502 words
I've been thinking a lot about my own decision making process, and how I work through things I'm not so sure about.
The short answer is that almost all of my decisions are based on some kind of intuition or gut feelings, rather than list of pros and cons, SWOT analysis, or some other business-y decision making framework (there are dozens out there). Mostly I'm talking about big, life-impacting or career-altering decisions.
This has a few consequences.
One is that it sometimes takes me a really long time to make a decision, usually because I'm unclear about how I really feel - I have to talk through things with multiple people, internally weighing out the conversation as we go. I often waffle back and forth during this process, because I have so many competing voices inside of me. This also means I have to involve other people in the process, it's too emotionally muddy for me to get there on my own. Other people hold up the mirror for me.
Another consequence is that I've gotten better and faster at coming to my own decisions. Asking myself "what do I want?" has always been incredibly hard for me, for so many reasons that I don't want to get into here publicly, but that's ultimately the question I am trying to answer when I'm making a decision.
An upside to me operating this way is once I do finally decide, I feel confident that it's the right move, and I don't backtrack on it.
I've also come to realize that I have no idea how other people make their own decisions. Many writers, TED talk speakers, and even friends have described their processes in ways that seem completely incomprehensible to me. I've come to the conclusion that the way people talk about the decisions they’ve made in life is not accurately reflective of their true mental process. Like if my process is baffling to me, it must be just as baffling to others, even if they think they understand it well.
If I'm trying to make a decision about something and use other people’s decisions or their explanations about decisions, I will be grossly misinformed. Not only because my process is, and has to be, so wildly different, but also that I don't believe other people have a clear understanding of their own thought framework. Humans aren’t perfectly rational creatures, so making a pro/con list doesn’t really clear up the decision making process, it’s all subconscious and obscured from understanding.
Of course, I may be totally wrong about all of this. Maybe there are people that completely understand themselves and their own thinking, and when they make decisions they use a framework and are satisfied with that process. To me, that feels completely baffling. The only benefit that frameworks give me is highlighting how wrong something feels, which at least gives me some clarity. Knowing what I don't want is a little less important as knowing what I do want, but it's still useful.