We constantly have to make choices - what to cook, what to do best, where to go, what shade of nail polish to buy. If the choice is difficult, we suffer, we even lose sleep and appetite. Often you want to fall through the ground so as not to have a choice at all. When I or my clients are faced with such a choice, I suggest relying on several techniques and principles to make the choice from a painful process to an interesting task.
Everyone is familiar with the old proven columns with pros and cons, when we compare the advantages and disadvantages of two options and choose the one with more advantages and exclude the option where the disadvantages predominate. Remember how Miranda in Sex and the City decides whether to forgive Steve for cheating or not, and scrupulously calculates the pros and cons of both options. This method is good, but limited. Limited by the framework of a purely rational approach to the situation of choice.
Then an alternative option comes to the rescue. Listen to yourself, your feelings, rely on your intuition. This really helps many people make important decisions. A great way, no doubt. I can’t help but cite the same Miranda as an example, in the episode where she ultimately makes a decision. For those who don’t remember, I advise you to watch this touching moment, it’s worth it.
But the problem is that this method is not available to everyone and not in all situations. Some people, due to their purely rational nature, cannot or do not want to rely on feelings. In difficult moments of life, when the choice is difficult or extremely significant, it is scary to rely on intuition alone. In such a situation, strength leaves a person and intuition becomes silent. What to do when the usual methods do not work - how to choose?
Then focus on the hard facts.
Benjamin Ritter, Ph.D., founder of LFY Consulting, says that once you have acknowledged and accepted the emotions you have after a bad decision, you should focus on the facts.
“Take a step beyond the emotions and stress to really look at the facts,” he says. - Ask yourself: what is happening now? What do you really want? How can you work productively towards your goal given the situation you are in?”
You may find it difficult to be objective. If this happens, Ritter recommends writing about the situation or moving beyond perspective by talking to a close friend or family member.
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It is impossible to get rid of the traps that prevent us from thinking objectively once and for all. They are the result of our evolutionary development. But there are steps that will increase your chances of making a good choice.
Write down your thoughts
I know that everyone who is not too lazy advises keeping a diary and recording thoughts in it, but there is a reason for this. By noting your ideas, you force yourself to look at them more objectively. By describing important life decisions, you stop operating on autopilot and evaluate the possibilities.
When I'm contemplating a big decision, I like to simply draw a line down the middle of the page and list the risks and costs on one side and the potential benefits on the other. This exercise alone is often enough to reveal your misconceptions.
Learn to overcome anxiety
Most bad decisions are made because they are comfortable and easy. The good ones, on the contrary, seem difficult, frightening, counterintuitive. To accept them, you have to go against your fear.
This skill only develops with practice. Some people call it “getting out of your comfort zone.” I sometimes think of it as “eating a shit sandwich.” Yes, it’s unpleasant, but necessary.
Find your weak points
We all have our own weaknesses when it comes to decision making. Some people are more emotional, others have a greater need for social approval, and others have a harder time assessing risks and benefits in the future.
Try to determine what is bad for you. And keep this in mind as you consider your next decisions.
Protect yourself from weaknesses
It's easier than trying to deal with them through willpower. For example, it’s hard for me to give up fast food, so I just try not to keep it in the house. I've found that it's easier for me not to buy it at all than to buy it and limit myself.
Or another example. I have friends that I report to on Zoom or Slack when I work from home. This arrangement helps us all sit down at our desks at nine in the morning. Nothing complicated or ingenious, but it works. The fear of being the one who slept while everyone else was working helps me get out of bed. And be more productive.
Face a choice
One of Parkinson's laws states that if a person only needs to write one letter, he will write it all day. If he has to write more than twenty letters, then this task will take him several hours.
Remember when an employee completes a huge amount of work per day? Yes, precisely in the last working week before the desired vacation. So why can't we always work like we did before vacation? Answer all calls and letters, sort out all the documentation, tidy up your desk?
When things don't rush us, we do them as needed. But when there is little time and a lot of work, a person begins to work effectively, does all the necessary things, and his productivity increases sharply. What forces us to face a choice ?
The surviving passengers of the Titanic told many interesting stories. One of them is the story of a woman who managed to find a place on a lifeboat. She passionately begged to be allowed to run to the cabin for the thing she needed. She was given three minutes to do this. She rushed headlong onto the ship and jumped over the box with her jewelry and money. Ignoring the rest of her valuables, she grabbed three oranges and ran back to the boat with them.
Just a few hours ago, before the tragedy, this woman would have laughed in the face of anyone who would have offered her to exchange at least one of her rings for a container of oranges. And in a critical situation, her entire system of values changed dramatically. What had previously been something unimportant and unnoticeable became more important to her than anything else.
