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Successful Decision-Making

Welcome to Successful Decision Making, an e-booklet in ‘The

HeartMath® Empowerment Series.

All material contained in this document is copyrighted by HeartMath

LLC and any unauthorized use is strictly prohibited.

Our intention in presenting this aspect of HeartMath’s material is to

share practical information and useful techniques with people who are
looking for a more satisfying and fulfilling life experience.

We appreciate and support your interest in the HeartMath System, and

in learning how to use your own heart’s intelligence as an efficient
source of intuition and answers to apply to all areas of your life.

For additional e-booklets or to learn more about HeartMath:

Please call toll free (800) 711-6221

- Or write to [Institute of HeartMath, 14700 West Park Ave.,

Boulder Creek California 95006]
- Or, for an immediate overview of HeartMath, visit us online at:
www.heartmath.org

HeartMath and Freeze-Frame are registered trademarks of Institute of HeartMath. Freeze-

Framer and Quick Coherence are registered trademarks of Quantum Intech, Inc. emWave and

Personal Stress Reliever are trademarks of Quantum Intech, Inc.

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Successful Decision-Making
In this e-booklet, we’re going to explore how you can consistently
make better decisions by using the power of the heart to increase your
intelligence capacity. You’ll learn that your emotions, as well as your
mind, influence your decision-making capability. You’ll learn how to
use simple HeartMath® techniques to help align mind, emotions and
heart to make decisions, large and small, with more confidence and far
more satisfying results.

The dictionary describes a decision as “the act of reaching a conclusion

or making up one’s mind.” According to new scientific research, this is
only part of the story. One of the most intriguing findings in recent
research is that one’s feelings are involved in the process of making
decisions as much as, or even more than, one’s mind. A highly
successful real estate entrepreneur summed this up when she casually
said in an interview, “I’m like everyone else. I decide what to buy with
my heart, and then I use my head to rationalize the decision.” What
she was describing was the feeling-quality she relies on to make her
buying decisions; she clearly engages her emotions as well as her
mind in the decision-making process, and puts her heart into it.

Part I: Making Decisions

We are all decision-makers, making a staggering number of big and
small decisions each and every day. In today’s fast-moving,
stimulation-drenched, complex world, we are faced with numerous
decisions to make daily. Each decision, whether large or small,
requires us to consider options and make choices, often at breakneck
speed. Although our ability to choose is perhaps the greatest gift of

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being human, the pace of life and magnitude of change today can
sometimes make us feel that all this “choice” is too much of a good
thing. Sometimes, having to make so many decisions leaves us
feeling overwhelmed and uncertain.

So, with decision-making often a stressful activity, and the speed and
complexity of life adding to our stress, it’s no surprise that we can find
ourselves feeling confused, irritable, or even indifferent in face of all
the decisions begging for our attention. There can be times when it
feels easier just not to decide… to let things work out however they
will. Well, sometimes deciding not to decide is perfectly appropriate –
but there it is again: that’s a decision, too! What you’re about to learn
is a simple and hopeful approach to effective decision-making.

Although common belief is that we make decisions with the mind,

there is growing recognition that IQ—which measures primarily mental
intelligence capacity—is not the most accurate predictor of real
intelligence, let alone success in life. IQ doesn’t measure street
smarts, creativity, or emotional sensitivity. And these are all important
qualities needed for effective decision-making. Our emotions, in
particular, are far more influential in our decision-making process than
many people realize. Our unmanaged emotions can propel a decision
we later regret, while calm intuitive feeling can guide us to make the
right choice.

Science tells us that the human body is an incredible system

comprised of roughly 7 trillion cells. This system orchestrates a mind-
boggling level of physical and biochemical coordination–the kind of

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coordination that’s necessary to enter a command into the computer,
cough, or drive a car. When you consider how little you have to think
about such things, it seems even more incredible. When was the last
time you reminded your heart to beat, your lungs to expand and
contract, or your digestive organs to secrete just the right chemicals at
just the right time? These and a myriad of other processes are handled
unconsciously for us every moment we live.

