3 exercises for making hard life decisions
A common topic type that clients will bring in is a life decision they’re stuck on — should I take a new role, should I work with this cofounder or solo-found, should I move, etc. These are decisions that keep you up at night, that can sometimes feel impossible to make, especially for optimizers and over-thinkers (raising my hand!).
For life decisions, logic/data can occasionally help you deduce the “right” choice. Most of the time though, it can’t, because there is no objectively “right” choice.
I call the latter “hard decisions” - here are a few traits of them:
The options are “on-par” (termed in one of my favorite essays on the subject), meaning there isn’t a clear best.
Different people in your situation would make different decisions, and they’d all be understandable.
Fear is often present.
Another energy is also often present, one that feels exciting and expansive.
What do you do in those decisions? While we all optimize for different things in our lives, if you ask anyone what they ultimately want from this decision, they’ll say - I want to be happy with the choice I made. We just often get muddled in the details of what will create that happiness, so it’s helpful to shake up our perspectives.
Here are 3 exercises that I find useful to do just that, in order of most structured to least structured (and most vibe-y, for lack of a better word).
#1: Values Rubric
Values are the ingredients of life that make it feel meaningful to you. When your values are being expressed, you feel deeply fulfilled and alive. They are, even if we don’t realize, what we actually want to be driven by, and can sometimes come into conflict with external standards of success. In some ways, if there’s an external rubric for how life “should” be, then your values, a unique fingerprint of you, are the internal rubric for whether you’re living your truest, most fulfilled life.
So, one way to make a hard life decision is to run the options through your values* and ask, for each option A, B, C, etc:
Which values does this option help you honor?
Which values are traded off or suppressed?
How strongly does this help you live by your top values?
And of course, there may be tradeoffs, so - what are the top values you want to optimize for right now?
There are two reasons that using values for your rubric is perspective-shifting for your decision. 1) Hard decisions usually involve a great deal of fear (which holds us back), and values help us transcend some of that fear to imagine what we truly want. 2) Society / external signals can confuse us into optimizing for things we don’t actually care that much about - thinking through your own values ensures you’re optimizing for what you actually want in your life.
*How to create your values list? Read this.
#2: Alternate Endings
OK my book and movie lovers love this one.
Pretend you are a character in a story (that ends happy ;)). What would it mean if you chose option A, or B, or C? In each of these cases, what is the story of your life? Which option would be most in-line with who the character is (i.e. who you are)? Which option would be most in-line with who you want the character to be? Who is the character that chooses option A? B? C?
The reason this is helpful is that 1) it helps you create some distance from your day-to-day concerns and take a more meta-view of your life, which helps you transcend some fears and 2) it helps you ask yourself who you are in each of these options, which helps you feel more confident in the choice you ultimately make (because it affirms who you are).
#3: From Fear or Love
Lastly, here’s the most “woo-woo” of the strategies, but it helps you get at your “gut” feeling, where a lot of your wisdom lies. Remember above, when we said a quality of hard decisions is that there is both fear and this other expansive energy present? We have choice in whether we want to act from fear, or from this other energy, which I call love.
If you were to choose option A, would that be a decision from a place of fear? Or love?
How do I know if a decision comes from fear or love?
Acting from fear feels like: contraction, feeling small, boredom, dullness, focused on past or future (but not present).
Acting from love feels like: expansion, aliveness, openness, authenticity/intuition, possibility, peace, presence, vulnerability.
Try to feel into this one - notice what happens in your body when you imagine life forces you down this option - do you feel alive and present and expansive? Or do you feel bored, small, dull?
Note that there can be fear in every option, but it’s about what you choose to do with that fear - do you act from it, or do you choose the other energy to act from?
💡 Hope these strategies are useful as you apply it to any big life decisions you’re making! (You can also adapt it to use for work/leadership decisions - we can talk about how)! I have some pay-what-you-can sessions available this month for new clients if you want to work through a decision live with me so we can get a little deeper. (We can also work through any other topic).
Let me know if you have any other hard-life-decision-making frameworks you enjoy - would love to hear!
🌱,
Cissy
So useful and so well written. Thanks for sharing!!