CEO whisperer’ shares the simple brain trick he uses to make better decisions—it only takes ‘a few minutes each day’

The difference between success and failure might come down to a simple trait: your decision-making abilities.

But you can’t consistently make the right decisions without a healthy dose of self-awareness, knowing who you are and why you think the way you do, says executive coach Jerry Colonna.

Colonna, who’s often referred to as the “CEO whisperer,” has been preaching this theory for 20-plus years now. After realizing in the early 2000s that his venture capital job was causing him an unhealthy amount of stress — and that he wasn’t as successful as he wanted to be — he started his own internal process of “radical self-inquiry,” he tells CNBC Make It.

That meant trying to understand what exactly he was doing wrong, without bias or judgment. His conversations with himself kept coming back to a troubled childhood, which motivated him — but also contributed to his constant anxiety about failing and losing everything.

Colonna left his job, “rebooted” his life and found a passion for leadership coaching, he says. The process wasn’t easy: It required him to confront traumas and “personal demons” that he’d been ignoring for years. But it was clearly the right decision to make, he says.

Here’s how you can follow his lead to get better at making decisions, too.

Get comfortable with self-questioning
Colonna’s radical self-inquiry process is simple, he says.

“Spend a few minutes each day, but not the entire day, asking questions like how am I really feeling? What do I want to bring [to a conversation or situation]?” he says. “Radical self-inquiry is a means to unabashedly, without shame and without seeking guilt, to understand who you are, why you do the things you do, so that you then do things out of choice, not for unconscious reasons.”

Here are a few more of Colonna’s recommended questions:

In what ways has my old programming helped me become the adult I am today?
In what ways might my old habits be transformed?
How are the things that shaped my childhood forming my current decisions?
Asking yourself these questions might feel unnatural at first, Colonna says: “We’re socialized not to look inward” to avoid coming across as “narcissistic or self-indulgent.” But introspection practices like this that cultivate your self-awareness can make you a better communicator and decision-maker, with more confidence and creativity, according to a 2018 Harvard Business Review report.

The only catch, says Colonna: Hyper-analyzing yourself can sometimes feel like a “trap,” because you can “get stuck” constantly evaluating yourself. Allot a specific amount of time for self-questioning and stick to it, he recommends.

Embrace individualization
Radical self-inquiry can perform another important service, Colonna says: It can help you become more of your own person. Often, when people try the practice, they realize something discomforting — that they’re acting just like their parents.

“We tell ourselves in our 20s, I’m going to be just like my parents, or more likely, I’m going to be nothing like my parents,” Colonna says. “And then we’re faced with the stark realization that we are emulating and doing similar things.”

When Colonna was growing up, his father would fixate on The Daily News, scouring through the newspaper’s pages with “his Parker pen in hand fixing the paper’s typos,” he wrote in his book, “Reboot: Leadership and the Art of Growing Up.” It was a way for his dad to find control in his life, he added.

As Colonna started his professional career, he noticed himself exhibiting the same behavior, over-analyzing and correcting his coworkers for even the smallest mistakes.

Humans tend to copy the patterns of the people who raised and shaped them, even subconsciously — and realizing that can be “shocking” and even “shame producing,” Colonna says. “There’s something liberating in starting to see the themes, what I refer to as ghosts in the machine, because of the notion of a ghost kind of calling the shots. And we’re not even aware that that’s happened.”

Recognizing those moments and deciding how to proceed is a key part of being a successful adult, Colonna says. That’s backed by science: Separating your intuition from bias and managing your emotions accordingly can help you gain more control of your life, psychologists Anthony Rao and Paul Napper wrote in a 2019 University of California Berkeley blog post.

“It’s a part of the growing up process,” Colonna says. “Separation and individualization.”

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