Episode 208: Decision Fatigue or Decision Ease
Introduction
You’re listening to Live Free Creative, an intentional podcast with practical tips for living your life on purpose. I’m your host, Miranda Anderson. And I believe in creativity, adventure, curiosity, and the magic of small moments. I hope that every time you listen, you feel empowered and free to live the life that you want.
Welcome, welcome back to Live Free Creative Podcast. This is episode 208, Decision Fatigue or Decision Ease. I’m so happy that you’re here. I’m grateful to have your ears today for this topic that affects all of us. We are all making decisions all day long, every day, whether we are thinking deeply about them or not.
Today’s episode is a bonus episode that I shared several months ago on my Patreon group, the Live Free Creative Podcast Plus group. I think the information is really important. I’m excited to bring it over here to the main feed, and it also gave me a chance to have a buffer week as I am deep in my studies and I was traveling over the weekend.
Sharing this bonus episode gives me a great chance to regroup here at home while also still sharing really important, valuable, and hopefully inspiring information with you.
My weekend trip was a quick 48 hour adventure to New York City with a good friend. We took the train up on Friday evening, went out to a Great Ramen dinner. We spent the day wandering the city. We had a couple shops we wanted to check out and got some great food. Dipped into a couple of our favorite treats.
And then that night we went and saw Music Man on Broadway with Hugh Jackman and Sutton Foster. And I will tell you, it blew both of us away.
Both my friend and I are seasoned Broadway theater attendees, participants. We’ve gone to lots of shows over our lifetimes, and this was one of the best that either of us had ever seen. The cast was so cohesive, so funny. You could tell that they were having a blast on stage. It felt so synergistic and entertaining and uplifting.
We had so much fun after the show. We had some delicious pizza. Went to sleep. We woke up Sunday morning for a quick hike and Central Park and a bagel, and hopped back on the train headed home.
Very quick, delightful weekend, and we kept commenting how it was a good reminder that even a very short getaway adventure vacation trip feels really important. By the time we got home, we felt like we had an entire trip, even though we were only gone for one true day.
Peaks Of The Week
For today’s segment, I wanted to share a quick peaks of the week of a couple favorite items that I picked up while we were in New York.
Now I am a minimalist. I don’t spend a lot of time shopping. In fact, I have my actual shopping designations down to about twice a year, and we happen to be in one of those seasons right now.
The transition from summer to fall is when I revamp, make sure that I’ve got everything that I need. The same for my kids for our fall winter closets, and then I don’t worry about buying anything until the spring. Going up to New York was a perfect time to head into a couple shops where I knew that they had things that I had had a pin in or I had my eye on as something that would be a great addition to my fall wardrobe.
These decisions were so easy because I had already thought through them and planned on them, and had wrapped my mind around exactly what I was looking for. So there was this open hole in my wardrobe. I knew what I wanted, and I had done a little bit of looking, a little behind the scenes research to find what I thought might fit and the chance to go to New York and actually try on some of these things that otherwise I would just have to order online was really fun.
The ease of knowing what I wanted, walking into the store, trying on making sure that it fit, and then happily adding it to my bag and bringing it home felt like a very aligned and intentional shopping experience. There was so much ease in the decision making and just as there was ease in choosing what I was going to purchase to compliment my fall capsule wardrobe.
There was also a lot of ease in consciously disregarding the things that were beautiful and interesting that I did not need or had not planned on. It went both ways. Both the ease of the yes and the ease of the no’s. For today’s segment, I thought I would share a peaks of the week with two things that I bought while I was in New York that I had been excited about.
They fit perfectly and so I brought them home and I’m so looking forward to using them over and over for years to come. And a final peak of the week that I used all weekend long and my friend kept commenting, I need those. I need something just like that. So perfect. Peaks of a New York weekend in the fall/winter.
Here we go.
ClareV Bag
My first peak of the week is a small black leather fanny pack from the brand Clare V. I started using a fanny pack as my primary bag that I took around town with me with phone keys and wallet probably four or five years ago. At that time, I had one on hand that I had been gifted at a conference that I really liked, and I have been using it and it’s just slowly deteriorating because of the daily use.
So I knew that I wanted to upgrade to something that was leather, that was a little bit longer lasting, that maybe felt a little bit more chic than the sportier version that I have been using regularly. And I noticed that the brand Clare V had some really great ones. I have been a fan of Clare V for a couple years now.
