Making Decisions, Easily | #98

What's the next most obvious step?

Writer’s Note (Dec 10, 2024): This post must be categorized as “Unfinished Business.” Decision-making is a sticky topic, one I continue to explore, practice, and reflect on. This short essay is my attempt to thinking out loud about a technique for decisions that has served me well, but still remains hard to pin down. I wonder if it will be useful to you all. I hope it could be. So it’s with that intention that I let go of my perfectionism and publish this unfinished essay from October. Enjoy.

Sunrise in Barcelona. October 2024.

Making Decisions, Easily

Draft v.3 | October 1, 2024

I’ve made more decisions this past year than any other year in my life.

Why?

We moved countries, bought and renovated a flat, had a baby, and grew our business.

So, am I an expert at decision-making now?! Ha. Not even close.

But there’s a deceivingly simple technique I’ve been using for the past year or so that has brought a lot more ease into my life, I felt called to write it up.

In this post, I’ll do my best to explain and unpack this technique. Hopefully some of you will find value using it in your own lives.

DECISIONS

Let’s rewind the tape.

Readers of this newsletter know we moved to Portugal in March 2023. After a semi-nomadic year, we decided to make a new home in Lisbon (not least because of the sunshine 🌞). 

We also decided in January of last year we wanted to start a family. After a devastating miscarriage in June, we were blessed with a healthy pregnancy in August, and Claire gave birth to our devastatingly cute daughter, Kaia, in May 2024.

Amidst the baby business, our own business had a stellar year due to a special partnership we landed with the kind folks at L’Oréal. Claire and I spent a lot of 2023 traveling between Paris and Düsseldorf delivering for L’Oréal teams.

As 2023 was a financially successful year for us, we then decided to makes some long-term investments in our company—things like redesigning our website, hiring an assistant to support with admin & ops, hiring some marketing specialists to help us grow our audience—so there have been even more decisions than normal.

We also spent last year searching for a home to buy in Lisbon, which eventually happened in September, then we quickly embarked on a major renovation project shortly thereafter (still ongoing…subject for another post).

So, we had some decisions to do.

Let’s start with the house. From finding a property, to securing a mortgage in a foreign country, to completing the purchase it, we made many, many decisions. Then we started renovating it! While Claire led & managed this, I think collectively we've taken 10,000 decisions.

Then, the baby. Where to start? Even before Kaia was born, we had dozens of decisions to make (do we want a doula, which hospital feels right, how about our doctor/OB, any specific preferences for the birth plan, etc.). Since lil’ Kaia was born, every week day presents us with countless new decisions to make.

How did we make these decisions?

If you’re reading this newsletter, my bet is that your the type of person who thinks about self-improvement, and that interest might have led you to some of the more traditional advice out there on making decisions.

There are whole books (Thinking Fast and Slow, Blink, Nudge) on making how to improve decision-making.

There are an endless amount of frameworks, mental models, 8-step processes, and so on.

While I think some of these models are great, I’ve found most of them to rely heavily on the logical and rational aspects of our intelligence, and often overlook the important role that emotions play in good decision-making.

Enter, Joe Hudson.

ONE SIMPLE QUESTION

Joe is an executive coach, but he’s far more than that. He is a deep, loving, connected human who leads an organization called the Art of Accomplishment (AoA). AoA runs the most transformative online training I’ve ever experienced.

After witnessing Joe’s magic in a “Rapid Fire Coaching” session he held in another course I was taking (Nervous System Mastery), I became obsessed. My wife Claire was equally intrigued, and she took the leap to enroll in the Great Decisions Course. I later took the Connection Course myself.

Through Claire’s experience in the Great Decisions Course, I learned a lot of valuable lessons.

In particular, there is one idea that has stuck with me over the past 18 months.

It’s this simple question: What's the next most obvious step?

Here’s a story from Joe explaining the concept (listen to the full convo here):

When I was investing, which I called investing for philanthropy where we would put millions of dollars into some project, there is this moment when you ask yourself if you are going to do that, put this money in. When I saw that, I used to think that was a decision I have to make and make well. Through my time working in philanthropy, what I realized was that’s false. That’s not true. It’s never true. What’s true is you do the next most obvious thing. 

If I am thinking if I should put the money in or not, there is some fear. What is the fear I have to address? I don’t know if this person is going to be great. I will do some reference checks. Am I sending them money now or am I still trying to make a decision? I am still trying to make a decision. Maybe they are not serving. The next most obvious step is to call some of the people they are serving and make sure their product is as good or their service is as good as I thought it was. 

It was a constant looking. Anytime I thought I had to make a decision, what’s the next most obvious step? What’s the fear not being addressed here? What’s the next most obvious step?”

