Stop Deciding And Start Choosing

A client is at a not immaterial cross roads. To leave the business he's invested 10-15 years creating and running. Or not.

I've been there. Clouds of consideration and variables weigh heavy on the head. Literally so. Clogged up, balancing the almost infinite ‘if this, not that’, or ‘if this, then definitely, maybe that’ variables and considerations.

Three key words in all this.

Almost infinite variables.

It doesn't suit our ‘high agency, master of the universe, ruler of all in my domain’ narrative - but here's the rub:

Decision making is largely a delusion.

Sorry.

Don't take it from me. Let's go first to Harvard, tacking back via a practise several thousand years in the making, all the way back to you - and your predicament, right now.

The Academic View

Dr Ellen Langer is a psychologist at Harvard. She's run a long term and pioneering lab looking at what it is to be human. Particularly the role and relationship of your mind to your life. Much of her work in the domain of health and aging outcomes, but not all.

In her teaching, she runs a class on decision making. In the spirit of her work, this is done as a live lab. The instruction to students is simple: for the coming week, don't decide, just choose. Whatever it is, this coffee or that, that meal or this. Buy this or don't buy that. However big or small.

This a subtle practise of - in her words - worrying less about making the right decision or more making a decision right.

Hey, guess what? Everything works out just fine.

I know - I hear you.

Choosing a sandwich is easy (or is it?!). The wrong move not costing you your life / livelihood (as far as you know...).

Leaving the company I've invested 15 years in running. Or a life partner. These decisions of consequence. Yes, they are.

Surely this a pros and cons list, at the very least??

No.

I invite you back to those three words: almost infinite variables.

When we're fiddling over a decision, a choice, difficult or otherwise, we're trying to predict, to guess, based on the information we have - which is arbitrary and incomplete, trying to predict different outcomes we can never know. Which leaves us with this:

What if this you call decision making is actually the opposite?
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Are you really making a decision?
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Or avoiding a choice?

Often what we call decision making is actually avoiding choice.

Meet uncertainty.

The Ancient View

We don't like uncertainty. It unnerves us. Feels like a dance with jeopardy, which of course it is. As is life. There is fear of loss, failure, looking like a dick and much else besides stitched in.

A teacher and collaborator of mine, Martin Aylward, tells it better than me. Martin is a long term student of a long term practise; decades applying Buddhist wisdom to his rich and varied life.

As Martin spoke to on my podcast, we like to tell ourselves a story of control. “I considered the options, decided to do x so y happened”. This the master of my universe narrative.

Back to making a decision vs avoiding choice…

Often all we're really doing in decision making is avoiding choice. Waiting until something changes, life chooses for us, or some other shift renders our ‘doing’ obsolete.

This decision making by another name.

When faced with a choice - however big or small - we hold on, attempt to keep the variables at some manageable distance, working through an imaginary series cascading events, for as long we can. Then lurch.

Less decision making. More lunging.

The What Should You Do View?

Two things clarify via this lens.

One, your ability to sit with the discomfort of uncertainty is a super power. It'll lend you space for insight to reveal, clarify. It’s less fraught and muddled. Less heavy. Because it's this attempted managing of the unknown which clogs up your head.

Secondly, choosing is the most important thing.

This is what Ellen Langer talks to her with her invocation: "worry less about making the right decision and more about making the decision right".

It means act, do, choose. Make a choice and start working to make the choice right. Make it work. Whether leaving the partner or staying. Leaving the business or staying.

Choose - and make the choice right.

Yes, it feels risky and scary, fraught with worry you’ve made the wrong choice. But there is no right choice - you’re attempting to second guess outcomes you can’t know.

Choose - and make the choice right.

A midlife footnote.

Jungian Psychoanalyst, Bob Hollis, has written much of midlife.

Midlife flatness, the drift, is you slowly dying. And I don’t mean literally, although that is of course true. I mean the story which shaped the Act I of your life is dying. This a story gifted you by family and culture. Your mid life opportunity is to discover your Act II. This what LeanMind is for - and is important work, for your personally, organisationally and socially / culturally, given the inflection point we're dancing.

Hollis talks about the importance of being defeated by ever larger things.

The wish for growth and creativity and challenge is what it is to be human. Midlife is your reminder to this, your invitation back home, we might say.

Sure, you can avoid difficult choices by sitting on the fence. And you probably will - and are not alone. But the invitation, excitement, thrill and joy is in acting, choosing.

Choosing life, we might say.

Choose - and make the choice right.

If anyone you know is dancing through a similarly complicated choice point, please share this with them.