I first found out about them because of my stylish younger sister who had started buying some of their pieces. This company is based in L.A. They have some shops in New York, and so going up to New York, I knew I would be able to actually put a bag over my shoulders and see how it fit and test my wallet and keys and phone inside it, and just of get a feel for whether or not it was going to be something that I wanted for the long term.
When I’m buying things for myself, I generally am thinking about them as something that I can use for as long as possible. I definitely subscribe to the idea ‘less but better’ so that all those values go into my decision making process.
I had my eye on a small black leather fanny pack and we got into the store and first of all, we’re just swooning at how beautiful everything was in person.
They have great branding, great style. It’s so fun to see the website and the shop was really fun. We oohed and ahhed and fell in love with everything in the whole store and tried on several different bags. Ultimately, I decided that this classic black leather fanny pack, which I wear is a cross body bag. I don’t often wear it around my hips is a fanny pack.
I wear it across, strapped onto my chest, so I have easy, direct access to all of the things that I need, and I can hop in and out of the car without having to set a bag down. This definitely is a post-toddler phase mom bag. I am no longer carrying around diapers or wipes or snacks or anything.
I just have my phone and my keys and my wallet most places that I go. So it’s a really great fit, this small, accessible, snappy bag, and it’s beautiful, it’s simple, it’s super well made, sustainably made, and I will be able to use it for years to come.
Alex Mill Jacket
My second New York Peak of the week is a recycled denim work jacket from Alex Mill. The color I chose is olive so it has a feel of a classic sort of army fatigue, military style work jacket. A little bit boxy, but not too oversized. The perfect weight to be in between a lightweight denim jacket and a heavier weight winter coat. So great for layering, great for wearing right now in the fall.
It can be the only jacket that I have on where once it gets a little bit colder, I can layer that with a sweater underneath it or even a coat over the top of it. This is something that I had definitely seen as a hole in my closet. I have a lighter weight linen work jacket that I really like the shape and style of. It’s just a little bit too light of weight for this upcoming season.
And Alex Mill is a brand that ust aligns really fully with my own personal aesthetic and style. It’s mostly primary, basic kind of neutral colors. It’s very classic looking. They talk about no one needs more clothes, but everyone needs the right clothes, and here’s the uniform, jumpsuits and classically tailored work style clothes.
It’s not too feminine. It’s a lot of navy blues and olives and browns and greens, which are my colorways for my closet. In fact, I walked into the store and just did like a sigh of, Oh, this feels like home. I could almost wear anything in here.
It’s the type of store where the clothes are meant to be mixed and matched. Like you could take five pieces and wear them for six months in various different iterations, and it would be more than enough.
The co-owners are former designers with J. Crew and Gap and Madewell. So it has that sort of very classic American style without a lot of the current trending. So these are pieces that you could see over and over again.
They feel very timeless and this jacket feels like something that I can wear, that I could have been wearing for the last five years and that I will continue to wear for the next 5, 10, 20 years. Just like a classic denim jacket. I think having a little bit heavier work jacket feels like a perfect layering fit for my fall winter wardrobe.
I will make sure that the fanny pack and the jacket are both linked in the show notes if you’re interested in checking them out, seeing what I’m talking about with both of these really fun brands.
Chelsea Boots
My third and final peak of the week, New York Edition, are a pair of black Chelsea boots that I added to my fall, winter wardrobe last year that have stood the test of time, and I wore them all weekend.
In New York, you know that you spend a lot of time on your feet walking, taking the subway, and then walking around Central Park, walking from block to block, walking down to Broadway. There’s a lot of walking involved.
And I brought one pair of shoes and the pair of shoes that I brought were these leather 10 point Chelsea boots in black that I found last year that I loved. And they’re pretty much my fall winter uniform boot. It was wet over the weekend, and so I knew that I wanted something that would feel water resistant.
And these have a little bit of a waterproof coating on them that I put on myself. Platform-ish. So they have a couple inches of height. They’re a little bit military style. They have a grippy bottom. They’re so comfortable and so versatile, and my friend kept saying, Gosh, I need a pair of boots like that.
Those are like the perfect fall winter boot. The brand is called Ten Points, and I bought them through Lotta from Stockholm, which is a shoe company that I really love and admire. These are high quality, sustainably made, conscious shoes that you can wear forever.
So between my new leather fanny pack and my work jacket and my boots, add a couple basic sweaters and pairs of jeans or corduroys, and I am set for the season, I will have all of those things linked in the show notes if you wanna check them out.
