Making Hard Decisions

As I'm going through a transition period in my life, I think of this quote about decision-making:

"The success of a decision is determined by the ability to stick with it."

Or at least, that's my paraphrased version of a much more elegant essay by Ed Batista.

I, like many people, sometimes struggle with making a decision. And the higher the stakes, the harder it becomes to choose a path forward. This line of thinking above alleviates a lot of the pressure to choose the "right" decision. In fact, it rejects the notion of a "correct choice" entirely:

"Before we make any decision—particularly one that will be difficult to undo—we're understandably anxious and focused on identifying the "best" option because of the risk of being "wrong." But a by-product of that mindset is that we overemphasize the importance of the moment of choice itself and lose sight of the importance of everything that follows."

Batista argues that it's our determination to make the "right decision" that leads us to paralysis and away from agency and ownership. Which is true; we're often waiting for something to tip the scales beyond our doubts to persuade us in either direction. This won't always happen though, sometimes it's just up to us!

However, it's not the choice, but our actions that follow our choice that is most important. The more we work towards its success after the fact, the more likely we will feel that the decision was the "correct one".

Of course, I still try to make the best choice; I don't just surrender my decision-making process to blind commitment. Batista writes more wisdom about this, but to summarize, it's our own reasoning and emotions that can help guide us to a successful decision.

Emotions serve as an evolutionary way for our body to predict the future. We associate experiences with positive and negative emotions, and when an image of that experience appears again, our learned emotional response will trigger and help us remember, or predict, the outcomes, which in turn helps us make better decisions.

"It invokes the concept of situational awareness--knowing what has gone before, what is happening now, anticipating what is coming, and then having one's cognitive engine in the right gear"

With that point in mind, I think it's important to regulate emotions too. If that emotional volume is turned up to 100, it overpowers logic and reasoning (the other half of the decision-making process) and leads to impulsive, spiraling behavior (and bad decisions). Through emotional regulation, we can reason to understand which emotions to ignore and which to pay attention to, further increasing the odds of a successful decision.

Emotions are not always accurate though. They can blind us. That's when we need to challenge what we feel and whether it to be true, again letting logic and reasoning hold weight in the decision-making process...

"Emotions can obviously mislead us and undermine the reasoning process [...] It is likely that when our emotions interfere with reasoning rather than support it, this is due to inaccurate or irrational associations made during our formative years."

It's all about balance.

So, when I face a difficult decision, whether that's walking away from a problematic relationship, switching jobs, or moving cities, I listen to what I'm feeling, challenge those feelings with logic and reasoning, then commit to whatever it is I choose, knowing success is not automatic, but worked for. Or, in a more concise way of putting it...

“When you come to a fork in the road, take it” - Yogi Berra