17 How Do I Decide?
Mark was frozen over the decision. He had no idea what to do. Every time Mark had decided this issue previously, he seemed to have chosen wrong. Yet each time, Mark had gotten all the information, examined it closely, considered all options, and clearly made the best choice, even according to everyone else whom he had consulted. But things had still turned out wrong. And now, Mark faced the same question yet again, waiting for him to make his choice. The whole idea of choosing the best option but having things turn out poorly again made Mark’s head swim and tied his stomach in knots. Clearly, Mark needed another approach. He even briefly considered randomly drawing an option out of a hat but decided against it. Time was ticking, though, which only made Mark even more disconcerted.
Deciding
Making decisions can tax the mind and vex the soul. Every decision forecloses another option that can immediately look like the better one. Buyer’s remorse is real. Looking backward, one can see a trail of bad choices. Looking forward, one sees more and more risk, until every decision seems fraught with peril, freezing the will. Making decisions has a lot to do with foresight, prediction, and control. We want to control outcomes more than make the decisions that lead to them because we know that every decision comes with risks of unforeseen and undesired outcomes. We thus try to follow sound and rational decision-making processes, carefully weighing all factors, and even getting expert advice. Yet we still err, it seems like just as often when relying on a sound process and recognized experts as not. What is wrong with our decision making? How can we better decide? Or, to put the question in a better way, how can we think more clearly about decision making, when decisions seem so often to turn out only half right but also half wrong?
Process
Sometimes, the trouble with our decision making is in a poor process. We ask ourselves the wrong question and inevitably get an unhelpful answer. We also ask the right questions but don’t research reliable data to measure or don’t choose sound measures. And we sometimes rush the process or decide with evident bias for an answer we’d already chosen before we even began. So, to avoid basic errors, use a sound decision-making process. First, identify the right question. Then, discern any objective measures with which you can correctly answer the question. What discovery would make you answer the question one way and not another way? Then, research the data on those measures until you have reliable inputs with which to answer the question. Then, carefully weigh those inputs until you’ve reached the clearest answer, while getting advice and counsel from others who have superior experience in weighing the data. A sound process should help you eliminate at least some errors. But also recognize that the more you obsess over decisions, the more you are exhibiting a frustrated sense of control.
Certainty
Your obsession with making the one right decision may indeed reflect your subconscious acknowledgment that you don’t have total control, not nearly. The first thing to recognize about decision making is that it reflects our need for control, where the sense that we are in control is mostly an illusion. Certainty seeking is control seeking. When making decisions, we assume some degree of predictability and therefore that we have some degree of control over the decision’s outcome. Outcomes sometimes align with our plans, fostering that illusion of control. We especially feel the urgent need to control the outcome of big decisions like whom to date and marry but also consequential decisions like what education and career to pursue, what job to take, and where and how to live. Even the smaller questions like how to spend, save, and invest money, and what vehicle to acquire on what terms, can loom with the weight of significance. But we largely don’t have the degree of control that we seek. The variables are far too many. The best process with the best inputs can still lead to surprising outcomes, sometimes for the better but sometimes for the worse and most often just different.
Limitations
You do, though, have a way to recognize the high degree of uncertainty in decision making, to improve your decision making. Our conscious capacity is extremely limited. We can only consciously consider and evaluate at any one moment a tiny bit of the information available to us, using a relatively small portion of our cognitive capacity. Our mental processing passes through a very small gate or bottleneck that shuts out all but a tiny fraction of the factors and influences affecting the options and outcomes. Even when we consider factors one by one, we don’t come close to considering all of them or integrating them into the patterns that their complexity and interaction actually produce. You can’t control very much with such a limited conscious capacity. Indeed, the more you pursue certainty, the more you cripple your decision making. Your pursuit of certainty fosters a perceptual blindness, keeping you from seeing the emerging patterns.
Breakdown
Too strong of a need for certainty can do more than just impede your sound decision making. Seeking control and guarantees can also contribute to a breakdown of your psyche, soul, and spirit. Your need for certainty can cause you mental and emotional suffering. Your seeking of certainty and guarantees projects your fear and insecurity of unforeseen outcomes, especially of contributing to your own challenges and failures. Fundamentally, your need for certainty represents your fear of meeting the fears and insecurities that you have hidden in your darker unconscious. The more you suppress your insecurities against risk and adventure, those personal attributes that you have hidden in your soul, the more you will obsess over decisions due to their uncertainty. Recognizing your unconscious fears and insecurities, bringing them into the light, and letting the light turn them into courage, adventure, and reward-seeking risk should reduce your obsessive need for certainty. Accept the possibility of failure, even your own failure through your hidden capacity to betray, and then deal with it through its illumination into positive characteristics.
Intuition
So, big steps to improving your decision making can be to forgo your pursuit of control through certainty, and to bring your hidden fears into the light. Yet you can also improve your decision making by embracing your intuitive capacity. Yes, follow a sound decision-making process. But recognize that an obsessive process simultaneously creates perceptual blindness, potentially leading you away from the subtle patterns and hidden fortuities that hold your creative answer. The answers to your question may be more numerous, broader, deeper, and richer than your decision-making process anticipates. Thus, keep an open mind for those patterns and fortuities. Indeed, welcome into your decision making your unconscious, intuitive capacity. Embody and live your question more than trying to answer it cognitively. Let your intuition draw on all your embodied experience, all your senses, and your subconscious and unconscious processes of which you are consciously unaware. Listen to your intuition or gut more than your conscious deliberative process. Your gut instincts may be discerning the complex pattern pointing you toward richer answers and opportunities that you do not even perceive.