Those are my peaks of the week.
Decision Fatigue and Decision Ease
Okay, let’s get into talking about decision fatigue and decision ease. As a reminder, this episode that I’m about to air originally aired as part of a bonus podcast series on my Patreon group as I reference the bonus group, bonus episodes, or even the timeframe which this aired in the beginning of the year.
So I talk a little bit about the new year. That of course, doesn’t apply to right now, this particular season, although I think any time of year we can think about as a new season and the changes that we may consider making in our lives to invite a little bit more ease into our decision making process.
So I hope you enjoy.
This month as we’re getting started on a new year, I have been thinking a lot about decisions, how we make the decisions that we make, how those decisions even come to be part of our lives, who decides what we have to decide.
And there is so much research that goes back many years about the idea of decision making and how sometimes our decision making becomes so overwhelming that we actually start to lose our capacity to make good judgements.
Our processing stops and we get to the point in the day or in the week, or on a particular project where we have simply run out of decision making energy.
So for today’s bonus episode, I wanted to explore the idea of ease vs fatigue when it comes to our decisions.
You have probably heard the phrase decision fatigue before. Decision fatigue is a psychological phenomenon surrounding a person’s ability or capacity to make decisions. Sometimes it’s also called ego depletion, which I think is so interesting. Ego depletion.
The term decision fatigue was coined by social psychologist, Royal f Bauer Meister. Just about 10 or 15 years ago, so it’s a recent development in the field of psychology. And his studies showed that when humans were overstressed, they became hasty or shut down all together.
So rather than having the judgment and maintaining the ability to make clear decisions, people would simply, at the end of a long or arduous decision making process, or a day full of decisions, would simply shut down and stop making decisions or stop making decisions that were in their own best interest.
I’m sure you felt that way. I know sometimes I feel this way, and it’s very apparent to me on a Saturday night after a week of making decisions or after a day of managing the kids in the household and whatever our activities for the day are. And then every Saturday night my husband and I go out on a date.
We’ve had a standing Saturday night date night for over 10 years now, so we know that we’re going to go on a date. We just don’t always know in advance exactly what we wanna do or where we’re gonna go for the date.
It’s been so interesting to recognize the difference in the Saturday nights that we haven’t planned something and Dave says, Okay, what do you feel like doing? I have a clear idea and I have a confidence going into the decision and say, Oh, you know what I’d really love is to go get Thai food and go on a walk in the park.
That compared to the Saturday nights that it’s very clear that my decision making abilities have been weakened by this decision fatigue, and I can’t even fathom the idea of making one more decision, and I’ll just say I actually don’t care at all what we do. The best thing for me right now would be for you to make all of the decisions regarding date night, because I cannot even think about one more decision.
Now, of course, when it comes to something like a date night, it doesn’t matter that much what we do or where we go. We’re gonna have a great time being together and food is food at the end of the day.
But what if I hit those walls–and I sometimes do–regarding decisions that do matter. We want to be able to approach the most important decisions that have either long lasting or deep impact on our lives with some level of judgment and of wisdom.
And if we waste our decision making energy, making decisions all day long or all week long that don’t matter that much, that don’t actually have a deep or long lasting impact on our lives, we can waste some of our brain power and that willpower to help us have clear perspective for the decisions that do matter more.
One way that we can help with our decision fatigue and move into decision ease is by simply reducing the sheer quantity of decisions that we make each day. My favorite way to do that is by having some things in my life pre-scheduled or pre-planned.
I make the decision one time and then I just roll with it, and sometimes it might not even be the absolute most perfect solution, but just the fact that I’ve decided it means that I don’t have to decide over and over again.
An example of this in my life is my minimal meal plan. About five or six years ago, I decided that one decision that I was tired of making every single day was what to have for dinner.
Why do we have to eat something different for dinner every night? That seems a little excessive, doesn’t it? I’ve decided, rather than make that decision over and over, or even come up with an elaborate meal, every week or every month, or every two months, at one point in my life I was meal planning for two months at a time.
I had two calendars in front of me and I tried to come up with a different meal. So we didn’t repeat during the whole two months except for our Friday night pizza night, which is another sacred event at our house.
I was struck by the idea that maybe we should just eat the same thing over and over again for a while. And I came up with seven meals in collaboration with my family, with my young kids at the time, who had some opinions about what they wanted to eat, and we decided to set it and forget it, and we ate the same.
