Do you want to change careers? Should you have a child? Where in the world could you live? The decisions we have to make as adults can be daunting.
We could ask our friends and family what they think. We could visit a therapist. We could write endless lists of pros and cons. We could, like a particularly diligent friend of mine, make spreadsheets to calculate the feasibility of our various options.
We could also enlist the services of a professional decision-making coach, which, it turns out, is a real thing.
You can pay someone to help you make an important decision.Credit:iStock
Babette Bensoussan is one such coach. She calls herself the “decision making maverick”. She has a coaching qualification from America, a post-grad counselling degree, seven books to her name and several decades of experience consulting with businesses on strategy and leadership – which, she says, had a lot to do with decision making. She works with clients who come to her with a particular dilemma.
A man had just lost his job as a CEO; what should he do now? A woman was trying to start her own business; is it time she left her current job? A couple were trying to conceive a child via IVF; how many rounds do they do before they give up on becoming parents? Bensoussan’s job is to help these people get to know themselves well enough to make the best decision.
“I’ve worked with mothers who are trying to decide when and if they should go back to work, for instance,” she says. “In that case, I would help that person work out what they want from their life, what they stand for, what they believe in.
"I would probably ask them to close their eyes and imagine their life in five years. What does it look like and how do we get there? We’d talk it through and we’d consider what realities this person could create for themselves.”
Bensoussan never uses a pros and cons list because they’re too riddled with assumptions and biases. She encourages her clients to talk it all through with her and reflect in their own time until they’re ready to make a decision, using both emotion and logic. “I’ll never tell a person what they should do, that’s not my role. I’m there to help them work it out for themselves.”
Psychologist Sharon Draper says indecision can be agonising, exhausting and overwhelming. “We’re so afraid of failure – that’s why we would ask for help with something like this,” she says. “We get too stuck in our own heads and we start circular thinking, where we keep having the same thoughts over and over without resolving anything.
"It’s a pretty natural, human thing to be scared and to feel like you can’t make a life decision. We don’t like tolerating distress … A coach may be helpful. You can bounce ideas off people and get other perspectives, but I would say that you shouldn’t give up your agency or your responsibility to make your own decision.”
We’ve also got to work on accepting our decisions once they’re made. “You can’t just carry on getting FOMO on all your unmade decisions,” says Draper.
Source: Read Full Article
