A while ago I wrote about making decisions efficiently when you’re building something, especially when the situation is genuinely ambiguous. One of the points was that you have to know what matters most to you right now. In other words, what you actually want.
Which leads straight to the obvious next question: I feel like I want all of it, so how am I supposed to know what I really want?
That reaction is completely normal, and it doesn’t mean you’re greedy. People are simply complicated, and the head holds several contradictory intentions at the same time:
- I want to build relationships with the people who matter and be visible at work. I also want to try something on the side, or just leave and build my own thing.
- I want to go all in for this stretch and work like a maniac. I also want to ease off, look after my body and rebuild my energy, because nobody earns more than their health will carry.
- I want to be well connected, with relationships everywhere. I also want to be alone, to meditate, to get clear by myself.
A and B are both good. Either could take you towards the person you want to become. So how do you choose, when time and energy are finite and the choice has to be made now?
My method: listen to the body and the emotions, and don’t trust the analysis running in your head.
Almost nobody reading this has a thinking deficit. It’s the opposite. We think too much, and we tend to overthink. When you’re stuck in indecision it usually isn’t that you’ve analysed too little, it’s that you’ve analysed so much that everything has gone foggy. That’s exactly when the body’s signals become a shortcut.
Here’s the sequence I use.
- Go back to the breath first. When the head is churning, breathing goes fast and shallow. Deliberately make it longer and deeper.
- Then make the choice internally. Pick A, and feel what happens in your chest.
Does your chest open, or does it pull in and tighten? Is the feeling warm and soft, or hard and cold? If it’s the first, A is what you want. If it’s the second, keep exploring.
- Then the same with the emotions. Hold option A in mind. What rises?
The emotional signal is finer. What usually comes up is some form of unease. It won’t be pure delight and excitement, because if it were, you wouldn’t have found the choice difficult in the first place. It’ll be a mix: nerves, unease, tension, excitement, fear. This is the part where you have to be precise. Is the unease underneath option A telling you it’s genuinely wrong for you? Or is it the tension and fear that always arrives with changing something?
That distinction is the whole thing.