The feelings and the facts
Maybe it’s better to be oblivious to the danger we’re in. (From A Mask of Dead Florentines, Hewlett, 1895)
One of the challenges of being “in charge” is that you have to make a lot of decisions.
In order to make decisions well — meaning not just that the decisions are “good decisions” but also that the process of making them is smooth — you have to learn to trust your gut.
Over time, you can get pretty good at trusting your gut. That can present a distortion: When feelings guide your decision making, you run the risk of making decisions based on feelings — that is, emotions — which is fundamentally different.
For example, I might feel dread around a decision I need to make. That dread might cause me to believe that one or more of my options are unacceptable; it might cause me to shy away completely from making the decision and sticking with the status quo.
However, the dread I’m feeling might have nothing to do with the particular choices before me. It might be the result of the situation itself. It doesn’t mean that taking action is wrong.
If I were in a burning building, I’d feel scared to jump out the window. I’d also feel scared to stay in the building. Both alternatives are terrible, but one is more likely to lead to survival. I need to make sure my emotions don’t get in the way of perceiving my gut instinct.
There are less dire situations in which this kind of conflict comes up. A difficult conversation might make my stomach roil with anxiety, but that doesn’t mean that avoiding the conversation is the right move.
Even when there is potential for a pleasant outcome, my feelings may be unpleasant. A possible path forward can feel totally wrong if it’s new and unfamiliar. If I’ve never done the thing before, it would make sense that I might feel uncomfortable with it. However, that discomfort doesn’t automatically mean that it’s going to turn out horribly.
In truth, the more we are stretching into uncharted territory, the more we might trigger a voice in our heads yelling, “Stop! Danger!” But if we want different results than the ones we’ve always gotten, we might have to take someone’s weird advice and do things differently than we ever have before. We might need to override this survival mechanism.
It’s not surprising that we’d hesitate and question ourselves and the other person. That’s when we’ve got to lay out the facts. We’ve got to consider the worst case scenario that would result from each option we’re considering. We’ve got to inventory the likely outcomes and give some thought to what’s at stake, which might be less than we think.
Once we can look dispassionately at the worst case scenario each choice could potentially lead to, then we are in a much better frame of mind to trust our gut. We can then examine all of the possibilities against each other and figure out what would be best. We can decide what we can live with when we are no longer afraid of any of the options on the table.
Last fall, when I made the decision to close down my school, it was the result of finally questioning the decisions I’d been making unconsciously for a number of years. On the morning when I finally resolved to do this, I felt terrible. But that didn’t mean I was making the wrong decision.
Who’s to decide what the wrong decision is, anyway? I don’t believe that there is some objective truth out there that I must discover. But if I’m to be a responsible steward of the resources I have and the commitments I’ve made to other people, I can’t shy away from considering moves that are emotionally disruptive to me. The wrong decision is, by definition, the one that I’m making out of fear or procrastination. Whenever I uncover one of these, I have to correct it.
The decision to close the school led to more difficult decisions, including the one I made to move a thousand miles away from my home and husband for five months. At no point did my gut confirm that this was the “right” choice, but there have been a number of indications that to do otherwise may have been even more inconvenient and perhaps even financially ruinous. It was sad to leave, but I am satisfied with my choice to do so.
I take comfort in the idea that bad feelings don’t mean that the decision is bad. Trusting myself makes it a lot easier to deal with painful emotions when they come up, and a lot easier to trust my gut. If I can’t trust the feelings, I’ll at least be able to fall back on the facts.
Though I can never be certain that a decision was the correct one, I learn with every choice I make. So far, 100% of my decisions have not been fatal. Even the stupid ones have been survivable. I can’t see the future, but I can believe in my own ability to handle it, come what may.
