Difficult decisions and the skill to learn to trust your gut
We all know these difficult situations in our life where we feel like standing on a cross – road and we have no idea of which turn to take. Many of us choose to be rational in those situations and we toss and turn every eventuality and possibility in our minds. What we don’t realize is that very often it will make the predicament we face worse. It might even lead to us never deciding. While it is always good to fist go down the rational path -at some point to jump - we must learn to trust our gut!
The great things here is, that everybody can learn to do so, as we all have a kind of “gut feeling” sense within us. Many of us, however, have forgotten to listen to it, in a world that is dominated by rational and hard facts around us. We therefore all have it, we just must waken it up again and use it.
The idea here is that each decision we are making has both a rational and an emotional side to it. Very often we focus a lot on the rational side but forget the emotional, as people consider this to be less trusting. However, very often our emotional reactions as they are very spontaneous and respond to factors like our upbringing and things we were exposed to during our life, are therefore a lot for reliable and trustworthy as thy truly reflect and align with who we are and what we want deep within us.
This does not mean however, that for difficult decisions, we should only rely on emotions and gut. Having some hard facts and numbers can help reduce uncertainty in deciding that emotions very often can’t. The rational part of decision making should therefore always be a first step and part of the overall process to conclude. However, facts cannot make us decided or do the “final jump” in the end as we always find positive and negative facts that can make the decision harder. The final step therefore is where emotions kick in and where we should use our so called “gut feeling” to choose our path.
The most effective way is therefore to use both rational and emotional elements in coming to a decision. We start with rational elements but rather than getting overwhelmed by those, we should have a balance in the process and listen to our emotions and instant feeling towards going down one way or another as well.
An example would be a change in job or the purchase of a house. Those are very important decisions that can influence our life for many years to come. Many people therefore go on the rational path of decision making as a start and gather information to reduce uncertainty and close knowledge gaps to, as they feel, be in a better position to decide. This could be getting info’s on the area the house is located in or the company we want to work for. However, all these facts will still not lead us to fully engage in decision making and very often overwhelms us even more rather than helping us to clarify things, especially when we go too far in our planning and information gathering. For the final step we need to see the house or go to an interview, meet the people, and trust our spontaneous emotional reactions to the situation that either makes us feel good or bad. It very often is a matter of seconds in which we form an opinion and already unconsciously decide what is right and what is wrong. The rest, us taking the job or buying the house is then only a natural consequence of this very climax moment where we decide for one way or the other.
To feel comfortable with decision we make, we must apply both, rational ways to reduce uncertainty but also emotional ways, or a so called “gut feeling”. Both elements combine will help us not only make the right decisions for us, but to make decisions and come to conclusions that we feel happy with. Even if things then don’t work out, we will feel that at the time we made the right choice, trusting our gut.
