 Dear students, I welcome you in the course of Leadership, Emotional Intelligence and Decision Making. This is module number 36 and we are going to talk about making better decions. When we talk about making better decions, remember that mindfulness is a very important phenomena and through mindfulness we will be better able to decide in given circumstances in challenging situations. So therefore, as you may know that there is a decision making process that we have to go through. First of all, there would be a situation, a situation which is calling us to decide for certain phenomena. Now our decision would be based upon our decision criteria. We have to decide what we have to decide and through which we will make our decision and obviously what are our variables, what are our constructs, what parameters we have to use. So these are all would be decided in decision criteria. Second aspect would be that we have to generate different alternatives. Different we have decisions that can be made to solve a problem which will generate some of the results for us. So for a problem, when we are making a decision, we have a list of alternatives that can be available and among those alternatives, we have to pick the optimum choice, the best possible choice because we will be able to achieve our best results from that. So we will evaluate the alternatives and we have chosen the optimum result among those. Now the optimum result, when we have selected it, that has to be executed. Then we will implement it and from that implementation we will be getting a certain performance level. So we will be getting the results, those results can be either in financial nature or they can be in strategic concern or they can be in operational concern. So the results we have achieved based upon our problem, obviously we will compare it with our situation, our problem and we will see whether our problem has been solved or not. If our problem is solved, then we will re-energize this whole system. If we are not able to achieve desired results, then we have to come up with re-engineering. We will have to take some changes, we may have to evaluate our alternatives again, we may have to change the decision criteria, we may have to look at our implementation and see what we have added and what our desired results did not achieve. Now this whole phenomenon, which is a typical decision making process, it requires our mindful attention. Now with mindful attention, no doubt there is another thing working, which is our intuition. Intuition, which is our sixth sense, our gut feeling, it has a lot of commitment and it is necessary. Because our intuition often shows us the points that are not part of our analysis. So most of the people, whoever are coming up with the decision making, they all agree that it is very important to have intuition along with systematic analysis. And we should never ignore the importance of intuition. Particularly when there is more environmental uncertainty, we have to rely more on intuition. At the same time, we have to use our rationality. Our logic, our reasons, our matters, our analysis, what they are and what they are guiding us. In the light of our rationality and in the light of our intuition, we come up with a mindful decision. Now when we are coming up with mindful decisions, remember that mindfulness would carry certain characteristics and those characteristics would include number one, our working memory capacity. And when we talk about working memory capacity, so no doubt we are focusing upon those phenomena, which in any given situation guide or train us how to adopt our rationality, how to operate on a conscious level and where we have to emotionally and cognitively control ourselves. Secondly, we have to see that superior decision making sometimes requires risk-taking. And that risk is basically indicating to us what is the right decision for us at the right time. And that risk is also indicating to us that we should take precautionary measures about what things. In what aspects we need to have feed-forward controls. What are our prerequisites? So we get all these things through our risk analysis. Another important thing is that sometimes problems are not that simple. We have more environmental uncertainty and complexity and in that environmental uncertainty and complexity, our problem area can also have many variables, conditions, constraints. We have to face different challenges. So we have to be mindful. We have to be conscious. We have to be careful. We have to be calculated so that we can do our decision correctly. The fourth most important phenomena when we talk about mindfulness in decision making is basically emotional regulation process. And this emotional regulation, we have to use our emotional intelligence. We have to see when, where and how we have to react. And how we have to control our reactions. If we conclude all this, then remember that in the decision making process, no doubt we need to have rationality, but we also need to focus upon our intuition. And we have to remain mindful so that our conscious mind can guide us when to make a decision so that we can achieve the best results possible. Thank you.