How to make better business decisions (as a coach or entrepreneur)

Today, we are discussing how we can make probably the best decisions in business - or in any aspect of our lives - using a value scoring method.

I hope that after reading this, you can make some of the best decisions in your life or business which align with your values. Before we start, I would like to share that I have a done-for-you Discover Your Purpose workbook which you can share with your clients and your community. I will put the link in the description box.

You can sell this workbook in your shop, you can use the exercises during coaching sessions or even create your own course using the exercises in this done-for-you workbook. It saves you so much time especially because we all know it takes so much energy to research, write and design a workbook from scratch.

And I write my materials using my counselling experience, so the exercises have more depth than an AI generated workbook. You can save your time and go enjoy your life or spend more time coaching your clients - whatever rocks your boat. And also feel free to like or rate this episode if you like it!

Anyway, back to the topic at hand!

If you gravitate towards this blog post, I am going to make a safe guess that you may be at a crossroads, you may be confused whether to pursue another business idea or add a new offering, whether to expand your niche or maybe you are debating whether you should take a break from your business.

When you are confused about a decision, you may have resorted to surfing through forums like Reddit, asking other people for their input and advice, reading books and blog posts to help you make decisions.

Or if you are more spiritual, you may have also done meditation practices or other practices which allow you to touch on your intuition or other things like automatic writing or other esoteric practices to get your answers. If you are an overthinker, it is not new for you to go through all sorts of methods to get answers to your questions and help you make decisions.

I love all these methods but you may want a more grounded method to make better decisions regarding your business.

Listening to other people’s opinions may not be the best move, considering that everyone has their own set of beliefs which they may project on you.

It is alright to keep an open mind when listening to advice from others, but you also have to have a firm grip on your own values and preferences if you want to make decisions which truly make you happy.

What about the traditional ‘Pros and cons’ list?

I’m going to guess that we all have written a ‘pros and cons’ list before. It is a very logical way of making decisions. One thing to take note of: it does not take into account of what makes you happy.

Just because Decision A has 5 pros and 1con does not automatically mean that it’s a good decision. Especially if that one ‘con’ makes you dread that decision very much. So what is arguably one of the best ways to make a decision?

I’ll share the 3-step method with you now. I call it the Value Scoring Method.

Step 1 of how to make better business decisions : Correctly identify your genuine core values.

I am going to emphasise the word ‘genuine’ here. For example, if you are someone who values ‘wealth’, you may feel the need to not admit it to yourself because society in general does associate wealth with greed and other negative things.

One of my top values in life is ‘fun’ and I used to find it difficult to admit that because fun is seen as frivolous and a ‘useless’ value.

But after going through my counselling trainings in the past (I used to work as a counsellor), we learnt that fun is a very important human need. As much as fun, beauty and entertainment get a lot of flak as being ‘unimportant’ in society, these elements raise the frequency of the planet. And happy individuals are loving, kind and compassionate.

Anyway, for this step, I want you to be as honest as possible with yourself.

If you find it uncomfortable to admit that one particular value is valueable to you, you may need to do some shadow work surrounding it. So, I am going to need you to be authentic and genuine in this exercise.

You can set a timer for 5 minutes on your phone and write down as many of your core values as possible. You can do a quick Google search for suggestions if you wish.

If you need a convenient suggested list of values, this can help:

Freedom, fun, ambition, fairness, family, excellence, honesty, authenticity, belonging, sense of community, courage, creativity, efficiency, generosity, health, harmony, integrity, kindness, love, loyalty, recognition, responsibility, discipline, wealth, human connection, security, friendship, peace, consistency, diligence, simplicity, alturism, inner peace,

At the end of 5 minutes, you may have 10, 20 or 30 values listed - the more, the better.

Step 2 of how to make better business decisions : Narrow down and choose your top 5 values

You can look at the list of values you have written, I want you to choose and circle 5 of your topmost values. Again, let’s bear in mind to be honest and authentic with ourselves. This should be a straightforward exercise. Give yourself some time to choose 5 values which mean the most to you.

Step 3 of how to make better business decisions : Write the decisions you are confused about on a piece of paper and give them a score from 0 to 5

I will explain this further. If you are confused between two decisions, write both decisions down. If you are confused about 3 decisions, write them down. What you are going to do next, is to give each decision a score.

If Decision A meets 4 of your 5 topmost values, it gets a score of 4 out of 5. If Decision B meets 2 out of your 5 topmost values, it gets a score of 2 out of 5. I think you get the drift.

So with this step, you will instantly uncover which decision aligns with your values the most. It is, thus, safe to choose the decision which has the highest score.

This Value Scoring Method is a simple way to make better decisions in business if you need a grounded, practical method which also honours your likes and dislikes.

If I want to go deeper into the complexities of decision making, I can do so, but I choose to share a method which is easy and works well.

If you want to share this method with your clients and help them make very good decisions, you can get my done-for-you Discover Your Purpose workbook. This value scoring method is included in that coaching workbook.

If you like my work, you can download a free Discover Your Clients’ Innate Talents coaching tool from my blog. It is a straightforward exercise which helps them to uncover their talents and gifts in a snap.

That is all for today and take care.

Shikah