Often the realization of the importance of what is happening to us reaches us too late and we have to face a choice.
One family was tired of the hustle and bustle of the city. Then at the family council it was decided to sell the city property and go live in the village. There, the father of the family and his sons planned to buy livestock and open a farm. After some time, friends came to visit them. We asked them what name they gave to their farm. The owner said that they all argued for a long time, since everyone had their own option. In the end, they managed to choose a name that suited everyone. But the cows had died by then. Too late, the family realized that instead of doing what was really important, they were wasting time on pointless arguments.
One well-known political figure, whose career was at its peak, who enjoyed incredible popularity among voters and had every chance of even becoming a presidential candidate, announced that he was leaving the political arena. A few weeks before this announcement, he learned that he had been diagnosed with a rare form of cancer. With successful treatment, it is possible that the illness would not greatly affect the politician’s career and would not greatly shorten his days. But he realized that he did not want to spend his last days working. What matters most to him is being close to his family and seeing his children grow up. And most importantly, he realized that he was mortal, which means that in his work he would not have time to do everything that he would like.
After he left his post, he received a letter from his friend in which he fully supported the politician’s decision. “When dying, no one regretted that they had paid little attention to their business,” the letter said.
Create a decision-making process for the future
The next time you're faced with a big decision, you may feel anxious or stressed about making another mistake. To counteract this anxiety, consider implementing a decision-making process for every future choice.
Ana Jovanovic, psychologist and life coach at Parenting Pod, recommends a widely used seven-step decision-making process. It works like this:
- Identify the solution/problem.
- Gather information to help you make decisions.
- Consider different options.
- Weigh the evidence for each potential solution.
- Accept the appropriate option.
- Take action on this decision.
- Review the decision after the action has been taken.
Armed with this seven-step process, you can be confident that any big moves you make in the future will be well-informed and carefully thought out.
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Accept your regret
After a poor judgment, your mind is likely to be filled with regret. It turns out that it can really be a powerful tool.
“Regret can help you remember things you want to avoid in life and can actually help you make better decisions later on,” says Ritter.
Accept your regret and move forward.
The brain turns us into zombies
And this is not an unfounded statement. There are scientific experiments behind it. They were first carried out in the late 80s by the American scientist Benjamin Libet. He placed electrodes on the subject's head and asked them to voluntarily squeeze their hand. Seems like a common experience. But the encephalogram amazed the scientist. About half a second before the action was performed, a signal appeared in the brain. But this is not enough. The subjects themselves stated that they were aware of their decision a quarter of a second before the action. That is, the brain made a decision before the person thought about it.
Opponents pointed out obvious gaps in the scientist's conclusions. Let's say it's difficult for a person to catch a delay of a quarter of a second. In a word, there is a lot of subjective stuff here, and therefore the experiments did not look very convincing. But today science has technology at its disposal that makes it possible to conduct experiments much more accurately. For example, the work of John-Dylan Haynes is well known; he conducted research using a magnetic resonance imaging scanner. The subject was asked to decide whether to add or subtract two numbers. Haynes claims that the brain made the decision much earlier, 4 seconds before the person realized it. The time is huge. And the scientist concluded: “Our decisions are predetermined by the unconscious long before our consciousness learns about them. The brain decides everything before the person himself.”
This statement by Haynes caused an avalanche of comments. Moreover, many support his version. Supporters claim that we are “biochemical puppets”, that a person does not have his own will, he is ruled by the unconscious. To the objection that we make plans every day and try to follow them, there is an objection: maybe it is the brain that writes plans for us, and we are engaged in self-deception, saying that we have written everything out ourselves.
“In such experiments, we recorded a delay of tens to hundreds of milliseconds, and this is quite understandable,” said Svyatoslav Medvedev, director of the Institute of Human Brain of the Russian Academy of Sciences, corresponding member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, to the RG correspondent. — The person is instructed to clench his fingers into a fist. It goes to the brain. What's next? First, the brain gives out the “idea” that it’s time to clench your fist. The idea is tested at the level of consciousness and, if approved, implemented. But it's hard to imagine the delay being 4 seconds. And most importantly, it is not clear why nature should give us such a huge amount of time for awareness? This is irrational.
Haynes's experiments raise many questions. For example, it is obvious that even when setting a task to raise a hand or perform a mathematical operation, the brain is activated. Then makes a choice of option. But how can you separate “addition” from “subtraction”? And if a person hesitated in his decision, shouldn't this be reflected in brain activation? But then the question arises: what and who ultimately ordered whom? In short, much more thoughtful experiments are needed to draw definitive conclusions.