Intelligence manages the whole system, much of it without our

conscious awareness. But what is becoming increasingly apparent is
that these system processes are profoundly affected by what we
consciously do: what we think, what we feel, and how we react.
Research is now clear that the inability to emotionally manage oneself
leads to premature aging, diminished mental clarity, and even blocks
access to intuitive intelligence.

The good news is that as we learn to increase what researchers call

our internal or emotional coherence, this leads to more efficiency in all
our physiological systems, as well as greater creativity and
adaptability. All these qualities are important in high-speed decision-
making activities we engage in day in and day out. In short, we can
make better decisions when we’re more coherent.

Think about it. When your system is stressed and unmanaged, you
can’t think as clearly. But when your mind, body and emotions are
functioning coherently, you see a bigger picture and gain more clarity.

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Remember the last bad decision you made, or that someone close to
you made. Did mismanaged emotions play a part? Did you or someone
else overreact, or strongly influence the decision based on emotions?
Chances are that was the case. We’ve all done it. Generally it doesn’t
mean the end of the world—but it can certainly make for messes to
clean up and new decisions to be made to improve a situation gone
south.

Now, remember the last good decision you made. What were the
circumstances and what were you feeling at the time? It’s highly likely
that you were feeling balanced and positive, and were able to view the
situation from a place of ease and well-being. Or even if the situation
was a tense or stressful one, you probably managed your emotions
and found a zone of clarity that made the decision easier.

You can see how our emotional state is critical to making successful
decisions. It is often emotion, not intellect, that is the fuel that drives
the engine of decision-making, whether in personal life or in business.
Intellect may provide the direction, but emotion is the fuel. If the fuel
being used is not high octane, but more like kerosene, we can burn
through a decision-making process with low quality results. This is
often what occurs when in the grip of unmanaged emotion, perhaps
due to being irritable, or feeling pressured and anxious.

When we’re balanced and coherent, our minds become far more
effective, sharp, and clear. It boils down to this: when we’re stressed,
we lose our emotional balance and are prone to making poor
decisions. When we’re emotionally coherent and balanced, we’re

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poised to make better decisions that will help serve us and everyone
concerned.

Part II: Creating Emotional Balance

Why do you suppose people get flashes of insight while in the shower,
or while walking on the beach or hiking in the mountains? How do we
learn to get insights more often? A good place to begin is by
understanding that when we have those heart talks with ourselves, our
mind and emotions get more aligned with the heart. Our heart-brain
communication improves, and this helps create the emotional balance
needed for intuitive insight.

Talking about the heart in this context could seem unusual; but
discoveries over the past twenty years have revealed that within each
of us there exists an organizing and central intelligence that can lift us
beyond our problems and into a new experience of balance and
insight. This line of investigation has been conducted here at the
research center at HeartMath for well over a decade. We call it heart
intelligence. Heart intelligence is the intelligent flow of awareness and
insight we experience, once the mind and emotions are brought into
balance and coherence, through a self-initiated process. Heart
intelligence embraces and fosters both mental and emotional
intelligence.

Here’s how it works. The heart is far more than a blood pump. It
actually sends powerful healing commands to the brain and the rest of
the body. It has a very complex nervous system which processes
information every moment we’re alive—information the brain needs to

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do its job. The heart also produces important hormones that affect the
brain and rest of the body. The electrical energy the heart generates—
commonly measured as our ECG—actually permeates every cell in the
body, and is, amazingly, around fifty times stronger than the electrical
signal generated within the brain. When we learn to harness the
heart’s power, we can create a highly ordered state scientists call
coherence and, when we do, we activate the heart’s intelligence. This
coherent alignment of heart and mind gives us a much greater ability
to manage our emotions and ignites the higher centers in our brain, all
of which gives us the ability to gain insight and make better decisions
more easily.

Let me share a simple technique that creates coherence and offers

access to the heart’s intelligence. This technique uses the power of
the heart to balance your thoughts and emotions in a hurry. It’s called
the Quick Coherence® technique. The Quick Coherence technique
helps you to achieve a neutral, poised state which is essential for good
decision making.