Seven meals week after week for several months without complaint, without stress. It felt so good to simply relieve myself of the burden of a continuous daily decision about what to eat.
I will say that we, of course, have switched our meal plan a few times since then. So we now try to aim for about three to four months of the same meals before we swap.
And if you wanna learn more about that, you can go to the main podcast feed. There’s an episode all about minimal meal planning, and I also have a short course that’s Seven Days, Seven Dinners meal planning course.
It’s a great way to get your family involved and I go into some of the details behind nutrition using myspecialization as an as a nurse in diabetes education and nutrition. So those things are available to you as extra resources, particularly for meal planning. Because of the success of this minimal meal plan and the last five years of not worrying so much about what to eat for dinner, which also in turn means that I don’t worry about what to buy for groceries because.
It’s all set out for me and I just know it’s elimination of decisions, which is so amazing. During Covid times, we have decided to do the same thing for breakfast and lunch because I’m home with the kids all day every day. Again, I’m like, Is it mealtime again? How often do these humans have to eat?
Everyone has to eat so much and we just set ourselves up with a breakfast, lunch, and dinner schedule, and it’s written on our family calendar. My kids help themselves to breakfast.
I don’t make breakfast for everyone every day, but because they can go to the calendar and say, It’s Wednesday, today is muffin and eggs day, they can go grab a muffin. I will make scrambled eggs for them.
Or if it’s, bagel and cream cheese with an orange. They have those things available to them. They can go get them when it comes to lunchtime, which is right after homeschool for us. We’ve got that on the calendar. We have the ingredients for it because I roll that into our weekly grocery shopping list.
It is so nice to cut down on the amount of decisions that we make every day, especially with decisions that are daily decisions, things that you are having to bump up against the friction of, what do I do now multiple times a day for the same thing?
Think of how you can streamline that in a way that will work well for you.
Automated Task Times
Another place that I’ve streamlined some of those household duties that tend to be a lot of the decision fatigue duties. When am I gonna do the laundry? What do we do about the dishes? Who’s gonna repair these household things? Streamlining those into what I call automated task times.
So Thursday is when we do the laundry and all the laundry comes out. We spend the whole day doing it. We sit and fold laundry on Thursday night and that works for us.
None of these ideas are perfect. They might not work for everyone. The point is to see if there’s a way you can reduce the sheer quantity of decisions that you have to make in a given day or a given week so that you don’t bump up against this decision fatigue and lose your ability to make good decisions because you’re making a lot of little, tiny, insignificant decisions.
Now that has to do with the quantity of decisions. But another way that we can be fatigued in decision making is by making a really long process of a single decision. This can happen. Whether the decision is really important or not, it can be something that we recognize as making a long lasting or deep impact on our lives, or it can be something that we just feel a little confused about or don’t really know.
Maybe you’re a person who really loves to know all of the options and see it from several different perspectives before you move forward into a decision. Maybe you’re someone who really wants to know the outcome and you don’t feel like you can move forward in a decision until you’re pretty sure you know what the result will be.
This is where I wanna get into talking for a few minutes and give you four specific tips that I can share for you to work on regarding creating ease versus fatigue. Decision ease is an idea that I just made up. I haven’t heard that anywhere before, but I love the idea of easing through a decision.
That there feels like there’s flow. The decision is easy. It’s not taxing. It feels aligned with your values and your principles. You feel centered and grounded and confident making this decision, whether it’s a big one or a small one. Can you just feel how wonderful the idea of easing through your decision is?
I love that idea. And contrast that with decision fatigue, which is making a hard decision, postponing it, feeling stressed out, or really getting stuck in the idea that it has to go a certain way. I’m pretty sure perfectionism and really trying to seek for the highest and best only is one reason why people may feel somewhat fatigued in a lot of the decisions that they make. Even when they’re small decisions.
I’m curious if you personally, as you’re listening to this, if you can think of one or two times recently where you’ve felt really stuck on a decision that ultimately was not that important. Have you felt really stuck or frustrated or stressed out about a decision that truly didn’t matter very much?
Sometimes when we’re making decisions and we have this sort of overwhelm or decision fatigue happening, we can lose perspective, not only of the decision itself, but of the idea that the outcome really doesn’t make that big of a difference.
An example of this would be a Saturday night date night. It truly doesn’t matter that much where we eat. I’m not gonna be up for days or weeks regretting the decision to eat at one restaurant versus another, or take out from one restaurant versus another on date night.
