'em or I ignored 'em.”

I was looking for hairdryer at one point, and every single one had some type of bad review. So you finally just have to pick and go with something. It'll drive you nuts to keep doing research and research; and see, that's one of the things that the head-based decision makers sometimes do drag out their decisions. They put off the decision because they're waiting to have enough information. They want all the facts, all the data to make sure they've explored every option. But when is enough going to be enough?

And the other downside of head-based decision-making is that they may often choose things that look right on paper, but they end up not liking. So perhaps they choose the job with a better pay or the better commute, and in the end, they don't like the coworkers, they don't like the work they're doing and they're miserable.

Or maybe they bought the house that's the best price per square foot, but it just doesn't feel like home, and it's missing things they feel should be in their home

Gut Based Decision Makers

The third decision instinct is your gut. You follow your immediate feelings, your thoughts in the moment of how you feel; literally what you feel in your gut. If you've ever had a stomach drop moment where either disappointment, stress, anxiety, triggers this pit in your stomach, know that this is not just in your head. You are physically reacting to your emotions and the situation, where blood from your gut is going to your adrenal glands, and it's triggering a fight or flight type of response.

So it could be that you've just found out news that your boss is leaving and you have to decide whether or not to stay or to leave, and you get that pit in your stomach. Or it could be some red flag going off in your mind saying, “whoa, whoa, whoa, this isn't right. Hold up. Put the brakes on. We're not gonna take that path now.”

Good gut decision makers are usually self-confident. They trust themselves and their instincts, and they don't waste time dragging out decisions, changing their mind or overanalyzing.

So the benefits to being a gut decision maker are you usually make decisions quickly and you're usually happy with your choices, even if they don't always pan out the way you like, but instead you think, “You win some, you lose some. I'll choose better next time. I'm not gonna drag out my decisions.”

Now, the downsides of being a gut decision maker is that you're often impulsive. You might make a big purchase, or just excessive purchases, because your gut in the moment says, “I want this. I need it. I see it. I'm buying it.” Or, you go with just what you want in the moment, not thinking long term about the implications, the consequences, the overall costs, or any ripple effects that that purchase might have.

Sometimes gut decision makers also make bad decisions based on fear instead of logic or true desires. You may be at a job interview and the HR director just rubbed you the wrong way, and so you ride this job off as not for you, even though you could have had awesome coworkers, maybe never even talking to the HR manager, and this could have provided for the financial stability you needed. But instead, you followed your gut that said, “No, I don't like that person. This job's not for me.”

My Gut Decision Story

I have a story of a gut decision that I'm glad I did not follow my gut on. I had been working at a company that shut down and went bankrupt, and all 500 employees got laid off on the same day. So I started freelancing. I have a degree in graphic design. I started doing graphic design work and about month later, got hired at a company to do graphic design work for them in their marketing department. The company was about 45 minutes away. So I get down there on my first day and hear the reason why the person before me lost their job. It was of no fault of their own, it was partly, the department was just a mess and it kind of got blamed on her. So here I am thinking great, I am being set up for failure on my first day. I'm never going to meet these expectations, this department's a mess. They probably need more help than just a new designer.

And my gut just sank. And I thought there's no way I'm coming back to this job tomorrow. My gut was saying, run, do not come back. Just go down right now and tell them, sorry, I made a mistake. But I knew in my mind that I should give it a shot because A, we needed the money, we needed me to have a financially stable job, and the freelancing was not going to cut it at that point. And B, I knew that overall this was a good company and a really good opportunity. Thank goodness I stuck it out because that job ended up being a great job with so many amazing coworkers. I loved my bosses. I was friends with my coworkers, did things outside of work with them. I got to go to LA for the first time to go to a conference, and it was just this awesome opportunity, a great job.

But my first initial day there, my gut was saying no. That was out of fear and also out of change. Change is scary. And we often, when we have these decisions that are facing a change, we are fearful and we go with our gut instead of what's logical or what's in our heart. So it is important to be well-rounded in your decision making.

A fourth decision stance

Now I'm going to throw one more out there. I know this was called the three decision instincts, but I have a fourth. It's not really an instinct, but more of a decision stance or your positioning. This should be how you approach decision making as a whole, and this is with your spirit.

As a Christian, I know I have to let God guide my decisions. I have to tune in to his will. And if you're faith-based as well, then you need to be doing this. So think of that pie chart where there are those three slices of your head, your heart, and your gut. The spiritual is not a fourth slice in that pie. Instead, it's an umbrella over the whole pie chart. It's an addition to it.

If you're a heart-based decision maker, you probably are looking for God's peace over your decision. If you are a head and mind based decision maker, you're probably looking for signs and confirmation from God. If you're a gut-based decision maker, you might look to the spirit's still small voice.

