We’re self preserving. Most of us would never intentionally push someone else down to get where we want to go. The key word here is “intentionally,” because intention involves thought. When we’re triggered and not thinking, our desire to protect ourselves first takes over. When layoffs loom at a company, otherwise decent people will quickly throw each other under the bus to keep a job. Sure, they wouldn’t consciously want to hurt their colleagues, but if it comes down to “them versus me,” they will ensure they come out on top. That’s biology.

Safeguard Strategy 1: Prevention

You can use the principles behind HALT as a safeguard for decision-making in general. If you have an important decision to make, ask yourself: “Am I hungry? Am I angry or otherwise emotional? Am I lonely or otherwise stressed by my circumstances, such as being in an unfamiliar environment or pressed for time? Am I tired, sleep-deprived, or physically fatigued?” If the answer is yes to any of these questions, avoid making the decision if you can. Wait for a more opportune time. Otherwise, your defaults will take over.

It’s easy to underestimate the role ease plays in decision-making. Since behaviour follows the path of least resistance, a surprisingly successful approach is to add friction where you find yourself doing things you don’t want to do.

Safeguard Strategy 4: Putting in Guardrails

Many of us have a hard time learning from our decisions. One reason is that our thinking and decision-making process is often invisible to us. We inadvertently conceal from ourselves the steps we took to reach our final decision. Once that decision gets made, we don’t stop to reflect, but just move forward. And when we look back at our decision later, our ego manipulates our memories. We confuse what we know now with what we knew at the time we made the decision. And we see the outcomes and read them back into our intentions: “Oh, I meant to do that.”

If you don’t check your thinking at the time you made the decision— what you knew, what you thought was important, and how you reasoned about it— you’ll never know whether you made a good decision or just got lucky. If you want to learn from decisions, you need to make the invisible thought process as visible and open to scrutiny as possible. The following safeguard can help:

Safeguard: Keep a record of your thoughts at the time you make the decision.