It really doesn’t matter that much yet at times I have felt so stressed out trying to come up with an idea of the very best or most perfect or most lovely Saturday night date night.
Another idea I can think of is getting dressed, especially getting dressed for an event. Now, I know a lot of us haven’t gone to very many events lately. Think of an example maybe of family pictures. If you’re a family that takes family pictures, have you felt stressed out or worried about what exactly you’re gonna wear everyone’s gonna wear?
And has that taken you around in circles about what the best thing is and how to coordinate and all of the decisions that surround? Something as simple as taking a family picture where hopefully, when you back up from that experience, you can think the true purpose of a family picture isn’t to look like a fashion magazine spread.
The true purpose is to capture a moment in our family’s life that we can look back on and reflect on with joy and happiness. So why do we sometimes fill these insignificant decisions up to stress and overwhelm in our lives? It’s because of this decision fatigue.
I’ve been thinking about how to make decisions with ease. and I wanted to share four ideas that I’ve come up with. Four ways that we can move from decision fatigue into decision ease and feel like we feel pretty confident. We feel pretty clear about what decision we wanna make.
If not, if we’re not confident or clear, at the very least in the cases of decisions that don’t make a long lasting or deep impact on our lives, that we recognize that it really doesn’t matter that much, and we can choose any of the decisions because any of them is just right.
Get To Know Yourself
So the first tip that I have thought of is that it’s really important to get to know yourself. To get to know yourself. When it comes to your decisions and the types of decisions that you’re gonna make in your life, how many of us spend time consciously learning about ourselves, becoming aware of our tendencies, becoming interested in our likes our dislikes, the things that bring us joy, the things that stress us out, our natural affinities and our natural triggers.
When was the last time that you sat down with yourself and maybe a cup of tea or in a notebook and spent a little time just getting to know your thoughts, thinking and maybe writing in a journal about things, some of your hopes and dreams and desires, some of the things that you love.
Recognizing those and writing them down and finding ways to implement them in your life. Getting to know yourself is a really critical step in being able to move forward through decisions with ease, because decision making is personal. It’s unique, and the impact of our decisions will affect us differently depending on what our personal values, joys and goals are.
I want to invite you to give yourself some space this week. Get to know yourself a little better and maybe write down some things about yourself, some favorites, some things that light you up, some things that you love, some things that you don’t love, things that you want to avoid or that you wish you didn’t have to do, or you don’t want to spend much of your time or energy doing.
As you get to know yourself, it will be so much easier to make decisions because right from the outset there will be things that feel more clear because you’ll have already some clarity around your preferences. I know that I don’t really love that, or I know that I do love that and I wanna incorporate that in my life.
One example I can think of knowing yourself and how knowing yourself can help you make decisions with ease. When I am at a restaurant– I don’t know, I must be hungry. I’d keep going back to food.
When I’m at a restaurant, there are a couple ingredients that if I see them on the menu, without a doubt, I order whatever it is that has those.
One of them is goat cheese. I love shev goat cheese.
Another one is buffalo sauce. I really love buffalo sauce and I don’t know why, it’s so funny. I will see any sort of buffalo something: buffalo cauliflower or buffalo sandwich, but I will order it because I love the taste of buffalo sauce.
I also really like artichokes. So if I see artichokes on a menu, that pops out at me, it like the whole menu goes from maybe 20 or 30 or 50 items down to a small few because I know and am really clear about some of the ingredients that I love that I want to be eating most of the time, that I will incorporate into my meal and make my meal splendid, and so it just reduces the decisions really quickly so that it becomes easier because of knowing myself.
Now, when I mention the idea of getting to know yourself, especially to women, especially in a group, there will be several people who say, I don’t really know how to do that. I don’t really know what I love.
Maybe you have young kids and it’s been a while since you’ve done anything just for fun. Maybe you’re really engrossed in your work, in your career, and outside of that is really just time to rest and relax and you haven’t spent a lot of time exploring what other ideas or things you like.
My advice for you then is that this is more important than ever and that one of the best ways to get to know yourself if you don’t know what you like and don’t like is to start experimenting, start trying things.
The first thing that pops into your head as a curiosity of, Huh, maybe I’d like doing that. Maybe I would like that. That’s the thing that you should try first and experiment with it. See if you really like doing it. And if you don’t, then great. Now you know, and you can move on.
