This snippet is from one of our previous episodes: Why Your Financial Habits Aren’t Sticking. 

Ever feel overwhelmed by all the decisions you need to make… especially when it comes to money and property? 

You’re not alone, and there’s a good reason why. 

In this TPC Gold episode, Bryce and Ben unpack how cognitive load (aka the mental strain from juggling too many decisions at once) can quietly sabotage your ability to move forward.  
Whether you’re stuck deciding whether to renovate, upgrade your home, or even just figuring out what step comes next… the real blocker might not be the decision itself, but the weight of all the decisions piling up. 

Feeling Stuck with Too Many Decisions to Make?

Sometimes the smartest move is to get a professional in your corner. Book a free, no-obligation chat with one of our Empower Wealth team members and take the guesswork out of your next steps.

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Transcript

Ben Kingsley
Well, it turns out not too many people are like me, Bryce.  

Bryce Holdaway
Nah. 

Ben Kingsley
Not too many people like to be overwhelmed by spreadsheet after spreadsheet after spreadsheet of numbers. And so what I learned from that is the cognitive load absolutely is a derailer for people to actually take action. Right? That is very true. So I learned that probably in sort of 2012 or 2013, a couple of years into us being able to do the work that we do. So these days, obviously, as much as there’s 230,000 calculations going on in our simulator, 43 variable movements, all the indexation rolling through it, tax scales and all that rolling through it… we just need to make sure that we keep it simple for those people who want a simplified version of that, because that’s going to help them with their decision making. So once they know that that’s fine, you guys are the professionals, you can answer all of those questions that we may have around the sequencing and whether that’s plausible, whether that’s going to work, whether we’re going to break the cashflow bank or whatever it’s going to look like.  

But from my point of view, that cognitive load does play with the decision making. So it’s really important that you try and keep it simple. And then it makes some of the decision making a little easier, because one of the more challenging things that people face is how they think about their big rocks in their jar. How they think about what’s gonna happen. Do we renovate? Do we put a second story on? Or the family’s getting bigger, do we just sell this property and buy another one? Just that thought process enough in itself is like: I don’t know what we’re gonna get for our property. I don’t know what we’re gonna be able to buy. People then just go into this spiral of procrastination and very rarely get along to doing anything.  

We’ve got great neighbours up in one of our Sydney properties and they’ve been sitting on wanting to renovate their property for 15 years. And we still have a fun joke about it. I’ve seen the plans. I know you’ve got the plans ready. They’ve been ready for years. When are you going to take action on actually doing that? And I think it’s because it’s challenging, right? There’s lots of big decisions that need to be made as part of that. So it really is clear, and this is what Bryce was saying at the start of show, there are some derailers. These are some of the bigger ones.  

So if that cognitive load is too heavy… if that decision making is too difficult, just bounce it off a trusted advisor, bounce it off someone who you respect in terms of their knowledge and discipline in that area. Because again, the research shows that when you do that, and then you can clearly then sequentially organize your thoughts and break it down into sub actions and smaller decisions that add up to the bigger decisions, then all of a sudden the stress levels go out of that. And then ultimately, you know you’re able to do that.  

And so that is coming back to the power of tracking that progress as you break down your bigger goals into those smaller goals and you track them… you’ve still got to put timeframes on them. You’ve still got to put, if they’re financial targets, you still must put those targets on there. You’ve got to help. You’ve got to hold yourself accountable. But to the point of breaking it down into sizable pieces that you can then comprehend. And if you then start hitting those smaller milestones… that’s your feedback loop, remember that we just talked about, and then you’re getting that constant feedback. And all of a sudden your confidence grows and then your levels of happiness grow. So you can now start to see how all of these components start coming together.  

Bryce Holdaway
Ben, the former president of the United States, Barack Obama, used to have two suits to choose from: it was the grey one or the black one. And then he’d have a white shirt. And then depending on whether he needed to deliver a speech with authority, put a red tie on or whether he needed to create some form of loyalty, put the blue tie on. So the decision that was required for him in the morning was pretty simple. Am I wearing black or grey today? Why is that important? Well, Tim Ferriss calls it I think it’s in the Tools of Titans: decision fatigue.  

Ben Kingsley
Yeap. 

Bryce Holdaway
And we’ve only got a certain number of decisions that we get to make in the day. So we want to automate a bunch of decisions and leave our brain as a processor, not a storage tool. And I think that’s what a lot of people, particularly when you were talking that story: Oh should I renovate? What’s next? That whole sequencing. If you’re doing the sequencing in your head and trying to store a whole bunch of stuff that’s coming up: by the way, what I’m having for breakfast; what am I going to do for dinner tonight? Oh and what should I actually wear today and what’s going on?  

The idea is to minimize the amount of decisions that you need to do in a day in an automated fashion so that you can then actually leave the brain capacity, because once you’ve used the credits in the day, there’s no more coming back. You’ve got to top them up next day. So you don’t want to waste those credits on: What do I need to wear? What do I want to have for breakfast? What do I want to have for lunch? What route am I actually going to get to work today?  

Those are the things that should be automated and done so that then when stuff comes your way, you actually still have the brain capacity and still enough credits in the decision fatigue bank that you can actually invest and inject into those, so that you can make better decisions. So that’s what I think of when we’re talking about behaviour derailers to what you were talking about before. This stuff should be done and automated. And if you can actually see that you are on progress to the work that you’ve done up the ground already, and then you can see the little milestones along the way to progress… you’re like the president of the United States then. That is in the same category as: do I wear the black suit or the grey suit? It’s in the same category. Am I on track or am I not on track? And then you just get on with it and use your credit somewhere else, Ben.  

Ben Kingsley
Love it. Absolutely love it. I mean, there’s some messaging and some meshing of the discussions that we’re having so far. So let’s just quickly recap on what we’re talking about. So, motivational and goal achievement shows up in the research. Feedback loop shows up in terms of building those habits and behaviours. Self-efficacy in terms of beliefs: I can actually do this. This is for me. Building those habit formations and behavioural change.  

Look for rules-based systems that allow you to follow the rules and follow proven success of what other people have put together. You’re running a marathon, break it down into components. But take the advice of people who’ve run lots of marathons before in terms of their training regime. Don’t try and create your own. Just basically leverage off those experts who have been able to do that.