My Favorite Questions for Making Tough Decisions

Sometime you’ll encounter tough decisions that can leave you wallowing in indecision, such as whether to change jobs or careers, end a relationship, move to a new city, or pursue a new lifestyle direction. There are many processes you can use to make intelligent decisions, but all of them have shortcomings when you’re dealing with imperfect information. Sometimes all it takes to gain sufficient clarity though is to ask the right questions. A good question can shift your perspective about your decision and make the wise path obvious. When I face tough decisions, here are some of my favorite questions to ask: Will this help me grow? Since growth is one of my highest personal values, I favor decisions where I can expect to learn and growth. If I see little or no growth on a particular path, I’ll tend to lean against it. This heuristic gives me a bias to embrace the new, as opposed to repeating something I’ve already done. It’s one reason I usually don’t repeat workshops. Even though it’s more work, I favor doing new workshops because a new workshop pushes me to learn and grow a lot more than repeating a past workshop does. Asking this question helped me join Toastmasters in 2004, and I remained a member until 2010. I felt a bit anxious about getting involved with the group since I didn’t think it would be a comfortable experience to practice public speaking. But I went to my first meeting and joined a club because I figured that it...
Source: Steve Pavlina's Personal Development Blog - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Tags: Values Source Type: blogs