The Decision Cycle

Outside of my 9-5, I occasionally work with people to help them apply the framework described in this article in their own lives. Contact me for more info!

I do not naturally make good decisions.

The art of decision-making was so interesting to me precisely because I wasn’t good at it. I wanted to understand what was happening in my head that caused me to make the same boneheaded choices over and over again, and I tried everything.

I read up on human behavior, studied cognitive biases, and downloaded seemingly every habit tracker app on the App Store. Annoyingly, everything I read about decision-making talked about how to deal with things that were happening outside my head. Nothing I saw explained how my mind worked to my satisfaction.

I wanted to understand the principles behind how my mind worked. It was like studying a physical organ: by dissecting my own liver, I could understand how everyone else’s liver worked as well. Of course, everyone has their unique experiences and viewpoints, but surely the underlying mechanism powering their decisions was the same.

That’s what prompted my own journey of discovery into decision-making. I read books on mental models, got a Masters degree in Decision-Making, and even spent months in a monastery, largely in solitude, just sitting with my mind. The result is what I’m calling the Decision Cycle.

A decision is the bridge between our inner and outer worlds.

One thing I ended up realizing was that any decision I made reflected what I really wanted and believed, not necessarily what I told myself I wanted or believed. In other words, my inner world would naturally overshadow whatever I wanted my external world to be. If someone says they want to do something but don’t do it, do they really want to do something?

That leads to an interesting conclusion: the only way to reliably make good decisions is to approach them from the inside out. We need to start with understanding how our inner world works because a decision moves from an internal resolution to an external action.

Both internal resolutions and external actions are required for a decision. We can’t actually make a decision without an internal resolution, but equally as important is tangible action. Something has to physically manifest for a decision to have been made - otherwise, it’s just a passing thought. I can decide to go to the gym, but until I head to the gym, it doesn’t actually count as a decision.

The Decision Cycle breaks down how the different parts of our inner world activate when making decisions, as well as how the outer world (the actions of others and the consequences of our own actions) influences our decision-making. In addition, it lays out how what happens in our head is cyclical: we have to continually be aware of what comes into our mind.

We often conflate the word “mind” with our inner world, but they’re separate and distinct entities. Our inner world is the parts of ourselves that other people can’t perceive (unless we reveal them in some way), which includes many things outside what we normally call our “mind”:

• Biases
• Past experiences and memories
• Values and morality
• Sense of self
• Likes and dislikes
• Ability to reason

All of these are found in the main components of the Decision Cycle. These components of our inner world interact in a generally predictable way. Thoughts flow from one stage to another, transformed by each component to ultimately result in the internal basis for a decision. This is the Decision Cycle.

Action

These are the things outside of us that make their way to the shores of our inner world. They’re external triggers; the actions of others or the consequences of our own actions. However, they only affect us if they activate our Identity.

The Identity

Our sense of self. It’s known as our ego and tells us a story about who we are and what we identify with. This is the perceptual filter we have for the world. Maybe the trickiest part of our inner world to pick out.

Impression(s)

A perception of the external world filtered through our Identity. Not exact, but rather a rough sketch of what truly happened that’s been passed through the perceptual filter of our Identity. These impressions, when built over time, form intuitions, biases, and patterns that we look to match what we observe against.

The Emotive Mind

Deals with (you guessed it) emotions. Primarily concerned with two questions: “Do I like this?” and “Do I not like this?” It’s the part of our mind that’s animalistic, that’s primal, that takes over on autopilot when we’re just drifting through the day. It’s correlated to the limbic systems of the brain.

Desires

The answers to the questions of our Emotive Mind. If I like this, then I want it, and if I don’t like it, then I don’t want it. There’s not much nuance here - monkey see, monkey take. Desires are impulsive and primarily concerned with whatever is pleasurable.

The Reflective Mind

When working properly, will consistently ask the question: “What is Good?” Highly logical and correlated to the outer regions of the brain, it uses the filters of “good” that we’ve been taught, contemplated, or socialized into to bring a thought to the front of our mind.

Resolution

The internal basis for a decision. The end result of a stimulus being processed by other parts of the inner world, a resolution is the inner equivalent of whatever action we perform externally.

Sentience

Our general awareness as living beings. If someone is dead or in a coma, then they’re not capable of making decisions. Put another way, it’s the thing that connects all the other components and allows for the ability of self-awareness.

So, how do these components fit together? Stimuli from the outer world trigger our Identity, which results in a particular impression. These impressions are translated by our Emotive Mind into desires, depending on the answers to the questions “Do I like this?” and “Do I dislike this?”. A desire is evaluated on its merits by the Reflective Mind, which weighs the pleasure of a desire against the idea of “What is good?” either altering the desire or keeping it intact to result in a resolution. This resolution is the inner half of our decision, the other half being the action we perform externally.

This is the Decision Cycle that I’ve synthesized from my study over the years. I’ll be writing about this in my next post, breaking down various common decisions people face and how they fit into this cycle. In future posts, I’ll dive into the specifics of each component, compare it to frameworks and models proposed by other thought leaders in the space, and address any comments and critiques.

As always, I would love to hear your thoughts! As I’ve moved to Substack, please engage with me on Substack’s platform, whether that’s through Notes, Comments, or replying to an email.