Do you feel stuck about what to do with your life or anything else? Does making decisions in general exhaust you?
That can be so with me, too! Though these days I also find that even my big decisions tend to emerge organically and don’t feel so big or threatening or like I better get them right.
I was thinking about big decisions and why decision-making has become so much easier for me because I was watching Jonah Hill’s Netflix documentary about his therapist Phil Stutz.
In it, Stutz says that when people come to him trying to figure out what their purpose is, or what they should do with their lives, he tells them to never mind about that.
He tells them, instead, to work on their vitality or life-force and then decisions will come easily (more on that below). If our vitality is flowing, we will naturally move towards purpose, meaning and the actions we should take.
Here are three ways of understanding what could be making decision-making difficult:
- Your fear of moving forward (distrust) is greater than your desire to move forward (vitality).
- Your ambivalence (distrust) is greater than your life force (vitality).
- Your dread of living the wrong life (distrust) is greater than your desire to experience life, however it is (vitality).
In other words, when distrust of your decision making is greater than the vital force that wants to move forward then you can’t decide and you get stuck. This means that to make decisions more easily requires less distrust and more vitality.
Increased Trust + Increased Vitality = Easier Decision-Making
So I thought, for the rest of this email, I’d discuss my method of increasing trust and Stutz’s method of increasing vitality. If you do both, hopefully your decisions can emerge more easily.
Increasing Trust
So, predicting the outcomes of any particular decision is actually impossible. That isn’t to say we shouldn’t analyze situations as part of our decision-making. It’s just that analysis will only take us so far.
Let’s say you have a big decision about whether to change careers or not. To oversimplify, we want to know whether we will be happier if we make the change. Sometimes, it is really hard to know.
Now, there are lots of ways to try to predict future happiness. But there is also a whole other way to approach the situation.
Instead of asking, How do I get the happiness I want? we can ask How can I be the person I want to be? We have limited control over how to ensure we get the happiness we want–which is why we can fall into distrust.
We don’t trust our ability to make a decision based on the criteria of predicting our future happiness because trying to predict our future happiness is actually not trustworthy!
What we do have a lot more control over and what we can trust more fully is deciding who we want to be and how we want to act. And because those are criteria we actually have control over it, we can more fully trust decisions based on those criteria.
So… let’s say you are facing a big decision in your career, as an example. Ask yourself, who do I want to be in my work. Write down words that might describe what values you want to embody. Lively, free, smart, empowered are examples of words you might come up with.
Other words might come from a list of values. Choose, say, ten values from the Berkeley Well-Being Institute’s list of values. Then ask in which of the situations I’m considering can I best embody these values. Choose from there.
Making a decision this way–How can I be who I want to be?–is more in our control than How can I be sure I will be happiest? For that reason, we can trust more and the decision can come more easily.
That’s my contribution to the easier decision-making equation–increasing trust.
Increasing Vitality
Phil Stutz’s contribution has to do with increasing the life force that wants to move into, through and past decisions–vitality or life force.
Phil Stutz draws a pyramid. If you take care of the elements of the pyramid, he says, then you will have more life force and you will automatically move towards your purpose and therefore be able to make big decisions.
Below is a picture of the pyramid, which I have borrowed from the website ThriveMind.
According to Stutz, in order to increase your life-force and therefore your purpose and decision-making ease, you need to begin by taking care of your body. You need to work on your diet, your movement, your sleep etc.
Next, you need to bolster your connection to others. Work on having friendships, being in community and being vulnerable and intimate. Lastly, you need to work on your personal growth–your spirituality, your personal growth your self-understanding etc.
Working on these three elements will naturally increase your life force and vitality and therefore your sense of purpose and therefore your ease of decision-making.
So that’s it. If you want to make decisions with ease, increase your trust in your decision-making and increase the force of your decision making–vitality.
Increase your trust by using the criteria of being who you want to be (instead of trying to predict what will make you happy). Increase your vitality by taking care of your body, social connections and personal growth. Take those two steps and the decisions will flow more easily.
What do you think? I’d love to hear.
Love,
Colin
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PPS I’m launching a course on Using A Pile Of Index Cards To Create The Life And World You Want. We will meet over Zoom four times over four weeks. Each meeting will be 90 minutes. There will be group coaching and exercises, homework and text group support in between meetings. You will end up with a pile of visioning cards that will help you move towards the life and world you want. The cost will be $347. Click here to read about how I use vision cards like these to build my life. I will be sending out more information but the course is limited to 15 participants so if you want to be sure to hold a spot, reply to this email now and let me know you are interested.
PPPS My friend, the famous anti-racism author Robin DiAngelo, has launched a course on facilitating affinity groups for white people wanting to combat racism. Read about the groups and sign up here.