Before You Make That Decision

Raise your hand if you have ever made a big decision based purely on how you thought it would make you feel afterward.

If you are being honest, your hand is up. Mine is too. Maybe if I get that board certification, I will stop feeling like an imposter. Maybe if I take that leadership role, I will finally feel respected. Maybe if I drop my FTE, I will finally feel calm. There is nothing wrong with thinking this way, it is one of the most human things we do, but most of us never slow down long enough to check whether it is actually true.

Here is where I want to start: the why underneath the decision.

When a client comes to me wrestling with something big, an FTE change, a job switch, a leadership role, I will ask them to do something a little strange. I ask them to imagine the decision is already made. Months down the road, already living it. What do you feel?

With one client considering an FTE drop, the first word out of her mouth was calm. Not a list of logistics, not a spreadsheet, calm. That single word told us more about what she actually needed than an hour of pros and cons ever could.

Once you know the feeling you are actually after, you get to look at the decision differently. And here is the part that changes everything: the decision itself does not create that feeling. Your thoughts do.

Dropping your FTE does not automatically create calm. If you go to 0.8 but you are still charting at your desk at six every night, still not walking out the door when you meant to, you have simply built a version of your old schedule that pays you less. The FTE drop did not fail you, it was never going to do the job on its own. What creates calm is the boundary you actually hold once that time opens up.

The same is true on the other end. Getting the board certification does not create mastery. What creates mastery is doing the work over and over, badly at first, then less badly, until you have actually earned the confidence you were hoping the certificate would hand you. The letters after your name are not nothing, but they were never going to do the inner work for you.

This is not a failure of willpower. Most of us were never taught to separate the decision from the feeling we are chasing. We were taught to solve for the circumstance and assume the feeling would follow. It usually does not, at least not on its own.

So before your next big decision, try asking why a few layers deeper than you normally would. Not just why am I considering this, but what do I think this is going to give me, and is there any way to start building that thing right now, decision or not. Sometimes that question makes the original decision much clearer. Sometimes it turns out you did not need to make it in the first place.

If you want a full walk through this process, including the client story and a few of my own confessions about late night Google spirals, the full episode is live now.

I also recently built something for exactly this moment, when you have got a decision sitting in front of you and you just need one focused hour to think it through with someone. It is called The One, a single 60 minute session, no package, no commitment. You can find it at healthierforgood.com.