Supercoach - Michael Neill [30]
He stayed down there for months, poring over the ancient texts by candlelight, pausing only to pray, to sleep, and to eat the meals that were left outside the door of the vaults every morning.
One day when the young monk assigned to care for him came by to gather up the empty dishes, he heard what sounded like distant crying. Although going down into the vaults was strictly forbidden, the young monk opened the door, lit a candle, and made his way into the sacred heart of the monastery. There he found his beloved new abbot sobbing uncontrollably.
“What’s the matter, brother?” the young monk asked the abbot.
The weary abbot looked hopelessly up into the gentle eyes of the young monk. “We’ve made a terrible mistake,” he said. “The original word was ‘celebrate’ . . .”
You Already Know What to Do
In theory, making decisions should be one of the easiest things in the world for us to do. After all, we either want to do something or we don’t. On those rare occasions when we’re not sure, it doesn’t really matter. We can make whatever decision we want, or even flip a coin, knowing that we can change our minds afterward if what we thought we wanted turns out not to be all it was cracked up to be.
So why is decision making so difficult so much of the time?
Mostly because we get caught up in our thoughts that the decision matters, and that in some way we could or should know in advance how things will turn out.
But what if you couldn’t make a mistake? What if whatever you decided always turned out to be the best thing, given the range of choices and information you had available to you at that moment?
The secret of effective decision making is simply this:
What you decide will never impact your
life as much as how you handle
the consequences of that decision.
In other words, marrying the wrong person is just a mistake; staying married to them for the next 25 years and being miserable about it is a bad decision.
Choosing one job over another might be a mistake; giving up on your career and spending the rest of your life pining over what might have been is a bad decision.
Getting tipsy and embarrassing yourself in front of that hottie from the office might be a mistake; letting it define you as a loser, a drunk, or someone not fit for human society would be a bad decision.
What makes for good decisions is what executive supercoach John LaValle calls “good brain juice”—the clarity in your mind that comes from having good feelings going on inside your body. When you’re in a clear state, you generally either know what to do or know that it doesn’t particularly matter. When you’re caught up in a low mood (something we’ll explore in depth in our next session), spending all your time imagining the possible negative consequences of making a decision, you’ll tend to struggle.
What can make things easier is recognizing that no matter what you decide, you can almost always change your mind.
I had a client a few years back who was trying to decide between two high-level job offers from rival companies. After much internal and external debate, he accepted the job from the more traditional company, only to realize a few days later that his heart really wasn’t in that decision. Because he was willing to make what he wanted more important than any sort of embarrassment or self-image issues that changing his mind might have engendered, he went back to the recruitment teams from both companies and admitted that he’d made a mistake. While the traditional company was reluctant to let him go, the other company snapped him up in seconds, and to this day he is thriving in his