What To Do If You Can’t Make A Decision

Are you one of those people able to glide effortlessly through the messy business of life, making quick, intuitive decisions and sticking to them?

Or, when faced with a judgement call, do you find yourself flailing in a morass of possibilities, a fog of maybe’s and what if’s, before plumping for one path in favour of another, while still endlessly looking back at what might have been?

If you fall into the latter camp, then this article is for you.

As a creative coach I’m often witness to the struggles people have when faced with a major – or, on occasions, minor – life decision. When people talk to me about whether they should accept an offer to work in a different company or country, or whether they should be putting their energy into writing their novel or their day job, or whether they’re even in the right job, I know that behind the conversation we’re having there have been anguished discussions with patient partners and long, sleepless nights; a painful thicket of indecision.

But it doesn’t have to be like this. Indeed, I’d argue that the fluster we get ourselves into when it comes to making a significant call is based on a fallacy. But, before we get to that fallacy, I’d like to share a couple of strategies for you to try next time you find yourself lost in an agony of deliberation.  

A criterion often applied when faced with a big decision is ‘Will it make me happy?’ This seems reasonable enough. We're all entitled to pursue some kind of contentment during our short time on this planet. The problem is that we’re not very good at determining what makes us truly happy. You might think that sunshine, cocktails and beaches would be enough. But, really, a lifetime of sunshine, cocktails and beaches could get a bit much – even if, right now, in the depths of a wintry fog here in Wales that does sound rather appealing.

And what about those experiences of struggle that were really tough at the time, unpleasant even, but looking back are a source of self-worth and pride?

The Jungian psychologist James Hollis has a much more helpful question to ask yourself: ‘Will this choice enlarge or diminish me?’

While it’s difficult to say what path will ultimately lead to happiness, it’s often much clearer to determine which one is more likely to lead to personal growth. And the question recognises the inevitability of any choice carrying with it a degree of discomfort or hardship. I first came across this way of approaching dilemmas in an article by the writer Oliver Burkeman, who himself added that we shouldn’t be too worried about burning bridges either. Once a bridge is burnt it means that there can be no recriminations: now the only path is forward.

A second strategy for you to try if instinct is failing you and you just cannot make a call, is the no-look coin toss. Here’s how it works. Let’s say you have to decide between A and B. You allocate choice A to heads and B to tails. Then you toss a coin. But rather than wait for the coin to land you pay attention to how you’re feeling as it spins through the air. You’ll probably discover that you already know which way you’d like it to land. In that moment your rational self will be eclipsed by a much more intuitive gut instinct. So you don’t need to see which side lands face up - you’ve already discovered which way you really want to go.

So, there are two strategies for you to try next time you’re stuck. But there’s also a deeper philosophical point to consider here too - what if the notion that we can make the right or wrong call is itself a fallacy?

Any decision you take happens at a fixed moment in time. It’s from the perspective of where you’re at on a given day. You’re making a judgement based on what you perceive to be the likely outcome of the decision, and whether that outcome is good or bad. But here’s the thing … we cannot say with any degree of certainty what the outcome of a decision will actually be. Life gets in the way. You decide to take up a job offer that will advance your career. On the way to your new office you stumble on a kerb and get run over by a bus. What was ostensibly a good decision turns out to have been a very bad one, but there was no way the negative outcome could have been predicted.

And often what is regarded as a negative outcome today can turn out in the long run to be the best thing that could have happened. Maybe not in the bus fatality situation, or indeed in any circumstance where success or failure is binary, but certainly with those events in our lives where the ramifications are subtler and more complex. I’ve written before about my own personal nadir, around ten years ago, which led to my wife and I losing our home. At the time it was extremely painful and arose as the consequence of me making what appeared to have been a series of bad decisions.

And yet the experience forced me to rethink my value system, to recalibrate and to take a new professional path that has become much more rewarding – and truer to who I am – than the one I was on before.

One of the reasons we agonise about making a decision is that we’re terribly afraid of making a mistake. And indeed there are times when an action you’ve taken does lead to an unequivocal failure: a defender in a football match passes back to his keeper, allowing the opposing team to intercept the ball and score the winning goal. That’s a mistake. But most events in life are rarely as clear cut. Most of the time they are just things that happen; whether they are good or bad is all a question of where you’re standing.

So if it’s almost impossible to determine what the consequences of a decision will be, and if it’s equally difficult to know for sure whether in the long term the outcome will be a good or bad thing, do we really have control over anything? Is the logical consequence of this that we should just cast ourselves adrift on the winds of fortune? Well, not entirely. While we might not have much say in where events ultimately take us, the one thing that is in our hands, all the time, is how we respond to them. This is where we definitely do have a choice. And it’s the most important one there is. As the jazz legend Miles Davis once said, “It’s not the note you play that’s the wrong note - it’s the note you play afterwards that makes it right or wrong.”

I hope this article helps you navigate any tough decisions you’re facing. But if you could use a little extra help consider creative coaching.