From Where Do You Choose?

A few weeks back I met with a client, John. We had a walk and talk along the river. It was sunny and cold. The sky was blue. The best kind of morning. And meeting.

He’d teed up in advance - “Ben, I need to make fundamental changes” he said. These he wanted to talk through.

Before we talk specifics, the context is relevant.

He’s at a difficult choice point. There is a sense of jeopardy, a feeling the wrong move will cost him heavy.

You’ll know your version of this :

To leave this work and start something new.
To leave this partner…and start anew.
To stop doing this old shit, boring work and do the work that excites me. Or similar.
You want to move on but don’t know how. Or if you can

Back to John, and that sunny, cold, riverside walk and talk.

Firstly, fundamental change, as I told him, is the last thing he needed. This a man deep into setting up a second business, who’s recently relocated his family overseas, AND with a new baby at home. That’ll be fundamental change enough, I mused.

As we walk, I invited a little reflection.

Let’s pause, I said. Put your hand on your chest. Take a few breaths. Slow down. Worry less about the specific problem you think you’re solving. From that steadier place, describe the feeling, I asked him. Where in the body are you feeling the stress, the discomfort, the challenge of this difficult choice point? Describe it.

And from here, a second question: what is it you most fear?

Arising from the knots of tension in the belly and chest, was a deep fear of failing, of fucking things up, of looking like a dick. Painful stuff.

What he’d articulated up front as a need to make fundamental change was actually, on a deeper level, wanting to escape a feeling of deep discomfort.

In this - sensing, feeling, choosing, something powerful happened - the decision melted away. On this, I'll return.

The truth of your difficulty navigating complicated choice points - what you call ‘deciding’ - is more an avoiding of difficult feelings and discomfort.

To navigate these complexities, three questions and reflections:

1) what being on silent retreat reveals
2) the delusion of decision making more widely
3) what you can do about it.

1) What being silent reveals.

Meditation retreats are very occasional periods of clarity and insight swimming in an ocean of anxiety, struggle and boredom.

Each of these - anxiety, struggle and boredom - is, at core, a feeling of deep discomfort and - as pioneering neuroscientist Antonio Dimasio has taught us - feeling precedes all action. No feeling, no action.

There are few feelings more potent than discomfort, ambiguity and uncertainty.

We feel these viscerally, alive in our belly, cold in our arms, tight in our chest. Or similar.

We don’t like it.

We want it to go away.

So we act, we do something, we sell ourselves a story, an illusion of control. In short, we bounce out of the body, into the head.

Sitting in retreat, this plays out, over and over. Feel bored? Mind plans. Feel scared? Mind plans. Feel anxious. You get it.

Working things out, making a plan, is like a warm blanket; a quick and easy route from the discomfort of ambiguity and not knowing, and so it is with your choosing.

Maybe the insight is less in the plans and more in the weeds?

Which brings us to the second point.

2) The delusion of decision making more widely.

Prof Ellen Langer has run a pioneering lab out of Harvard for close to 50 years. Her work focuses on the relationship between mind and body, particularly relating to health and ageing, but not exclusively.

She also runs a class on decision making.

Over a week she invites students to abandon any notion of deciding and just choose. This sandwich or that. This coffee or that. This night out or that. Whatever. Don’t think or plan or decide, just choose.

Guess what?

It all turns out just fine.

Easy, I hear you say, for these inconsequential things. They’re not Matters Of Significance like these affecting me, my family.

Some truth, but not as you think.

When faced with any choice we can never know:

a) if we’re considering all the variables
b) considering the right variables. Nor
c) how different variables will develop or relate to each other.

In short, it's all head game, guessing to feel better, to avoid the feeling of discomfort that is not knowing.

Langer has a powerful invocation:

"spend less time making the decision and more time making it right".

How to do this?

3. From where do you choose?

The retreat shows us we bounce out of our heads.

Langer teachers that we can never know.

So, what to do.

Let’s go all the way back to the sunny and cold morning on the riverbank.

In just that short little exercise - slowing down, taking a pause, descending into the belly, into the weeds of the complexity, the ambiguity and uncertainty - for even just a few short minutes, something powerful and profound happened:

A completely new pathway revealed itself.

Something until then unconsidered and unseen.

Not more fundamental change.

But a simpler, clearer, alternate road ahead.

The route to solving the complicated challenge, to better choosing, was slowing, dropping down, from head all the way to belly, and learning to sit with ambiguity and uncertainty.

Your human birth right is a gift of almost limitless ingenuity and creative wisdom. Far richer and more powerful than you can imagine.

And we tap into this amid the discomfort, the messy weeds, the felt sense of tension and tightness in the belly, not rattling around your head.

This is your true choice making wisdom.

If you practise one thing, practise only this: learn to sit with difficult feelings of discomfort, even if just fleetingly, one moment at a time. And from here, trust.

Choice melts. Clarity reveals. A new path will form.

And from here, invest your energy making the choice right.

What difficult choice are you currently wrestling with? Let me know and I'll send you a guide to help you sense your way through it.

Until next time.

Ben

PS if you know one person struggling with a difficult choice point, please share this. Thank you 🙏