What does this research tell us? First, that we love having options (“Whoa! Twenty-four jams?! Let’s check this out!!”), and, second, that we can’t deal with too many of them (“Um...so many...can’t decide; let’s go get some cheese”). In fact, most minds can choose effectively between only three to five options. If we’re faced with more than that, our ability to make a choice begins to wane—many more than that and our ability to choose completely freezes. It’s just the way our brains are wired. We’re attracted to having alternatives, and our modern culture almost idolizes options for their own sake. Get lots of options! Keep your options open! Don’t get locked in! We hear this sort of thinking all the time, and it seems to make sense, but there absolutely can be too much of this good option thing. When you toss in the Internet and the fact that we can now be made aware of seemingly every idea and activity on the planet after a subsecond Google search, most of us are suffering a pandemic attack of too many options.

The key is to reframe your idea of options by realizing that if you have too many options, you actually have none at all. If you get frozen in front of your daunting list of possibilities, then, in fact, you have no options. Remember that options only actually create value in your life when they are chosen and realized. We often teach our students that when an option grows up it becomes a choice. So, when you’ve got twenty-four jam options, you actually have zero options. Once you understand that, in choice making, twenty-four equals zero (and, boy, is it hard to believe when you love your options and worked so hard to find and come up with them), then you are free to take the next step: narrowing down.

Step 3: Choose Discerningly…

The memories that inform this choice-guiding function in our brains Goleman refers to as the “wisdom of the emotions”; by this he means the collected experiences of what has and hasn’t worked for us in life, and what we draw upon in evaluating a decision. Our own wisdom is then made available to us emotionally (as feelings) and intestinally (as a bodily, gut response). Therefore, in order to make a good decision, we need access to our feelings and gut reactions to the alternatives…

The key to step three is to make discerning decisions by applying more than one way of knowing, and in particular not applying just cognitive judgment by itself, which is informed but not reliable on its own. We aren’t suggesting making only emotional decisions, either. We all have examples of emotions getting people in trouble (though usually those are impulse emotions, and that’s a very different thing), so we’re not saying to swap your brain for your heart or your gut. We’re inviting you to integrate all your decision-making faculties, and to be sure you make space so your emotional and intuitive ways of knowing can surface in the process…

Doing this requires that you educate and mature your access to and awareness of your emotional/intuitive/spiritual ways of knowing (or however you may name these affective aspects of our shared humanity). For centuries, the most commonly affirmed path to such maturity has been that of personal practices such as journaling, prayer or spiritual exercises, meditation, integrated physical practices like yoga or Tai Chi, and so on…

Emotional, intuitive, and spiritual forms of knowing are usually subtle, quiet, and even shy. Rarely do people get access to their deepest wisdom by rushing around a few hours before a deadline and talking a lot or surfing the Web. It’s a slower, quieter thing. Practices are just that—practice. We both practice regularly, month in and month out—especially during our off season, when there’s no pressure to perform and we can focus on just doing the practice and gaining strength and balance.

Do yourself the favor of getting lots of options, then culling the list down to a short and manageable size (five max); then make the best choice that you can, given the time and resources available to you, get on with it, and build your way forward. Note that if you’re doing this with prototype iteration, you don’t have too much at stake, and you will be able to adjust as you go, before you really reach a significant investment. And once you make a choice—then embrace your choice and go with it. When the questions that lead to agonizing creep into your head, evict the thoughts, and direct your energy into living well the decisions you’ve made. Pay attention and learn as you go, of course, but don’t get caught with your eyes fixated on the rearview mirror of decision regret.

This letting-go step relies primarily on personal discipline. Keep your reframed understanding of decision making handy, and be sure to win the internal argument with yourself when you’re tempted to rehash and ruminate. Put in place the support you need to stick with it—find a life design collaborator or team to help remind you why you made the choice or choices you did; make a journal entry about your decision, and reread it when you get confused. Find what works to enable yourself to enjoy your choices fully.

Not every bad decision is rushed, nor is every good one made slowly. It’s not that simple.

People mistake choosing for decisiveness and the decision-making process for waffling. Part of what makes slowing down and reasoning through a problem difficult is that, to the outside observer, it might look like inaction. But that inaction is a choice.

4.3. Evaluate the Options

To speed things up, I came up with a system for them to sort decisions into three boxes:

• Decisions they could make without any input from me,

• Decisions they could make after sharing their reasoning with me so I could double-check their judgement their judgment, and

• Decisions I wanted to make myself.

But the problem persisted,

After a few months, I consulted my mentor. “Do they know what decisions they should make and what decisions you want to make?” he asked. “Are the boxes clear?”

“Yes,” I replied, “but due to the operational nature of our job, if I’m not around, they have to make decisions in the third box without me. That’s where we’re running into the biggest problems. They seem incapable of doing that.”

“Do they know the one thing that’s most important?” he probed.

“I’m not sure what you mean,” I said. “What’s the most important differs for each decision.” I listed off a few different types of decisions and how the variables were different.

“That’s not what I mean,” he replied. “Do they know what you value most?” I hesitated. He looked me square in the eye. “Shane, do you know what you value most?” I stared at him blankly. He sighed. “The problem isn’t your team. It’s you. You don’t know what’s most important. Until you do, your team will never make decisions without you. It’s too risky for them to figure out the most important thing. Communicate that to your team, and they’ll be able to make decisions on their own.”

“What if they make the wrong decision?”

“As long as they make a decision based on the most important thing, they won't be wrong.” He paused, then said slowly, “A lot of people reach their ceiling in this job because they can't figure out this one thing.”

I learned three important lessons that day. First, I couldn’t expect my team to make decisions on their own unless I told them how I wanted them to make those decisions. That meant focusing on the single most important thing and not inundating them with hundreds of variables to consider. Second, if they made the decision with the most important thing in mind, and it turned out wrong, I couldn’t I get upset with them. If I did that, they’d never make decisions without me. The third lesson was perhaps the most revealing: I myself didn’t know what the most important thing was. That’s why I couldn’t tell them.