We perform most of our actions unconsciously, automatically. For example, when we ride a bicycle, we don’t track every movement. But when we master driving, we rely mainly on our consciousness; it learns new skills. And then, having mastered it, it resets this science into an “automatic machine”, and consciousness simply “looks after” the behavior, but does not think about it. Otherwise, our consciousness simply would not be able to cope with the huge number of tasks that arise before it every minute. In a word, nature distributed everything wisely. The matrix of memory about stereotypical, experienced situations really controls our actions, but it would never occur to anyone to say that it controls a person.
This is done thanks to the work of the “error detector” discovered by academician Natalya Bekhtereva. He checks whether the intended action corresponds to the model that has already been developed. And in experiments at the Institute of Human Brain of the Russian Academy of Sciences, it was shown that the brain catches a person in a lie. If he wants to lie, the brain warns: you are doing the wrong thing. And it’s up to a person to listen to his inner voice or brush it off. If we were “biochemical puppets,” then the world would consist of angels and righteous people. But alas...
Forgive yourself
Don't be too hard on yourself after a bad decision. “The most important step is to forgive yourself,” says psychiatrist Dion Metzger, MD. “We ourselves become our own worst enemy when we make a bad decision.” We spend too much energy focusing on guilt instead of using it to move on to the next step."
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Use the failure of your bad decision as leverage for future success. “Mistakes are essential to success,” Metzger says. “You will do them, but what determines your future success depends on what you do next.”
First, let's take a look at how the situation of choice arises.
In this situation, our two polar parts collide and cannot agree with each other. There may be many options, but in the end the choice comes down to two polarities. To put it simply, it looks like a dispute between our inner Child, who really wants something, and our inner Parent, who does not allow him to do something due to various norms and rules.
So what should you do? The most effective is a conversation between two parts, when you give the right to a real, living voice to each of them.
It is absolutely not a fact that they will come to an agreement, but at least they will definitely talk. This, at a minimum, allows us to reduce the intensity of internal tension from constant throwing around and makes it possible to hear each other’s arguments.
The method involves two areas at once: rational and emotional, that is, a person does not just mechanically record a set of arguments, he voices them from the position of different parts, feeling each of them. It is better to practice this method with a specialist who will help identify and give voice to each of the parts and build their effective dialogue.
An even more effective technique is when a person is asked to imagine that he has already made each of the choices. and tell him how he lives there.
The more detailed and lively the story, the more a person will be able to immerse himself in each situation and realize his decision. The two parts may also talk to each other, or it may be a sequential story from each situation. It is better to focus on what is easier for a person to immerse in and what is easier to open up.
This method promotes a deeper awareness of both situations. By “awareness” in Gestalt therapy we mean both experiencing and being involved in the process, as well as understanding what is happening. Awareness involves the rational, sensory and bodily levels. It is precisely this that helps to simulate a situation in which you have not yet been in reality and the details of which you do not yet know.
The deeper you dive into each situation, the more levels and their greater depth you engage, and the better the process of awareness becomes. This technique even more requires the support and participation of a specialist.
It is worth noting that in all methods, when deep emotional experiences arise, it is recommended to take a time-out for at least several days. This is a period of assimilation, during which a person does not implement the decision, but digests and accepts the changes that occur.
It was the latter technique that helped me make an important decision - the question concerned a new professional offer. Finding myself in the situation of a choice that had already been made, I quite vividly imagined myself in a new role and was able to obtain from within such arguments and experiences that convinced me to accept the new offer.
What is a bad decision
Imagine that I asked you to play this game: you give me one dollar and I flip a coin. If it comes up heads, you win $50; if it comes up tails, you get nothing and lose your dollar. Is it worth playing? Of course, because the potential loss is small, but the potential gain is large.
This clearly explains what a good decision is: a move in which you risk little for the opportunity to gain a lot. For example, starting a conversation with a person you like, asking a question that may be considered awkward, applying for a vacancy in a company where work seems unattainable.
A bad decision is a move in which you risk a lot for the opportunity to gain a little.
For example, you break traffic rules to get somewhere on time, you lie and pretend to please others, you get drunk the evening before an important meeting or exam.
But how to distinguish “many” from “small”? Most decision situations are not nearly as simple as my coin game. They are confusing and biased. Is continuing education worth giving up all social life for a year? Is buying a house worth saving for the next 10 years?
Everything is determined by your values. To make a good decision, you must know what is important to you.
Looking at the examples above, you probably noticed something interesting. For some reason it’s difficult to make good decisions. Even when it is obvious to us which choice is correct (and this is not always the case), it is difficult for us to make it. On the contrary, bad decisions are easy to follow.
Why is that? Why do we deliberately do risky things that can harm us, but we need to make incredible efforts to make good choices? If you're thinking, "Yeah, because we're all a bunch of idiots!" - you are not far from the truth.
