People in leadership positions have to make a lot of decisions in extreme uncertainty. Their decisions can have a large impact, when they concern the best strategy for the business, how to address a new market, or simply when they affect a lot of people. Decisions of this kind are hopefully based on good research, but still, in many cases we have to rely on prognostics, i.e. the best guess. So how can we make better decisions?

John Keats, in 1817, coined the term of ‘negative capability’, which later found its way into psychotherapy. It describes the ability to tolerate uncertainty while one is moving into unknown territory, and accepting to feel lost at times. How is it possible to acquire such a competence?

It might be obvious that leaders cannot know it all and don’t always have a solution to any challenge. Many feel responsible to provide solutions, nevertheless. This leads to a high level of stress.

Economist and psychoanalyst David Tuckett, in the TEDx talk he gave in 2016, states that we make decisions according to which narrative we find most convincing. Which means, we follow our gut feeling. It is our so called interoceptive system, which monitors our wellbeing and sends the relevant signals to the brain – from your gut, heart, lungs, skin, and the connective tissue. Like the heart races when there is a lot at stake.

Our body is our social and emotional sense organ. So, one solution to the dilemma is to learn how to be attentive and read the signs of our physical early warning systems.

Hypno-systemic coaching can help to mobilize more resources by granting access to the subconscious. Because of any 11 million bits of information that our brain processes per second, only 40 bits make it into our consciousness. Should we ignore all this data? Getting access to this knowledge helps strengthen intuition – the condensed result of former experiences and patterns that we recognize – and thus give a solid base for good decision making.

What the body offers in terms of perception and evaluation is an immense source of information. It can provide an invaluable tool for making better decisions and reduce stress in high-performance jobs.