Inherent in Joe’s approach is an appreciation for the emotional aspect of decisions. In fact, all decisions are emotional decisions.

Here’s Joe’s summary from the interview:

We’ve talked about the thing many times on the podcast about how the emotional center is the decision-making part of our brain. If we remove it, it will take us half an hour to decide what color pen or whatever it is. You will maintain your intelligence, but you won’t be able to make any decisions. That’s the quintessential link. The quintessential link is that we make emotional decisions. We do not make intellectual decisions. What we are doing is we are using the intellect to help us try to understand how we will feel at the end of the decision.

This is really a key point worth lingering on. We make decisions with emotions. Every decision is an emotional decision. Our decisions are driven by a desire to feel, or not feel, some emotion.

For a fascinating exploration of the neuroscience behind emotions role in decision-making, this 3-min video clip from Daniel Goleman, author of Emotional Intelligence, explaining a case study from neuroscientist Anthony Demasio is worth the watch:

BIG DECISIONS

What I’ve learned from asking Joe’s question is that it can break down big, scary decisions into a more fluid, effortless process.

Should we hire an assistant?

Should we invest in a website rebuild?

Should we give birth at a private hospital or a public one?

(note: I know the world “should” is a naughty word but forgive me…)

In all of these, you’ll notice the decisions feel binary. It’s a “yes” or a “no” or a “this” or a “that.”

When my decisions feel binary, they feel big, and I start feeling tension. The tension is usually associated with feeling some fear. 

Take the website overhaul. It’s an expensive project in terms of time and money. So all of a sudden, I’m worried. Is it worth the money? Am I smart enough to do it well? What if I fuck it up?

There’s the fear.

But wait a second…is this a Big Decision?

When I slowed down and remembered Joe’s question, I began the process of asking questions.

When I asked, “what’s the next most obvious step?” it became clear that I needed to know if we could finance it with the cash in the business.

Ok, we can. Now, what’s the next most obvious step? Writing a brief one-pager to crystalize my goals for the project.

Ok, done. Now what? I want to discuss it with Claire to get her ideas and feedback on the site, and then do the same with John.

Ok, now what’s the next most obvious step? I want to speak a few web designers, socialize the brief, and see if I find someone great to work on it.

This process continued and continued until the decision became obvious. 

I knew we could afford it, I knew what wanted the new site to accomplish, I found a great designer, and here are we, decision made. It almost wasn’t like making a decision, it was more like letting a process unfold.

Now, this process is simple, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy.

The reason it’s not easy is because usually what needs to happen is I need to recognize the underlying emotion in the decision, and I need to feel that feeling! 

But the more I come into contact with my emotions, the less scary they feel. And the more I address the emotion, the smoother my decision-making has become.

Here are a few lessons I’ve learned putting it into practice

Feel all your feelings

This is the my work. I have years and years and years of practice living in my head, so I am continuing to learn how to feel into my body, recognize my emotions, and be with them. A great technique for this is Emotional Inquiry.

Accept and learn to enjoy the “bad” feelings

It’s fun to feel joy, gratitude, contentment, and so on. But who the hell wants to feel fear, anxiety, envy, etc.?! The key I’m finding is to welcome, accept, and learn to love the difficult emotions, because these sticky-icky not-so-nice feelings are the main culprits of stuck-ness in decision making.

Do it with somebody else

Man, this process can be tough at first. But it’s been made a lot easier through my partnership with Claire. I’m a verbal person so I “talk to think” and I’ve found vocalizing the process of asking “what’s the next most obvious step?” with Claire is like playing this game on easy-mode. Don’t play life on hard-mode guys.

Here are a few other techniques or ideas I’ve found helpful

Make a decision and find out

Have you ever said “yes” to something and then immediately felt like shit? That’s a good sign from your intuition, and it’s wise not to ignore it. Of course, you can’t always back out of a decision, but sometimes I’m able to trick my mind by “making a decision” and then witnessing how my body responds, and then changing the decision accordingly. 

Hell Yeah or No

This mantra by Derek Sivers is simple and powerful: “If you feel anything less than “hell yeah!” about something, say no.” It’s a sharp way to get right down to business. If your system isn’t going YES, then just say no.

Would I do this tomorrow?

It’s easy to accept an invitation to some event, meeting, or social plan a couple weeks away, even if you’re a bit hesitant. Because it’s in the future, we’re not very good at predicting how we’ll feel about it, so it can mean we say yes to things that should be a no. A little trick is to ask yourself if this thing was tomorrow, would you be excited about it? Great, do it. If not, consider saying no.

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