Decisions, decisions
A little something about matrices, ways of knowing, and acting "as if"
Decision making. Every semester I lead a class session about it and every semester I think about how there is no better example of "those who can't do, teach." I've never been the most decisive person. It's possible that people in my life have occasionally had to utter the phrase "it's just lunch," to break my over-analysis of falafel versus Greek salad (it's falafel, always go with the falafel… except there's that delicious feta cheese on the salad).
Anyway…
In this class about decision making, we talk about choice overload and the importance of narrowing down your options to make decisions less overwhelming, thus increasing your likelihood to actually make a decision. In sticking with the food metaphor, this is the difference between pondering the notebook-sized Cheesecake Factory menu versus a little one-pager of options at a museum cafe. We talk about decision matrices as tools for evaluating and narrowing down options and test drive those a bit:
From there we move on to think about all the different forms of knowing or intelligence that inform those final choices from the narrowed down list:
Cognitive — the facts, be they actual mathematical/scientific facts about a thing or the data we've gathered via our matrices or lists of pros and cons
Social — the input of trusted mentors, community members, coaches; sometimes a sense of communal insight
Emotional — our "gut" feeling about the thing, intuition and inclinations, spiritual connections
Physical — how the decision makes us feel, is the nervousness accompanied by curiosity or dread, do our shoulders tighten or relax, how does a particular option feel in our bodies
Toward the end of class, I always have a time for students to share tools or insights that have been helpful for them in decision making. This semester someone shared the technique of imagining yourself in the future, having made one decision versus the other and comparing how this imagined future you feels. Six months from now, how will you feel with that new job versus the current one; if you are out of a current relationship versus still in it; if you've started that project you've been putting off versus not? What do both decisions feel like in your body: heavy/light; tense/relaxed? And how might it feel to tell a friend about what changed or what hadn't?
This concept of acting "as if" is a way to try on a decision and getting data feels very similar to the concept of judging your interest in something by how you feel after it's done, instead of by how hard it was to start (aka, The Afterglow). Perhaps a choice feels almost insurmountably difficult in the moment, but the way you imagine yourself feeling a few months down the road feels so different in all the right ways that you realize it's worth pushing through the hard stuff. Or maybe you act as if you've quit something that you realize you'd likely really miss if it wasn't there. Such a great way to tap into our emotional and physical ways of knowing.
I can say without a doubt that all the decision matrices, a solid understanding of ways of knowing, and all the helpful exercises in the world don't make it easy to make big decisions. However, they can help us move forward with the knowledge that we've made the best decision we possibly could at the time. And that's not nothing.
Now back to that falafel vs. feta…
This Week Last Year
It's been a fascinating exercise to include these "snapshot from a year ago" links here; to think about what has and hasn't changed over time. This week's was particularly interesting in that I haven't been meditating daily since January of this year. I don't have a big important reason for this: I could say that it got to feel a little too routine, like I was checking a box each day just to keep a six-year streak unbroken. While that is true, what's more true is that I just lost the thread of the practice and allowed things to take priority over meditation. It happens, and while I'm not judging myself for it, it is informative to read this post from a year ago, and realize that I have been feeling more of that "paddling hard beneath it" feeling. A nudge back toward my practice, perhaps.
Squirrel of the Week
Spotted on a road trip by reader, Jenni — this little cutie lives in the North Carolina Welcome Center off Interstate 95:
Do you have any techniques that have helped you make big decisions? Which way of knowing do you feel like you tap into the most? Are you going with the falafel or feta?