Decisions have been coming thick and fast in my life recently.

A fortnight ago we decided to sell our lovely family home and move to a house which needs a lot of renovation work.

Last week I had to take a big decision about investing in my fractional business, in the face of rapidly changing circumstances.

Having had a few days to reflect since those big calls, I’ve been thinking a lot once again about how we make decisions at work (this is a favourite topic of mine).

We’re all making more decisions than ever before in a volatile uncertain world that’s changing faster than we can keep up with.

But we’re still using the same faulty decision-making approaches our grandparents might have recognised from more stable times.

Here’s what I’ve noticed after years of working with founders wrestle with this (and reflecting on my own decision-making processes): we’ve got it backwards.

The business world has convinced us that good decisions come from checking our emotions at the door.

Be rational. Be data-driven. Think like a machine, not a human.

I certainly had this drummed into me from my early career days as a graduate trainee. I still remember “value-based management” or VBM being drilled into me (please forgive me, it was 1998 not 2025).

But this approach – this emotional avoidance – is precisely what fuels those 3am regret spirals that we all pretend we don’t have when making the big calls.

And the funny thing is even the most “data-driven” decision makers I know are actually emotional about their methods.

They’re passionate about their spreadsheets, attached to their frameworks, proud of their analytical rigour when making decisions.

But they are also blind to the emotions that are there in their heads, whether we acknowledge them or not.

So why are we fighting them?

Since becoming a coach, I’ve started thinking about emotions differently. They’re no longer inconvenient noise to be filtered out, but just different types of data to be weighed against the spreadsheets.

I now seem them as rich, valuable data about our values, our concerns, our gut instincts – all shaped by years of experience.

When you get that uneasy feeling about a potential hire, even though they tick all the boxes on paper, what’s your emotional system telling you?

When you feel genuinely excited about a new direction, despite the risks, what information is buried in that excitement?

But here’s the crucial bit (and this is where most of us go wrong): we can’t just follow our emotions blindly any more than we can ignore them completely.

When it comes to big decisions, the magic happens when we get good at combining the emotional side with the practical side.

Or in other words: when we make the messiness of being human actually practical.

I’ve been experimenting with this approach in practice myself and increasingly with the founders I work with.

Instead of pretending we’re rational robots, we acknowledge that all decisions are emotional decisions. Then we use simple frameworks to break those decisions into manageable pieces.

The goal isn’t to remove emotions from decision-making. It’s to use them as one input alongside all the others.

To integrate what Daniel Kahneman calls our fast (intuitive) and slow (analytical) thinking systems instead of letting them fight each other.

Here’s what this looks like in practice:

• Acknowledge the emotional component of every decision upfront
• Ask yourself what your gut reaction is telling you about your values and priorities
• Use that emotional data alongside your analytical thinking, not instead of it
• Create simple frameworks that help you process both types of information quickly

Let me share three frameworks I’ve been using with founders that we’ve found actually help in real life:

The head-heart check

Before any significant decision, I ask founders to write down two things: what their head is telling them (the rational analysis) and what their heart is telling them (the emotional response).

If they’re aligned, then we can move forward with confidence.

If they’re not, that’s where the interesting conversation starts:

• What’s the disconnect telling you about the decision?
• What does it mean we need to explore further?
• What does it look like 24 hours later?

The 10-10-10 lens

How will I feel about this decision in 10 minutes, 10 months and 10 years?

This one’s brilliant for cutting through the noise of immediate pressure and getting to what actually matters long-term.

It makes you look at decisions through different lenses.

That often forces new perspectives and enables you to allocate different weights to the emotional and analytic data you have.

The regret minimisation framework

This one comes from Jeff Bezos.

When there’s a big decision, ask yourself: “When I’m 80 which choice am I more likely to regret not making?”.

This one really helped me when making my mind up about buying a new house a couple of weeks ago – when that was never our plan and isn’t great timing for lots of very good reasons.

It helped me see that while there’s a lot of short term (in lifetime terms) hassle from that decision, I’d regret not taking the opportunity that was available to me.

At work it’s often particularly useful for founders wrestling with whether to take risks or play it safe.

If you can get better at combining emotions and data in decision making, it means your decisions can be made with both clarity and confidence.

You’ll feel better at choices that you don’t have to spend months second-guessing. You’ll be able to move faster without sacrificing quality choices.

And in the bigger picture, as automation takes over more routine tasks at work, this kind of integrated human judgment is becoming one of our most valuable skills.

The AI can crunch the numbers, but they can’t feel the weight of responsibility, the excitement of possibility or the wisdom that comes from experience.

I wonder…what decisions are you avoiding right now because they feel too complex or emotionally charged?

How might you approach them differently if you treated your emotions as data rather than obstacles?