by Søren Lauritzen
Do you sometimes find it difficult to make decisions? Yes? Welcome to the human race.
Almost everyone finds it difficult to choose from time to time, and human life is actually one long series of choices: Choice after choice, after choice, after choice.
Wouldn’t it be nice to know how to make a decision, to have a deeper insight into making choices – as well as a simple and effective tool that you can use to make decisions?
That is what this article gives you. It will provide you with three pieces of information about the best way to make choices:
1. What the ultimate goal is for almost all of our choices
2. Where your focus / attention and starting point should be when making choices
3. How to sort your options so that it becomes easy to choose
Let’s jump right into it …
Choices Are About What You Most Want to EXPERIENCE in Your Life
Choices are about (expected) consequences. Results. When we make a choice, we do so based on our best guess about the outcome, that is, what consequences we believe our choice will have. There are certain things we want and others we don’t.
So, first and foremost, we need to be absolutely clear about what the most important thing in our life – the most important thing in YOUR life – is. The ultimate goal. Then we need to briefly look at the optimal starting point for all our choices and decisions.
What Is the Most Important Thing in Your Life?
No, it’s not your family, your job, your status, your appearance; or money, power, fame, or what-have-you.
It’s not even love, freedom, wholeness, happiness, health, meaning, or inner peace – not in an overall general sense, at least.
The most important thing in our life is our EXPERIENCE.
The most important thing in YOUR life is your experience. Because your experience IS your life.
Isn’t that true?
Love, happiness, meaning, wholeness, freedom, health, and inner peace are among the most important, fundamental things in life. They are things we all really want.
But why do we want them? Because they give us a good EXPERIENCE, which is the same as a good life.
A good life with a good life experience is our highest – and most fundamental – desire. This applies to all people.
This includes you and me.
Now that we are clear about the ultimate goal of all our choices, there is just one more thing we need to remember, and that is where the experience takes place, which is the starting point for all our choices.
Where Does Experience Happen?
It’s easy to think that if we live in Houston and go on vacation to Hawaii, then it’s in Houston and Hawaii our experience happens. However, that’s not the case. Your experience actually happens inside you, and my experience happens inside me.
You and I can go to Hawaii at the same time, stay at the same place, visit the same sites, do the same things, and even read the same books in the evening, but that doesn’t mean we will have the same experience. You will enjoy, hate, emphasize, notice, and remember entirely different things than I will – our experiences will be different.
You have your experience because you are who you are and experience things the way you do, and the same goes for me.
We are, each of us, our own “experience instrument.” Everything we experience happens inside ourselves. Experience is an inside job.
Why is this important?
Because it tells us where our focus / attention and our starting point should be when we make choices.
Focus and Starting Point: In Yourself
Precisely because all our experiences take place inside ourselves, that’s where we should focus our attention and take our starting point.
Choices become DIFFICULT (and the results poor) when our starting point is something other than ourselves, but they become EASY (and the results good) when our starting point is ourselves.
In fact, this applies not only to choices but to our entire lives.
“Something other than ourselves” that we should avoid using as our starting point includes norms, traditions, other people’s opinions and expectations, and what we imagine others think.
Overall, it goes like this …
We have the best experience when our focus and starting point for everything in life (especially when it comes to how to make a decision) are within ourselves.
In short:
We can ALWAYS benefit from taking point of departure in ourselves and KEEPING our focus on ourselves.
This is so important because we are our own experience instrument, and our experience is the most important thing of all.
Before we present our simple, but effective little tool for how to make a decision, let’s take a look at a concrete example where both the above concepts and the tool will be applied. This will make it easier to understand the tool later on.
Peter and His Shitty Job
Let me provide you with an example from my practice as a coach and consciousness guide:
A man, let’s call him Peter, was dissatisfied with his job – so dissatisfied that it was ruining his sleep. There were many different reasons for his dissatisfaction, so I had him make a list of the things he was unhappy with, and this list was quite extensive:
– Uncertainty in his job after a period of downsizing
– A large workload due to a merger
– Salary lag because he had been in the same job for many years (and the company only followed market salary levels for new hires, not for the ‘old’ employees)
– Lack of new challenges and a feeling of monotonous routine
– No professional development opportunities
– Problems with a new boss
– Tense relationship with one of his closest colleagues
All these challenges were areas where Peter had the opportunity to make a change or a new choice. However, he also had considerations about security (he knew what he had, not what he would get) and his family’s expectations (it was his father who had helped him get this job).
Overall, he found it very difficult to make a decision and felt genuinely paralyzed. Everything seemed overwhelming and hopeless.
Once Peter had gained and understood the fundamental knowledge about the ultimate purpose of nearly all choices – that is, a good life experience, a good life – and had become clear on where he should focus, that is, inside himself on his own experience (and not, for example, on his father’s expectations), I asked him to view his entire situation from a broader perspective.
I asked him to imagine sitting in a helicopter, looking down on himself and his entire life with a particular focus on his job. From that vantage point, I asked him to formulate his options so that he only had three decisions to make in total.