How do we get to know God's voice and feel his peace in our decisions or know which ones are signs from God and what's just a coincidence or not from God? That's through prayer and a relationship with God that helps you know his voice.

I love this passage from John 10 in the Bible. You'll probably hear me quote it a lot on this podcast and on my social media because it's just so relevant to getting to know God's voice… Jesus says, “My sheep know me. They hear my voice, and they follow me.” The people in Jesus' time would've understood that analogy well — a lot of times multiple shepherds would gather together with their flocks to take shelter. When it was time to separate, the shepherds would call out to their sheep, and their sheep knew their voice and followed only them.

So, do you know God's voice well enough to follow just his voice? Or do you often confuse it with your own thoughts? Do you confuse it with the devil's deception? The devil comes as a wolf in sheep's clothing. He doesn't come in this red suit with a pitchfork and horns where it's obvious that it's the devil. No, he twists and distorts the word of God, the truth, what's right in our mind and our hearts, and that we can't see clearly what's truly from God.

So that is why it is so important to know God's word and be connected with him in prayer, in relationships, that we can distinguish his voice from all the others.

In my decision guides that I have in my shop, I do cover all four of these areas. We look at how does your heart feel and answer questions about that. What is logical and realistic, and what are the finances involved, looking at things from the head perspective. Then looking at the gut instincts, what does your gut have to say about this? And then looking at the spiritual and what has God been leading you to do?

A lot of times, God overrides all logic and instinct. With his plan, that's better than our plan. Or sometimes what's revealed that's in our heart might be different from what his will is and his purpose for our life.

Are any of these decision instincts better than another?

Yes, especially in certain circumstances. If you are looking at making a big decision, maybe it's buying an income property, you better be doing your head work. You’d better be looking at the costs, the comps of other recent sales in the area, the price per square foot, the neighborhood. You want to ensure that you get a return on your investment.

So, if there's a cute house you fell in love with that you want as an investment home, but it's overpriced or full of maintenance projects, or in a horrible community — that could turn into a nightmare and a money pit. Not so cute anymore, right?

You wanna make sure you are using the right tools for the right decisions. Now, something like choosing what to eat or what to wear for date night — Go with your gut, go with your heart.

And then one thing to keep in mind is that over all these decisions, no matter how good of a decision maker you are, no matter how much research and the reviews you think you did, there could still be decisions that don't have favorable outcomes for you.

Let's say you're investing in a stock and you think you found a really solid company. You've done your research, you've done the groundwork, and then news comes out that the CEO is laundering money and cheating on his wife, and the whole company comes crashing down. That’s completely out of your control. You did not make a bad decision. You made the best, most informed decision you could in the moment, and you have to learn to give yourself grace.

Or, you could have made a completely impulsive decision based off a hunch to in the moment when your gut said, “Do it.” You made a risk and it paid out and you had the best decision ever completely out of luck. But once again, that's a topic for another time we can dive way deeper into.

Overall, it's important to be very well-rounded so that you can make the best decisions possible, especially with big decisions like career or expanding your family, a big move or purchasing a home.

Don't be quick to rule things out just because your gut says no, or because it doesn't feel good in the moment. But also, don't be so analytical that you undermine your feelings and go with just what looks best on paper. Strike a balance between what feels good and what makes the most sense depending on the specific decision you're facing.

Now, if you're anything like me and an over-thinker, then you've probably had circumstances where your heart and your mind are in conflict with one another. Your heart says one thing, your mind and logic says another. Which one do you listen to? How do you make your decision?

That is actually my next episode to make sure to tune into that one.

But your homework for today is first to subscribe to my podcast, shameless plug to go leave of rating and review on your favorite podcast player to really help get the momentum started with this podcast to help more lovely people like you find and discover it.

And then I want you to go take that decision instinct quiz I was talking about earlier. Go discover your main decision instinct so you can start being more mindful and intentional of how you make decisions in order to make the best decisions you'll be happy with long term. You can find that at anchoreddecisions.com/instinct.

If you're listening to this around my launch date, February/March 2024, first of all, I want to thank you for tuning in and supporting me as I start this podcast journey. It means so much to me. I also want to invite you to take part in my launch giveaway. You can win a whole swag bag full of goodies, including Christian devotional items, Bible study resources, prayer cards, a decision guide of choice, a bracelet and a $50 Amazon gift card!

Enter by leaving a rating or review for my show on your favorite podcast player, taking a screenshot of it (since sometimes they don't post right away), and sending it to me either by email, direct message or posting it to social media and tagging me @AnchoredDecisions.

You can also earn bonus entries by sharing my show on social media and tagging my account publicly — earn one extra entry per each post that you share throughout the month of March.

You can find me on social @AnchoredDecisions. I can't wait to help you make more prayerful, purposeful decisions.

I have a few solo episodes lined up and then we'll bring on guests to share their decision stories or expert insights for making informed, wise decisions.