Set Your Decision Parameters
So number one in creating ease in your decision making is to get to know your. number two is a tip that I gleaned from our recent podcast plus book club book by Patrick King.
The book is titled, The Science of Getting Started, How to Beat Procrastination, Sum in Productivity, and Stop Self Sabotage. So of course, Patrick King spends some time talking about making decisions because that’s a big part of procrastination. One of the things that he mentioned that I was blown away by, which I’m going to share in this tip number two, is to choose one or two most important factors in each decision to help you eliminate the gray area.
An example that he gives is if you’re shopping for a microwave, there are so many different features and sizes and powers and models and colors of microwaves available on the market, just thousands upon thousands of microwaves. If you go into the search, having no clear idea of what matters a lot to you in a microwave, you’re going to spend a lot of time searching.
So if you can narrow it down to one or two most important factors, you will eliminate a bunch of options consciously to help ease your decision making.
I think of this as I sometimes have shopped online. I love websites that have the filter option where rather than looking at pages upon pages of a general item, like a microwave, you can go into the filter section and filter by budget.
You can filter brand by size, by storage capacity, by Motor Amp. In this way, you reduce the available options until it becomes more clear which is the best choice for you, or which is a great choice. At this time, Patrick King recommends not having six different filters, but one or two to help narrow your decision and eliminate all of that in-between area.
Choosing a microwave is actually a silly sort of decision that I have some recent experience with. When we moved to Richmond and we moved into a small rental house, a thousand square foot rental house, the kitchen did not have a microwave, and I use a microwave sometimes, not every single day, but often in the kitchen.
This kitchen was super old, super tiny, and I knew that the microwave was going to have to be on the tabletop or on the countertop somewhere. So the clear factors for me were that this had to be small and I wanted it to be really cute because it was gonna be out, and it matters to me what things look like that are out all the time in the kitchen.
So I spent a little bit of time looking for a small, cute microwave, and I found one, it was on Amazon. It was a vintage inspired, really cute, little tiny microwave, big enough to fit a standard plate, but not massive, and it was within my budget, it was like a hundred dollars and I ordered it and I loved it.
I loved this little tiny microwave and every time I would share a picture or a story in that small rental kitchen, I had people asking about it. Where did you get that cute microwave? I’ve never seen a microwave like that.
Having a really clear picture of the two factors that mattered most to me made that decision Now when we moved into our current house and did a big kitchen renovation, that tiny cute microwave wasn’t gonna be visible anymore, so it didn’t matter so much that it was cute, except for I liked seeing it when we opened the door.
But it did matter that it was small. It fit really well in the little nook behind a cabinet door that we had planned for it. After about a year of living in our house, we had a little microwave accident, with my cute son who didn’t realize that cookies weren’t supposed to be baked in the microwave, and so he put a cookie in there for 13 minutes or something.
So you can imagine we had a fully charcoal cookie by the time the microwave stopped and because it was behind the cabinet door, we didn’t notice until there was smoke coming out. So this microwave was done for after the cookie incident, so I needed to buy a new microwave for the second time in two years.
It’s not that often we buy a microwave. But here I was buying another microwave and I had a little bit of a different priority for the microwave. Now, it still needed to be small, but rather than being tiny and cute, I wanted it to be small enough to fit in the cabinet. I also wanted to buy it locally because I didn’t want to wait to order it online. I wanted to just go to the store and pick one up.
So I took the dimensions of the cabinet with me to Home Depot and I went into the store and I found the one microwave that was in the store, my local store that would fit in the cabinet, and that was the one I bought.
So my factors were small. Immediate. I needed to buy it right then at Home Depot, and that made the decision really easy. Could I have found a different, better, higher quality, lower cost, something, all of the different factors somewhere else? Probably.
But one of my factors was, I want to get this today at my local Home Depot.
Sometimes the factors that you choose to eliminate choices with aren’t necessarily deep, big, ethical values. It’s really great if they can be. And sometimes you might want your decision making factor to be something as simple as, I’m only gonna get it from this store that’s nearby me because that’s easy. That will be quick.
We’re talking about decision ease here, so sometimes you can just say, We’re gonna go into this little boutique to buy a birthday present, and we’re gonna choose from the available options and our budget’s going to be this amount. And that’s it. Like those are the factors that matter most because that will help ease the process.
The more you can do to eliminate the gray area and make decisions really black and white for yourself, the more easy those decisions will be.