Quick Coherence is comprised of three steps:

- Heart Focus
- Heart Breathing
- Heart Feeling

We’ll take you through these steps and then you’ll apply the Quick
Coherence technique to a current decision you want to make. Ready?

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Step One is Heart Focus. Focus your attention on the area around
your heart, the area in the center of your chest. Place your hand there
if you’d like, to help keep your attention in the heart area.

Step Two is Heart Breathing. Breathe deeply but normally and feel as
if your breath is coming in and going out through your heart area. As
you inhale, feel as if your breath is flowing in through the heart and as
you exhale feel it leaving through this area. Counting slowly to five or
six as you inhale, and slowly to five or six as you exhale can help you
gain a deeper, healthier rhythm. Continue to breathe with ease until
you find a natural inner rhythm that feels good to you.

Step Three is the most important step. It’s called Heart Feeling. While
maintaining your heart focus and heart breathing activate a positive
feeling. One of the easiest ways to generate a positive, heart-based
feeling is to remember a special place, the love you feel for a close
friend or family member, or maybe a treasured pet. It can be anything
that feels good to you. Hold that feeling for about 20 seconds. It’s that
easy. Just practice the three steps—heart focus, heart breathing and
heart feeling.

Now, what do you observe from your first experience of the Quick
Coherence technique? You likely feel a little calmer, more at ease, and
perhaps more in sync with life. What this technique helps you to do is
to create synchronization in your nervous system which improves
heart-brain communication. You become more coherent, which also
adds the benefit of impacting your hormonal system in a positive way.

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Just doing this simple technique opens the brain up so you can
experience more mental clarity.

The Quick Coherence technique is useful in activating the heart’s

intelligence, offering you a quick boost of clarity needed for effective
decision making. You can use it any time you need to bring your
system into balance and make a decision. It’s especially useful in
making those continual small decisions that come up throughout the
day. We’ll explain and then do the technique again.

Small decisions might not seem that important, yet we know inside
that our choices do make a difference. How and what we decide
moment-to-moment affects the overall quality of our day. As we go
through the following examples of small decisions, try to notice how
the emotional coloring they have for you. What typical feelings do you
experience while in the process of making decisions like these?

- Should I share this information in an email or should I call a brief

meeting to explain it?
- Will we go out to eat tonight, or should I stop at the store and
fix something at home?
- Would it be better to answer my email now, make a phone call
or work on that project?

Small decisions can stack up in a hurry, and often whirl around in our
minds, sapping our energy and detracting from our sense of well-being
in the moment. Small decisions might not seem that critical at the
time, but they take up “head room” and emotional processing while we

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defer making the decisions, even when we think we’re not thinking
about them. Or we can find ourselves falling into habitual modes of
deciding, and just do what’s easiest—but not necessarily the most
pleasing or effective.

What are some of the small decisions you need to make today? These
might be things you decide on every day, things relating to upcoming
events, or planning what to do for the weekend. Pick a small decision
you need to make right now. Write it down if you can.

Now, take a minute and use the Quick Coherence technique to make
this small decision. Start with Heart Focus. Just focus your attention
on the area around your heart, the area in the center of your chest.
Now, start your Heart Breathing. Breathe deeply but normally, and as
you do, feel as if your breath is coming in and going out through your
heart area. Count silently to five or six as you inhale and exhale. Lastly
go to the Heart Feeling step. While maintaining your heart focus and
heart breathing, activate a positive feeling like the care or appreciation
you have for someone or something in your life.

Good. Now that you’ve brought your system, mentally, emotionally

and physically into a greater state of coherence, go ahead and make
your decision. Write down what you’ve decided.

By using these three steps you are placing yourself in a better position
to cut through those little decisions effectively. Hopefully, you’ve
begun to see how doing a simple technique to engage the power and
intelligence of the heart can bring more “quick coherence” to your

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decision-making process. It only takes a minute to do the Quick
Coherence technique, but this one minute can save a lot of energy,
while helping you to make a better decision.

