Making Better Decisions
People make decisions every day about their lives, relationships, health care, and services. Some decisions are easy to make, but others may feel difficult and stressful.
6 ways to help kids (and adults!) make better decisions:
1. Talk about how good decisions require effort, not genius
That’s because great choices come from using a disciplined process, not scoring high on an IQ test.
2. Avoid either-or choices
It’s easy for kids to think that decisions are binary: Do they want to learn the violin or not?
In reality, they have tons of different options! They could learn to play the violin, beatbox, or write musicals. Help them explore all the possibilities.
3. List 20 options
Our brains can only hold so much. Putting ideas on paper helps kids lower their anxiety.
Once they list all the obvious solutions, encourage them to keep going!
Your kid will be surprised to see what new options they discover.
4. Identify one-way doors
Jeff Bezos calls irreversible decisions “one-way doors.” Once you go through, you can’t come back.
Ask your kid, which decisions on your list are unchangeable?
Encourage them to modify these options to make them less permanent.
5. Run experiments
We often get stuck going around in circles in our heads. To break this cycle, run an experiment!
Ask kids: how can we try out one of the options? They’ll gain a fresh perspective from real-world data.
6. Let kids make mistakes
It’s tempting to always protect kids, but they need the chance to learn from bad choices.
After all, the best way to avoid catastrophic failure as an adult is to make lots of small failures as a kid.
I explore ideas like this in Fab Fridays, my newsletter on childhood education with a twist + new ways to learn.
Subscribe below!