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Making decisions

We make between 20,000 and 35,000 decisions a day!

What we decide shapes and influences our experiences, our personality, the people around us, the opportunities in life. So, we are the result of our decisions!


How or where do we make decisions?

No, the answer is not as simple as you would think. Decisions are mostly not made rationally with our mind. Decisions arise in our body, from our physiological state.

Whether you have to decide on a 5-year strategy, or the selection of employees, the next investment, the private move, the next career step, job change, family issues....

The basis for all these decisions is security and connectedness - a biological survival imperative. And this is also where our body and primarily our nervous system comes into play, because we always perceive the world first through our senses, which are linked to our nervous system (for the specific background on this, see my blog articles below). The sensory input is interpreted and "labeled" (as “safe” or “unsafe”) by our brain as - I like to call it - an information management and recognition machine. This ultimately influences how we behave (from a perspective of safety and confidence in life or just from a protective mechanism), how we interact with others, and ultimately what we decide to do.


Thus, sensory-based sensation is the origin of subsequent understanding. About 60% of the fibers of the parasympathetic nervous system (part of the nervous system responsible for relaxation and regeneration) are sensory, relaying sensory information from the viscera to our brain stem. Only about 40% of them are motor and send action information the other way around, from the brainstem to our body.

So, in anatomical terms we "feel first and then think". This is what we unconsciously do all the time. From the biological point of view this means that our famous gut feeling has not only a colloquial meaning. It has a much stronger influence on our physiological and psychological state than our consciousness.


It therefore makes sense to consciously and increasingly include the parts of the body below the head in our decisions.

In order to support decision-making processes, it is essential that we focus not only on numbers, data and facts, but especially on the body.


We unconsciously think and act mainly in a binary way reduced to two states (yes/no, black/white...). But the human being is not a power switch with on and off function. We have the ability to get out of this dualistic view and to see and experience a colorful bouquet of possibilities through consciousness work.


Our stone-age survival mechanism, which switches to fight/flight/fright mode in uncertain situations, is also organized in a binary way to protect us. But often this state of our nervous system does not help us but proves to be a hindrance. However, we can teach our body and nervous system to react differently to triggers and thus influence the subsequent reaction.


Successful decision makers learn to overcome the inertia of human thinking, connect with their body and interpret its signals. This is Authentic and Conscious Leadership.

Anatomy of Leadership is therefore also about creating awareness through bodywork and making it possible to experience how the conflict between ratio and emotio takes place at the body level, and accordingly develop one's own new strategies for decision-making.


You can find more about bodywork here.

Explore the concept on Anatomy of Leadership in more detail on this page.


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Video Concept: Katina Kamke

Video by Martin Stonard (thefilmcreative.com)

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