We make thousands of decisions every day without even thinking about it.
- Will I get up with the alarm or will I snooze? I snooze.
- Will I have a good breakfast, or will I mainline coffee? Coffee.
- Will I walk the dog now or after my shower? Uhm…
Most of these decisions we make automatically, according to habits and routines and also to how we feel. I actually wake up most days around six without an alarm. Is it a decision? Of course it is. Is the decision influenced by anyone? Yes – Dexter, my golden retriever, is anxious to go outside at daybreak. He influences my decision about the shower too!
Decision-making is natural for us and, most of the time, it is fairly easy. We weigh the alternatives, sometimes without even realizing, and make the call. This is true with 93% of the decisions we make every day.
The Other Seven
The bigger decisions, however, can become more cumbersome, awkward, and unwieldy. Big decisions like:
- Shall I buy that new BMW?
- Where should I go on vacation?
- Should I move to bigger house or apartment?
These are decisions that have consequences attached. The BMW is probably expensive. The vacation can be to Dubai or to Darwin, Minnesota, home of the World’s Largest Ball of Sisal Twine wound by one man. The consequences have to do with the distance, the airfare, the cost of spending two week in Dubai or Darwin. If I change homes, what will it mean for the family? Will we move away from friends?
We may agonize over these decisions because they present something we want and a certain amount of sacrifice needed to have it.
The BMW is WAY out of my budget, but I really want it! Maybe the consequence of that desire means cancelling the vacation.
But even these are not exceptionally difficult. We look at the costs, the consequences, and the alternatives and make the decision fairly easily.
The Imponderables
Where some people (many people actually) run into trouble is with decisions of far-reaching effects. In these decisions, people can become paralyzed in analyzing the pros and the cons and the ramifications over time.
Getting married is one such (as is getting divorced). Moving abroad. Changing jobs. Quitting your job and starting an entrepreneurship. Kicking old habits. We could list these decisions all day because they are the ones that matter. And some of them are irreversible.
It is here where people become stuck and entangled in all of the possible options about what to do and how to act. Furthermore, these decisions are also challenging because they contain many smaller decisions inside them.
The decision to get married, once taken, is usually joyful. But then the dilemmas set in: Will it be big or small? Where will it be held? Who will we invite? Where will people park? What music? What food? What day? What time?
People will sometimes hire wedding planners to take care of these things. The wedding planner’s job is based on the premise that a lot of people freeze in front of details. And it is true that trying to organize a complicated event can be a daunting task and lead to anxiety and worse.
Unpack Slowly
The approach I tend to take is to step back and try to break the anxiety causing decision into as many parts as possible, identify the easy ones and the hard ones, get an idea of timing and order, and then reassemble them not as a Problem Decision, but as a project.
In many cases, we will hesitate or get blocked on decisions that involve input from others. Or maybe there are things we know nothing about – lack of information leads to difficulty in deciding. All of this must be sorted and tasked out in the project.
When faced with a decision that is both important and difficult to handle, there are always reasons for that. I like to help people see those reasons and confront them. If they can be fixed, we fix. If we need more help, we get more help.
I don’t want to say that this will make is easier, sometimes there are hard calls to be made. But this will at least help you not to be bogged down in the process.
If you are facing this kind of situation, click below and book a free assessment session to put your mind at ease.