Part III: The Freeze-Frame® Technique

Now some decisions are quite complex, have larger implications, are
more emotionally charged, or are just plain harder to make. We
usually consider these to be “Big Decisions”. Big decisions take focus,
intelligence, and ideally some intuitive clarity to reach. In many cases,
when we don’t feel up to facing them, we put them off till “next week,”
“until I have more information,” or simply, till “later.” Again, you’ll
notice the part emotions play in that process. After a while, the stress
of indecision, whether the decision is personal or professional, can
mount up. We feel uneasy, experiencing a low-grade anxiety that runs
as an undercurrent, whether we are conscious of it or not. We don’t
feel our best, but may not realize why. Or maybe we do know there’s
something major hanging over our heads, but just can’t seem to make
ourselves deal with it.

Let’s look at some examples of big decisions. For instance:

- What should I do about health insurance now that I’m self-
employed?
- How can we budget our monthly income so we’re saving for the
kids’ education or for our retirement every month?
- Since I seem to have topped out on my job potential here,
should I start looking for a new job?

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 - I know my teenage son’s grades are slipping and we hardly ever
talk these days. I wonder what I should do, where to turn for
help?
- I’ve got an opportunity for a better position with my company if
I’m willing to relocate, but that means moving the family. What
should we do?

In order to deal with more complex decisions, we’d like to introduce

you to the Freeze-Frame Technique. This technique is similar to Quick
Coherence but it takes the usefulness of coherence a step further. It’s
taught in most HeartMath training programs conducted in Fortune 100
companies, health care organizations and school systems. It’s a multi-
purpose technique useful for reducing stress, overcoming emotional
chaos, increasing performance and, yes, improving decision making.

We’ll share this technique with you now, while you apply it to making a
decision. First, write down or mentally identify what it is you’d like to
make a decision about—the situation or issue that needs clarity. Next
write down or mentally review what you’ve been thinking about this
decision and how you’ve been feeling about it. What conclusions have
you come to so far? How do these conclusions feel?

Now that you have identified what you are working on and where you
are currently at with it, let’s walk through each step of the Freeze-
Frame technique. It’s a five step process.

Step 1. Take a time-out so that you can temporarily disengage from

your thoughts and feelings, especially stressful ones about a decision

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you need to make. (Stop to admit how you’re thinking, feeling and
reacting, then put it all on pause.)

Step 2. Shift your focus to the area around your heart. Now feel your
breath coming in through your heart and going out through your solar
plexus (the area just below your sternum). Practice breathing this way
a few times to ease into the technique.

Step 3. Make a sincere effort to activate a positive feeling. Allow

yourself to feel genuine appreciation or care for some person, place, or
thing in your life

Step 4. Now, ask yourself what would be an efficient, effective

attitude or action that would balance your system, help release stress
and offer clarity about the decision you are trying to make.

Step 5. Quietly sense any change in perception or feeling, and sustain

it as long as you can. Heart perceptions are often subtle. They gently
suggest effective solutions that would be best for you and all
concerned.

Now write down or mentally review any new insights you may have
gained about your decision. Don’t look too hard; just see what comes
to you easily.

Lastly, compare what you felt about the decision before and after
doing the Freeze-Frame technique. See what new clarity you’ve gained
from the exercise.

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Good work! Hopefully you’ve gotten a better sense of what the
decision needs to be. You may not have a crystal clear answer but
perhaps you feel calmer and less stressed about this decision. If you
didn’t get more clarity, or you’re unsure of what your heart is saying,
go through the steps again. Just shift your attention to the area of the
heart, breathe in through the heart and out through the solar plexus,
activate a positive feeling, ask yourself what would be an efficient,
effective attitude or action that would give you more clarity about your
decision and then sense any changes in perception or feeling.

You may have to do this a few times before you have a sense of
intuitive knowing. On decisions that have a lot of emotional weight,
you may not get clarity right away. Be patient. Try to keep your
thoughts and feelings under control, while you genuinely ask your
heart intelligence for a larger view. As I mentioned earlier, some of
our big decisions are complex and hard to make. Keep using the
Freeze-Frame technique and take it a step at a time. Greater clarity
will come with sincere practice.

