Nicole Devlin here, once again, Founder and CEO of The Powerhouse Professional Assistant, an executive assistant training course designed to take you from good to great in whatever field of business support or executive assistant work or administrative assistant work, or any other administrative work that you care or desire to work within. What we want is the best for you and for your career, and for you to be doing work that you love.

Today, we're going to talk about skill number seven in this course, which is called The 12 Most Important Skills You Need to Become a Powerhouse Professional Assistant. Skill number seven is Decision-Making.

How do you make decisions? Do you know what's at the basis for the decisions that you make? Generally speaking, what people don't understand is that good decisions are relative, right? Good decisions mean that you are making decisions based on what's important to you. You may have decisions that you have to make either for yourself, at work, for the person that you work for or report to, and you don't quite know how to make them because you're trying to figure out what the results are going to be before you decide what's good or bad. And in fact, that's not the way to do it because you are not in the results business. You're in the making-things-happen business - you're in the business support business.

What you want is to know what's important to you, what's important to the company, and what's important to the person that you might be helping or working for as you're making this decision. That's crucial because good outcomes always come from good decisions and good decisions are those decisions that you make in favor of what's most important, even when it feels uncomfortable or scary. You as an executive assistant - or any type of support person - will handle making a lot of decisions as you move along in a relationship with a CEO or an entrepreneur of a small business because these people are very high level, very responsible for a lot, very direct, and usually very busy. The more that they can delegate decision-making, the better it is for them and the easier they can take care of their other priorities.

Once you've developed a relationship of trust and confidence with the person that you assist, you will have them trusting you to make decisions, not just write a note, not just prioritize or hand something off. They will in fact, allow you to make decisions for them too, which is really, really, really when you're in a position of trust.

When we talk about trust, if you are new to a position or you want to up level your skills, start doing little simple things that can build more trust. Like going the extra mile, doing a little bit more than you were asked to do, making something special, remembering things that they don't remember. Those are great ways to do simple things that will build the trust between you and the person that you work with. That will also enable them to trust you to handle more, which includes making decisions for them.

The last point I'll make when it comes to decision-making - and I alluded to this a little bit when I was referring to the things about good versus bad decisions and knowing what's important to you - in order to make the best decisions, avoid stress like a plague. Avoid anxiety like a plague because there's nothing worse that can create more stress and anxiety than thinking that you have to make a right or perfect decision all the time. You're going to make mistakes, you're going to be able to learn from those mistakes. You want to avoid stress and anxiety because what they do is they create a hamster wheel in your brain that prevents you from understanding the basics of the information that you're looking at. It prevents you from understanding what, in fact, you really do have to do. It is literally just your mind's way of occupying itself and creating fear, so that you're not in action, and so that you're not getting stuff done.

These are just little tips and tricks about decision-making that help to just quiet the mind and help you to continue to make the best decisions. Again, realizing that you're never responsible for the outcome. You can hope that the outcome will be good, but that's never guaranteed. So, this again goes back to confidence in you knowing that mistakes are going to be made and you're not going to do it perfectly. But when you have trust in the relationship with the people that you assist, you will all work it out. Mistakes are going to get made, things are going to happen, and you're just going to have to keep working towards being more productive and helpful with and for the person that you work for.

So, that's all I got on skill number seven, Decision-Making. This is Nicole Devlin. Once again, the CEO and Founder of The Powerhouse Professional Assistant.

The next skill that we'll be talking about is skill number eight, we'll be Organizational Skills. So, we'll see you when you come back to that. Thanks for joining me.