And another example that I’ve used, Was when we were building our house in Texas, we were working with a builder in a suburban housing development where there was an HOA and there were specific floor plans that were approved by the neighborhood. Certain colors that were approved. Within the house, I had options at all different levels.
So there was the included option, which the price that we agreed upon for the house could have anything within those included options. And if we wanted to upgrade some of our options, then we could move to the next level or the next level, or the next level.
And each of those different levels had a new price point. We had decided when we chose the house and the floor plan that we wanted to stay within the available options for everything except for floor. Because we wanted to use real hardwood and the basic options in our housing didn’t include hardwood.
So we knew that for that one level we would move up to where we could find a hardwood that we really liked. Other than that, we were gonna stay within the available options. I knew that anything that I didn’t absolutely love, I could swap out later and probably find a better deal than from the builder.
And so we just went with the book. It was so fascinating to just make decisions. In the world of making choices regarding a house, to have the thousands of options be narrowed down to, these are the five available options at the basic level. The decision making process was so easy.
We designed our entire house in two sessions. Two, like one and a half, two hour sessions. So four hours it took to design our entire house, to choose all of the tile, all of the countertops, the cabinets, the colors, the paint, the moldings, the doors, the handles, all of the different decisions that go into actually building a house. Just went like clockwork because we had decided for ourselves that we were gonna stick with this one level of option.
And within that level of option, there were a finite number of options. The decision process was so smooth. Most humans would probably say that they prefer more options. That more options is better. And in practice, we actually perform a lot better and have a lot easier time with less options. So the next time you’re feeling stuck with a decision, come back to this:
See what one or two main factors you can rely on to help eliminate many of your options so that the decision becomes a lot.
Decide Now Or Decide to Decide Later
Okay. Tip number three is to decide now, even if your decision is that you’re not going to decide for a while, rather than putting off a decision and still thinking about it all the time and having it consume us all of the time, we can decide not to decide until a certain time.
One example I can share of this is, When I was in the middle of growing my family, I felt like for years I was either pregnant or thinking about being. There was no in between. I knew that I was going to, after the first I knew I was gonna have another baby.
I was thinking about it all the time. I think at least once a day I had the thought about when was the right time, or how developed did I want Milo to be, or how was would it be, what about timing for the future and planning trips and all of those things that you do when you are thinking about having a baby? I was consumed.
Thoughts about family planning, even when there was nothing actually for me to do right then I was just thinking about it a lot.
And after I had Eliot. Between my first and second, I had a miscarriage that was really hard for me, and then I was able to get pregnant and have Eliot. And after Eliot was born, I told Dave, we agreed that we were not going to talk or think about having another child until he was at least 18 months old.
I know that isn’t that long, but when going from the moment I had my low in the hospital and was thinking about should he be a sibling? When should that, when should we start thinking about that? To give myself the space of a full 18 months before I even thought about it, was really healing.
It was really helpful for me and I was just able to be present and enjoy that first year and a half and just love being a mom of two boys without thinking about what came next. After 18 months, it was really nice. I had settled into this and the decision to go ahead and have another baby and what that would look like timing wise felt good for me.
And so the decision to not decide, not to not decide ever, but to not decide for a certain amount of time was really helpful and real, made the decision easier in the future. The key to this is that you lose all of the benefit of this deciding now or deciding not to decide if you carry the burden of the decision making all the way until you make the decision.
The key is that if you decide to wait to decide on an important decision that you release all of the emotional baggage having to do with that decision in the meantime.
Let me share another recent example. Dave and I have been talking about a couple opportunities to invest in real estate in our area, and we have a fun possible opportunity coming up in the next few months and we got really excited about it initially, but it involves other people, it’s not a unilateral decision. It involves some other people and their ideas and what they think about it.
And so we initially were super excited and I had decided, Yes, I wanna do this. This sounds really fun and exciting without realizing that it isn’t my decision at the end of the day, and I can decide on my own. I was up all night thinking about it. I was making plans in my journal. I was Photoshopping ideas and I was getting so excited about this.
And then I realized that I was spending a lot of time and energy on a decision that I can’t make on my own or with Dave even, that we are relying on other people to make this decision with us. And we made the conscious decision to not decide until we can decide with other people’s ideas, and we have some time coming up where we’re gonna be able to discuss it further.
