Heart and Mind: Mastering the Art of Decision Making

The price was good for a book I'll never read again after this course. A little roughed up, but still readable.

If you think a book about decision making must be difficult or dry, think again. This book is very readable and well organized, progressing at a comfortable pace, building in complexity as the reader develops further understanding of decision-making tools. When read or reviewed as a guidebook, the reader need progress only as far as necessary to match the complexity of the particular decision at hand. Many interesting and entertaining examples are provided throughout the book.This book lives up to its title, Heart and Mind, by integrating both heart-felt intuition and rational analysis. I find this unique among books on decision-making. Most books focus on analytics, forgetting that human emotions play a critical role in our decisions. Other books refute the benefit of analysis, overly emphasizing intuition (think "Blink"). Both approaches sadly overlook the opportunity for integration, which this book richly provides by showing how to make the most of personal values, intuition, analysis, creativity, numerical rating, courage and follow-through. I highly recommend it.

interesting and helpful.

Book came in great quality.

I really enjoyed this book. It's a really good book, helps out with clarifying where you stand in your problem. And opens up you mind to other solutions.

I think at some level we all know that the quality of our lives depends on the quality of our decisions. Unfortunately most of us have no formal training in how to make better decisions. We might make a list of the alternatives and try to rank the possibilities, but that often falls far short of systematic method for making sound decisions.Barry Anderson, Dan Hahn and Ursina Teuscher, all from the University of Portland, have teamed together to deliver a well structured method for improving the quality of our decisions.According to the authors, there are three key principles to good decision making: Courage to be rational, Creativity and Balanced judgment. The book starts with simple examples and moves to very complex decisions. Along the way, the authors teach us about problem structuring - defining the problem, about values and creating value trees. They then move to generating alternatives. From there they provide guidance on how to properly construct a decision ladder, including fact tables, plus and minus tables, extremes tables and weighted values tables. Finally they introduce the decision tree.While the book is about a systematic approach to making good decisions, the authors point out that good decisions do not guarantee good outcomes. Because decisions are about the future, you can never know for certain if a good decision will result in a good outcome. But under the law of large numbers, if you follow the techniques, you will on balance get more good outcomes from making good decisions.This book would be a great resource for anyone making important decisions. However it will require a fair amount of time to understand and then master the techniques put forth in this book. I think the book is of far greater value to those who are frequently called on to make important decisions or to assist others in making important decisions. This book should be very valuable for coaches, consultants and counselors.The authors all teach at the college level but their writings style is not at all academic. They write in a very conversational style and the book is filled with drawings, illustrations and example tables that help to clarify and explain the concepts.At the end of each chapter is a recap of the points covered in that chapter.If you are involved in helping others make better decisions, this is a book that you will want to keep handy and refer to often. I found plenty of concepts I could put to use immediately in guiding others facing complex decisions.I was provided a review copy of this book.

Sometimes we are confronted with making life decisions and it seems that the more we think about what decision to make, the more complicated it becomes. While I am a firm believer in 'trusting one's gut', it is often helpful to have a balance of decision making techniques in our toolbox to draw from. Most of us are familiar with the process of listing the pros and cons of making a decision. Simply put, if the list of pros is longer, we tend to go with that; alternatively, if the list of cons is longer, we tend to go with that (or at least the list of pros and cons will heavily influence the decision we make). What I love about this book is the variety of scientific based 'rational' techniques that can be applied to the process of decision making. Typically when I find myself confronted with a decision to make, I allow my emotions to heavily influence my final decision. However, I have found we need more than feelings or emotions to influence us in making life decisions. We need a concrete process that puts all of the factors in perspective in a rational way that can be integrated with our feelings and emotions. This book offers just that. I love the process of what is called creating a 'value tree' that the book teaches us to apply while making life decisions. What I learned from this process is the fact that making decisions is not only about the pros, cons, and feelings involved; included in the process must be the 'weight' or 'value' that is placed on the factors involved in making a particular decision. I actually used this process in a simplified form the other day with a client in my office. I am a marriage and family therapist and often work with couples who are in the process of deciding which direction to go in their relationships. While we can list the pros and cons of staying or leaving, and discuss what our 'gut is saying', the decision to stay or leave is isn't only about which side of the pros and cons has the longer list and/or about how we feel; the process of deciding is also about the 'value' placed on the factors listed on either side of the pros and cons as well as our feelings. For example, maybe the list of cons is short relative to the list of pros. Maybe our emotions tell us not to leave the relationship. That being said, a factor on the list of cons may carry enough weight to sway the decision to stay or leave. Integrating the 'value' of the factors involved with the pros, cons, and emotions allowed my client to approach the decision making process in a very different way.The authors of Heart and Mind do a fabulous job of integrating the use of intuition and scientific analysis to the process of decision making. It's important to develop the ability to have 'balance' in the process of 'listening to your gut' and 'rational thought'. Given the analytic nature of the content in Heart and Mind, it could easily be written in a very dry and complex way. However, the authors have found a way to write the content using very user friendly language that applies to all areas of life decisions (e.g. career, relationships, finances, etc.). The authors also provide techniques to visualize the components involved when making life decisions, which I find incredibly helpful. Heart and Mind integrates what I believe are the three most important components in making life decisions: courage, creativity, and balance. I give my very strong recommendation to adding this book to one's repertoire of references to use when applying the process of decision making.Kathy Hardie-Williams, M.Ed, MS, NCC, MFT, LPC