Uncertainty
A fruitful way of approaching decision making is to recognize that the uncertainty that we find everywhere represents not a threat or risk but instead the world’s immense potential. And that potential isn’t just out there but also inside yourself. Treat uncertainty in your decision making as your personal psychological open space. Uncertainty is your personal blank canvas where your creativity can emerge as your unconscious self delivers its gifts. When you embrace uncertainty, you embrace your authentic self. Don’t try to control all outcomes. Doing so is denying your expression of your genuine deeper self. Consider uncertainty to be a tide bringing you rich gifts. Scripture calls it casting your bread upon the waters to see what return it will bring. Embracing uncertainty unlocks a deep intuitive and creative intelligence within you that certainty blocks. Your psyche works intuitively, through uncertainty. Watch where circumstances take you rather than always trying to control where you go. Unplanned moments can be richer than planned outcomes. Fortuities aren’t accidents. Uncertainty has fractal patterns. Chaos has its own order. Embracing uncertainty incorporates your deeper intelligence to recognize and pursue those patterns.
Transformation
You have another fruitful way to look at decision making in the midst of uncertainty, which is that uncertainty’s purpose is transformation. Uncertainty isn’t random but instead patterned, fortuitous, organized in fractals that reflect the cosmic structure. Uncertainty therefore isn’t disabling. Uncertainty instead invites, grows, and matures you in a transformative manner. Your transformation happens through your circumstances aligning for you, far more than in your planning for predicted outcomes. Embracing uncertainty can feel like emptiness because you have freed yourself of the plans fashioned by your controlling ego. But learn to tolerate the discomfort of your emptiness because only through your emptiness can you receive the new to fill you. Unconscious wisdom won’t compete with your plans. It only emerges in empty containers. The unconscious delivers richer gifts than your conscious plans. Thus, seek your transformation over your making the one perfect decision. Let your transformation resolve your questions rather than your decisions resolving your questions. Your transcendent dimension creates new options and opportunities for you through your deeper intuited self. Don’t seek what you should do as much as who you are becoming.
Questions
Another fruitful approach to decision making involves how you think about the questions you are trying to answer. The questions that you pose to yourself involve drawing from the unknown. Every time that you ask yourself a significant question, you invite the unknown and all of its potential into your soul. Doing so then gives you the opportunity to live out your question, not so much to answer the question as to let it transform you as its purpose and answer. Don’t avoid your own questions. And don’t seek certainty in your questions. Instead, let your questions plumb the vast unknown, the deeper the better. Then, let the tension of your unanswered deepest questions draw new psychological and spiritual capacities into and out of your soul. Hold in your psyche and spirit the full tension of the question, without seeking to force its resolution. Let the question’s resolution emerge in your psyche’s transformation. If your question involves two conflicting options, hold their paths side by side in your mind and soul until the third path emerges that includes elements of both paths but has its own character. Treat questions as resources, as doors to your expanding spirit and soul.
Outcomes
One final approach to decision making that you may find fruitful involves how you view the outcome of your decisions. In your decision making, don’t pursue the single clear outcome that you can best conceive and that you most desire. Instead, leave your desired outcomes sufficiently unclear and uncertain to allow for better and richer outcomes than you perceive. You may, for instance, have a clear image of a perfect marriage or a perfect job or career, leading you to pursue those images even though they do not in reality exist. In pursuing those images, you may miss better outcomes that were available to you, when what you pursue is not available. Pursue the uncertain outcome that is most available and best for you, not the certain outcome that is less than the best and in any case unavailable. Let reality and creativity flow through you rather than constricting it to your artificial and limited ideals. Connect your psyche, soul, and spirit to resources beyond your conscious inventory. Draw from your unconscious potential when making decisions.
Reflection
Do you obsess over decisions? Do you have a habitual process that you follow to make important decisions? How does your decision-making process compare to the process described near the beginning of this chapter? Could you improve your decision making? What have been your best big decisions? What have been your worst big decisions? To what degree do you think you control the outcomes of your big and small decisions? Do you allow for uncertainty in your decisions, that things might not turn out as you expect? To what degree do you use your intuition rather than a conscious process, when making decisions? Have you made a decision intuitively, going with your gut, that turned out well for you despite the advice of others? Have you successfully avoided making a big decision that would have foreclosed something good that subsequently happened to you? Are you good at holding a question in mind, letting it work its way into and through you, transforming you? How good are you at asking the right questions, the deeper ones that don’t have immediate answers and that may instead become guides to your psychological and spiritual transformation?
Key Points
Decisions can burden our mind and vex our soul over their uncertainty.
Follow sound decision-making processes based on reliable measures.
But don’t seek certainty in decision making because it rarely exists.
Seeking certainty can cripple your decision-making process.
Conscious processes significantly limit information and capacities.
Obsessing over decisions can break down the soul, spirit, and psyche.
Instead, welcome your intuitive capacities into your decision making.
Embracing uncertainty unlocks your deeper creative capacities.
Uncertainty’s purpose is psychological and spiritual transformation.
Asking the right questions involves drawing from the vast unknown.
Allow your anticipated outcomes a rich degree of inviting uncertainty.