He quickly came up with three choices:
1) Stay in his job without making any changes (= status quo)
2) Make a serious effort to change his current job (= take one path)
3) Look for a new job (= take the other, opposite path)
Then I asked him to consider these options by extrapolating the possible outcomes to their extremes: What was the worst possible outcome, and what was the best possible outcome?
His answer was that the worst outcome would be staying in his current job, with things either remaining as they were or getting worse.
Conversely, the best possible outcome was that he would start doing completely different things he preferred, with a better boss and a market-competitive salary … likely in a completely different company.
When he saw his situation in this light, it became clear that his current experience was terrible, and regardless of what his father might think, what he wanted was to look for a new job.
That’s exactly what he did, and within a month and a half, he found a new job that met his desires and requirements. Within a few weeks in his new job, he was much happier and knew he had made the right decision.
And his father? Initially dissatisfied, but quickly accepted the new situation and was happy that his son was now happier than before.
This is a true success story.
And now it’s time for you to get your tool for how to make a decision.
Your Tool for How to Make a Decision: Always Create 3 Options by Bringing Matters to a Head
Do you know this situation: You are faced with a decision, and then there are three general options. Exactly three.
One is to go one way, the second is to go the other way, and the third is to stay exactly where you are. To the right, to the left, or stay.
The three options can also be:
• 1) Change in one way, 2) change in the other, often opposite, way, or 3) status quo.
• More of something, less of something, or the same amount as now.
• Run towards, run away from, or stay where you are.
• Achieve, avoid, or maintain the status quo.
• Yes, no, or not sure.
• Positive, negative, or neutral.
• Plus, minus, or zero.
• Or even (now and then): Focus on (or based in) the past, future, or present.
Many choices are like this. And if they aren’t, they can often be reframed to fit this pattern.
If a choice doesn’t already offer exactly three options in this way, you can almost always:
• Look at the whole situation from above, to create this pattern
and / or
• Extend the possible outcomes to extremes, to create this pattern
In the above example with Peter, you saw both approaches used in a way that complemented each other. This is often a great way to ensure you make the right choice. However, they can also be used separately as two different ways to achieve the same result.
When you choose to look at the whole situation from above, for example, as if you were in a helicopter viewing yourself and your entire life (with a particular focus on the area where you need to make a decision), it typically becomes much easier to identify the three overall options.
And as was also evident in the example with Peter, extending the possible outcomes to extremes involves checking:
a) What is the absolute best and most fantastic possible outcome you could achieve?
b) What is the absolute worst and most dreadful possible outcome you could have?
c) And what would be the outcome if (you do not make a choice and) everything continues as it is?
When you view the consequences of your choices through the lens of extremes, it usually becomes much easier to identify your three fundamental options – and choose between them.
It’s quite straightforward, isn’t it? Simple and effective. And it works.
The advantage of using the 3-options tool is that it simplifies and sharpens the choices, making them much clearer, more distinct, and easier to choose between. This is especially true when you also keep in mind the ultimate goal / result / motive of nearly all choices (a good life experience, a good life) and ensure that the focus remains within yourself, on your own experience.
Summary – And What About AFTER the Big Decision?
The general dynamic truths underlying all of this are:
Almost all of our choices revolve around what we most want to EXPERIENCE in our lives, so the ultimate purpose of our choices is a good life with a great life experience (where we experience love, joy, happiness, meaning, inner peace, humor, wholeness, balance, and health).
Because we are our own “experience instrument,” all of our experiences takes place within ourselves. Therefore, the better we are at starting from within ourselves (and keeping our focus inside ourselves), the easier it becomes to choose, and the better the results of our choices will be.
We make choices with our will, which is a part of our consciousness. Our consciousness can be expansive, broad, and based on wholeness and love (corresponding to a “high” level of consciousness), or it can be limited, narrow, and based on separation and fear (corresponding to a “low” level of consciousness).
The higher and more comprehensive the level of consciousness we make our choices from, the easier it is to make the choice, and the better the long-term results will be for all parties involved.
When we view our situation from a higher perspective and narrow down our options to just three (overall or extreme) possibilities, making a choice becomes even easier.
Let’s conclude with a brief example:
Should you choose option A, B, C, D, E, F, or G?
Shift your focus back to yourself and remember that this is about your experience in life. View your many choices from an general, overall perspective and formulate three broad (or extreme) options to choose from.
Then choose the option that ensures that you will experience love, joy, happiness, meaning, inner peace, humor, wholeness, balance, and health. In other words, choose the one that will give you a good life experience and therefore a good life.
We Can Also Use Our Knowledge and Tool for How to Make a Decision for Smaller Choices
AFTER we have made our major choice, it’s not uncommon for new, smaller choices to arise – these could be called subordinate choices. (For example, after deciding whether to eat at home, eat out, or skip eating, you might find yourself at a restaurant deciding what to order from the menu.)
When you apply the knowledge and tool presented here, these subsequent, smaller, and more subordinate choices also become easier to make – and the outcomes from them will improve as well. If they still seem difficult, you can certainly use your knowledge and tool on them too.
In other words: We can use our knowledge and tool repeatedly. Both for the major choices and for the smaller choices that follow from our major decisions. How to make a decision, a hard one even, can in this way be fairly straightforward when just following a few simple steps.
Enjoy!
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