Jim Loehr is a renowned performance psychologist and coach. He works with corporate clients as well as elite professional athletes in several sports. A former tennis player himself, Loehr’s tennis clients included Jim Courier, Monica Seles, and Arantxa Sanchez-Vicario. He has written numerous books on human performance including a few that focus specifically on tennis.
Wise Decisions: A Science-Based Approach to Making Better Choices is billed as a framework for learning to make the best decisions with whatever information you happen to have. It delves deeply into human psychology and takes an evidence-based approach. The objective of the work is to help people improve their decision-making processes and skills.
While this isn’t a tennis book, Loehr references the sport a few times in this current effort. For example, when describing “reality-distorting” mechanisms contributing to decision-making challenges, he describes how “motivated reasoning” relates to bad line calls in tennis. He writes “Players tend to see what they want to be true rather than what is actually true.”
“The Inner Game of Tennis” is included among the formal citations listed at the end of each chapter. A “harmful inner voice” is one of the recurring factors that Loehr believes leads to poor decisions. That is a theme that will resonate with people familiar with that seminal tennis psychology book. In a way, Wise Decisions broadens the aperture of the philosophy of The Inner Game of Tennis for application to life in general.
The ideas presented in Wise Decisions are credible and backed up by a plethora of formal citations. It also provides many examples and contexts of poor decisions and worksheets for the reader to develop and refine their decision-making skills and process. Unfortunately, the volume and presentation of that material gave me a distinct “filler” impression that I just couldn’t shake.
There are a lot of books in the self-help for decision-making niche, and Wise Decisions is a credible addition to that category. I will be trying out some of the exercises recommended by Loehr, such as tracking my self-talk 24/7 for a couple of weeks. However, the amount of filler information in the book makes me believe that there might be a better resource available.
Wise Decisions: A Science-Based Approach to Making Better Choices shines as a list of curated peer-reviewed scientific papers that delve deeply into the psychology of decision-making. Given his background in tennis, many of those are directly relevant to that sport which is a bonus. The book was disappointing to me because I had high expectations that it failed to fulfill. It is good but I was anticipating great. However, it is still worth reading with tempered expectations.
 | Wise Decisions: Wise Decisions: A Science-Based Approach to Making Better Choices |
