Trust Your Gut, And The Facts

Entrepreneurs constantly face difficult decisions that could impact their company and everyone in it. Sometimes there is no easy way to make those kinds of decisions, but the best way to handle things is to make decisions based on your gut feeling and a few facts.

Your gut feeling is that indescribable predilection toward one decision or another that you can’t put into words. If there’s nothing factually incorrect about a potential employee, but the person makes you feel funny, or puts you off, for instance, then that’s a gut feeling. That gut feeling is instinctual, and could indicate that the person isn’t a good fit for your company’s moral or ethical positions. These types of gut feelings can be useful for business owners. They’re often based on past experiences that you can’t put into words, and are thus relevant tools in the decision making process.

That doesn’t mean gut feelings should be the only thing you use to make decisions, though. You should also try to align your gut feelings with the facts. The facts include things like resumes, statistics, numbers, and other tangible pieces of evidence that you can use to determine if the decision you’re making is the right one. Choosing to reject a potential employee because they don’t have enough experience would be a factual decision. Entrepreneurs need to use facts every day, and they must be an essential part of decision making.

Putting both facts and gut feelings together is better than using only one or the other. If something works according to the facts, but your gut instinct tells you differently, then you should dig a little deeper into the facts before making your decision, and vice versa.

Both gut feelings and facts are tools that entrepreneurs must use to make decisions. The best decisions any entrepreneur will make are when their gut feeling is the same as what the facts say, so do your research and listen to your instincts at the same time.