How Do We Make Decisions?

David Bayer's YouTube video about the content of a book by Florence Scovel Shinn, 'Your Word Is Your Wand', reveals why the words you repeatedly speak may be the single most overlooked tool for reshaping your identity and your results.

We talk ourselves out of things long before we decide which is sometimes why we miss opportunities. Most of the opportunities I've watched business owners walk away from were never really made through rational discussion.

There was no meeting, no weighing up of the options, no moment where anybody sat down and concluded that the answer was no.

It was slower than that, and a lot quieter. A remark on a Tuesday about the timing not being right. A comment a few weeks later that we'd tried something like it before and it hadn't come to much. A half-joke over coffee about not being the sort of business that does clever marketing.

By the time it came up properly, there was nothing left to talk about. The decision had already been made, in the gaps between everything else.

I've been chewing this over since listening to a talk about Florence Scovel Shinn's Your Word Is Your Wand, which she wrote back in 1928.

But the middle of the David Bayer's video has stayed with me, because it is something I've watched for almost 50 years without ever quite naming it. The running conversation we have with ourselves, in the car, between calls, on a Friday when the week has gone sideways, isn't a report on our resolve. It's the thing that builds it or wears it away.

When somebody else tells you your idea won't work, it has to get past you first. You weigh them up. What do they actually know about your market, have they ever run anything themselves, is there something in this for them. You might take it on board and you might not, but there's a process.

However, when you say it to yourself, there's no process at all, because you're the one saying it. You don't cross-examine your own throwaway lines. You file them and move on, and believe what you tell yourself as true.

You don't cross-examine your own throwaway lines.

Trevor Moawad spent years as a mental conditioning coach to elite sportspeople in the US. He was blunt about not being in the positive thinking business, which he thought tended to fall apart under pressure. He reckoned the negative counts for considerably more than the positive. Watch how often people's comments default to negative.

You start spotting the business version of this everywhere once you're looking for it. I've sat with owners who've told me, absolutely certain, that their clients are very price sensitive. Ask them when they last put their prices up and it turns out they haven't, in some cases for years, because their clients are very price sensitive. Nobody ever tested it. It became true by being said. The same thing happens with follow-up, where "I don't want to be a pest" has quietly cost more than any competitor ever managed. And with referrals, where "I'm no good at asking" gets repeated until it sounds like a personality trait rather than what it really is, which is a habit nobody has ever checked. These aren't people short of ambition. They've talked themselves out of things so gradually that it never felt like a decision at all.

Nobody ever tested it. It became true by being said.

It runs the other way too, though we tend to call that confidence and leave it at that. The owners who actually get things done talk about them as if they're already happening. Not "I'm thinking about launching something," but how it will work, who it's for, what the first month looks like. The language is practical rather than hopeful, and it turns up well before there's any evidence to justify it. I used to put that down to personality.

I now think it's closer to a habit, a default bit of self talk that is not serving us at all.

I catch myself at this as much as anyone. "No time this week" is mine, and I've said it often enough that it's stopped describing my diary and started describing me.

The question is this. Are we really in control of the decisions we make or are they the sum of a hundred small remarks made over months, when nobody, including us, was really listening. Which means the conversation that decides most of what we do isn't the one we're preparing for next week.

It's the one we've been having with ourself all along.