It was so nice to put aside a decision that I cannot do anything about right now, and to just decide to not think about it very much anymore, knowing that decision is coming is great, and whether we decide to move forward or not, either way is great so I can just decide to not decide. Decide to wait a month until we have all of the necessary information, and at that point we can move forward and that decision will be a lot easier than if I’ve been stewing on it for the whole month when I can’t do anything about it.
The number three tip that I’m sharing, just to be clear, is decide now or decide when you’re going to decide. So I’ve given some examples of how waiting to decide has been really helpful for me.
I want to share an example of how deciding now can also be really helpful. I do creative mentorships and I have a bunch of coaching clients who I help them in the decision making process.
This is one of the things that I do as a coach and a mentor, is to support people’s decision making. I often encourage people to make decisions on the call with me. Let’s make a decision. and see how it feels. After you move through a decision, you usually get the fallout of that decision. When you’re stewing an indecision, it’s hard to tell how you feel as soon as you say yes or no.
It’s very telling, the gut response and intuition that comes after a decision has been made, and sometimes you’ll make the decision and feel really good about it, and that confirms the decision that you’ve made. And sometimes you’ll make a decision and immediately, or even in the next day or two, feel sick about it or not interested in it anymore.
The clarity that you gave yourself by choosing helped inform how you actually felt. It’s been interesting just in this last month to have two different women who I work with make a decision that they feel fairly confident about and they move forward into the decision: Yes, I’m gonna do this. I’m gonna plan as if this is happening.
And then they’ll call me and say, You know what? I just got so much clarity after I decided, yes, I realized that I do not want to do that. And it wasn’t until deciding yes that I realized that is not where I wanna go and that everything else fell into place. So decide now, or decide to not decide for a while.
Either way, you will feel so much better deciding or deciding when you’re going to decide. Rather than walking around carrying the burden of a bunch of unmade decisions.
There Are Many Right Choices
The final tip that I wanna share with you for inviting ease into your decision making process is something that I’ve shared before and I think it is worth reiterating.
Many choices are the right choice. There isn’t one right way to do things. There isn’t one right way to live; so many of our choices are so clearly unique and individual and depend on our own responses and our own abilities and our own desires.
When you’re faced with a decision and you feel like you’re struggling to find the right choice, try to back up and remind yourself that there isn’t one right choice. That any choice that you make that doesn’t harm other people and is within the legal guidelines of the country can be made into the right choice by how you move through it, how you feel about it.
I think this is true in small things like where to eat for dinner on a Saturday night. I also think this is true in big things like what degree to get, whether or not you should apply for that new job, whether or not to have another baby, how you want to structure your business.
There are so many available options and all of them can be great. Rather than thinking in terms of right choices, or perfect choices or the best choice, try to think in terms of what feels good for me, what feels aligned with my greater purpose and value. Or simply, what do I like better? What sounds more fun? What sounds more interesting? Which way is my curiosity pulled?
And if none of those things, draw it out of a hat, write all your options down and just pull one out. You will know immediately if you have a preference by the way that you feel when you pull the option from the hat.
Most of the time when we are stewing about something and we say, Oh, I just don’t really know, which of these is the best or which is right. If you put them all in a hat and you pull one out and it’s not the one that you prefer, you will say, Oh, I actually want this other one.
If you really don’t have a true preference and you don’t have a gut feeling about it that you just aren’t allowing yourself to follow, then when you pull one out of a hat, you’ll say, Okay, perfect. This is it. Eas. Decision made.
For me, I rely fully on this idea and this piece of advice that there are many right choices, and that then takes us back to number one, get to know yourself. As you get to know yourself, you’ll be able to have more of those instincts.
Recap
Okay, Let’s review these four tips for bringing ease into your decision making.
Number one. Get to know yourself. Give yourself space to think about your preferences and to jot some of them down and experiment with things that you, in areas that you don’t know what you prefer or what things you like. Experiment with a view and get a feel for it.
Number two. Choose one or two most important factors to help you eliminate the gray area in any decision that you’re making.
Number three. Decide now or decide when you’re going to decide, and then release all of the stress of the decision until you get to that point.
And number four. Remember that there are many right choices, and it’s just up to you what feels right.
Conclusion
Thank you so much for tuning in today. I hope that you will have a little bit more ease in your decisions as a result of listening to today’s show.
If you’re interested in one-on-one coaching or mentorship, as I mentioned in today’s podcast, visit patreon.com/livefreecreative to learn more. I’d love to work with you and I hope you have a wonderful day. Bye-bye.