You now have two new techniques for improving decision making—
Quick Coherence and Freeze-Frame. They are effective because, in
essence, they both create a window of opportunity so that you can
access your intuitive intelligence. These techniques use the electrical
and biochemical dynamics of the heart to increase synchronization and
perception in the brain. This gives you the opportunity to experience
your own higher intelligence—useful for efficient decision-making
about the big and small things in life.

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As with all new skills, with regular application you’ll get better at using
Quick Coherence and Freeze-Frame for decision-making. Be sure to
have patience with yourself as you go. It’s not about doing it perfectly
the first time, or any time. It’s about practicing sincerely and putting
your heart into it.

Now for a recommendation: Make a commitment to yourself that you’ll

practice the Quick Coherence technique at least five times over the
course of the next couple of days and do one Freeze-Frame exercise
on an important decision. Once you start practicing, it will become
easier and more automatic, like riding a bike. So, if you really want to
improve your decision-making skill, take the next month and practice
Quick Coherence at least five times a day. This can be when you first
get up in the morning, while you’re commuting to work, before phone
calls, before meetings, during phone calls or meetings, while you’re
walking to your next meeting or appointment, while driving home or
before bed. Since the technique takes less than thirty seconds to do,
there are literally dozens of times a day you could practice. You’ll feel
better each time you do it. And practice the Freeze-Frame technique at
least three times a week. With the number of decisions you’re going to
be making anyway, why not get your heart involved in at least some
of them? You’ve got nothing to lose and everything to gain. Making
decisions can be invigorating and self-empowering, especially when
you’ve got your mind, emotions, and heart all working together for the
best results.

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Next Steps
Learning how to make more effective decisions is a skill to be
cultivated. At HeartMath we understand the importance of developing
this skill and have created other offerings that can help you make
better decisions and more intuitive decisions.

There are two books in the HeartMath System we’d like to

recommend. Freeze-Frame by Doc Childre is a great book dedicated to
in-depth exploration of the Freeze-Frame technique— the research
behind it, why it works and various applications. Another book, From
Chaos to Coherence, by Doc Childre and Bruce Cryer presents
HeartMath’s business model for improving individual and
organizational decision-making and performance. Both of these books
are valuable resources for learning how to make heart-intelligent
decisions.

In this e-booklet you were introduced to understanding the importance

of heart-brain communication. To learn more about the in-depth
research on this topic, we recommend the e-booklet The Coherent
Heart, by HeartMath researchers Dr. Rollin McCraty, Mike Atkinson,
Dana Tomasino and Dr. Raymond Bradley. HeartMath has doing
research in this field for many years and developed technology that
improves this internal heart-brain communication process.

Our technology products, emWave2® handheld unit with computer

interface and the emWave Desktop are also very useful for clearing the
blocks to intuition. They utilize a patented process that guides users to
create more internal coherence, a highly synchronized and
regenerative state. Both the emWave2 mobile device with computer

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interface and the emWave Desktop work on PC and Mac computers.
Using either of these powerful tools along with any of the HeartMath
techniques can provide a calming yet energizing effect that can help
offset symptoms of stress such as anger, fatigue, sleeplessness,
anxiety, etc. and also train you in how to shift into uplifting emotions.

Regular use of the emWave2 or emWave Desktop will build your

coherence power and help you in making decisions big or small.

Lastly, the Coherence Coach™ is an interactive software application

you can download to your computer. It takes you through the steps of
the Quick Coherence™ technique, provides a breathing pacer to help
with heart focused breathing and then offers five different visual
images to help with finding and sustaining a coherent heart feeling.
This is a great tool you can use to master the Quick Coherence
technique (Coherence Coach is included with all emWave products).

To learn more about tools, techniques, resources and training

programs that can help you improve your decision making skills and
cultivate a state of coherence and emotional balance, please visit our
web site at www.heartmath.org or call us toll free at (800) 711-6221.

Enjoy and take care!

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