Here are my instructions for making a decision that feels utterly impossible.
You know the ones where you’re convinced that you’ll surely blow up your life if you make the wrong one. (Part of the instructions is to realize there is no wrong, but we’ll get to that, love.) They are the ones that keep your eyes locked on to the ceiling late into the night, far after sleep should have taken you. The ones that feel terrifyingly, exhilaratingly, maddening.
First, you take a deep breath. Because we always start with a deep breath. Whether we are choosing creamy or crunchy peanut butter or whether we’ll move to Tanzania, we have to start with a breath. The breath is to get air into our lungs because our brain needs oxygen to do its thing. But the breath is also to remind us that we are alive.
The alive-awareness part is important because we need to remember that it’s only because we are alive that we get to make this decision. I know, I know. Right now the decision feels like torture. It feels cruel that we have to make it. (We might not, but we’ll get that too, love.) But in fact the power and autonomy to choose is like a little gift that’s been placed at our doorstep. The alternative to making this choice is either imprisonment or death. And I hardly think either would be better than getting to choose.
This being human thing is complicated. No one ever said it would be simple. If they did, they were trying to sell us something that was most certainly overpriced and was going to break in less than three days. The honest ones told us it would be hard and that there would come a few times – hopefully not too many, hopefully not too few – where we would be faced with decisions like this one.
So after the breath and the remembering that we are alive and stuck in this hard humanness, we decide that we’re not going to decide. That’s just for right now, I promise. But this step is absolutely crucial. We have to set down the decision like a ball that we’re waiting to pass but don’t see anyone open. Sports people would probably tell us not to just set the ball down, but this isn’t actually basketball. If your decision is about basketball, please consult other instructions.
We set the decision down for the moment because what we need to do next is we need to learn how to decide. Most of us didn’t really learn how this whole thing works. Instead, we learned to very carefully look around at all the bigger people and see what made them smile or laugh or at least not freak out. We catalogued this information carefully in our big brains and our tender bodies and then we started applying the algorithm wherever we went.
To learn how to decide means that we now have to relearn who the heck we are. We have to decide to also set aside all of those Other People’s Opinions (OPOs) and start to learn how to be self-detectors. This part of the process is actually one of the most fun because it involves lots of experiments. We put on our lab coats and our self-detector badges and we go searching for data.
The data comes by giving ourselves lots and lots of choices. Not choices like the Big Decision, because again, we’ve set that ball down. No, these are choices like –
Do I want to go on a walk today?
How many pages of this book do I want to read?
Do I want the medium or the large milkshake?
Do I want to answer this phone call?
Which color pen do I want to write with?
We start to pay very special attention to what happens when we are faced with these decisions, with extra awareness on how our body reacts to each option. We notice if our heart races or our gut lurches or if our brains get all scrambly. We notice if the changes that happen are subtle or dramatic. We notice if our mind tries to argue with our body, telling it why it’s so silly to want what it wants. We notice if our heart tries to speak and if we give her room to do so.
We start to be more adept self-detectors – better translators of those even more gentle cues. We start to see that when we choose the purple pen or the medium milkshake that we feel proud of ourselves. Because even when we realize we actually wanted something different, we get to collect that data too. Amazing! Our store of data is growing, and so is our confidence.
The next instruction is to get clear on our values. Values, schmalues, you might say. Maybe it sounds a little silly or even self-indulgent, but bear with me, because you can’t skip this step. You have to sit down with a piece of paper, ideally blank, and write at the top, “I want to be the kind of person who…” Include the dot dot dot and then below that statement you have to finish that sentence at least ten times. Don’t filter or edit, and just let yourself flow through what feels important to you about this whole being a person thing.
Now, you’re going to go back through the list of values and cross out any that feel like they come from the land of should or are an OPO (Other People’s Opinions, you might recall). If they are, they get crossed out. Really, there will probably only be a small handful left, and these feel more true and real. Now that your body is more attuned from all of your experiments, check in with your body to see if it agrees that these are your values. If it does, you’re ready to keep going.
At this point you might be feeling ready to pick that decision back up. You can experiment with that and see how it feels. If it feels good, do it. But here’s where you must be careful. Because you may be be tempted to pick it up and then to ask a bunch of your special people what they think about your decision. Resist the urge to do this. I’m not saying you can’t talk about it all. But one or two people max, and they have to meet the very special criteria.
What are those criteria? Well, at least one of them cannot be directly impacted by the decision itself. They can have no stake in the game. Not financially, emotionally, or otherwise impacted by what you choose to do. They can care about you, and let’s sure hope they do. But their fate can’t be tied to what you decide. A therapist is a good idea. Or a friend who is a very good listener and not too enmeshed with you.
The other criteria is that they have to be very good at pointing you back to yourself. A lot of people will be tempted to tell you what they would do. Or what the research would suggest. A lot of people will want you to think of all the facts or stories of their sister’s colleague with the same decision because those things are important to them. But if they are part of your wise council, they have to know how to reflect you to you. They have to say things like, “Well you said earlier that…” or “What I notice happens when you talk about that option is…” This is not a universal skill – another one we don’t learn so well. So please be conscientious that anyone you discuss your decision with has it.
At this point, you are ready to return to your decision. You’ll pick the ball back up and hold it lovingly in your hands, and what you’ll notice as you start to look at where to throw it is that wherever you do, there is someone there to catch it. Here’s the weird thing. All of the people on the other side – the catchers – are you.
You see that wherever the ball lands, it will be in the very hands because they are yours. So you’ll stop worrying so much because now there is no unsafe option.
And what’s even more amazing is that when you go to make the decision, it doesn’t feel like a decision at all anymore. You’ve already decided who you are, what you like, what you need, and who you want to be. So all you have to do now is let the person you are take action. It’s not really a decision. It’s the only thing that the person you’ve become could possibly do.
Once you do the thing, be careful not to backtrack due to OPOs or because it feels weird and different. New paths – or even old ones with a new perspective – will always be full of brush and it will be hard to see more than a few inches ahead. Know that this is okay and you don’t need to see more than those few inches. You’ve got you.
And then at some point in the future, you’ll look back on your experience and you’ll feel really proud of yourself. You’ll sit with your large milkshake and your ignored phone calls and you’ll realize you knew just what to do all along. Your life didn’t blow up. It just got interesting.
