I’m not sure who the originator of this quote is but my friend Roy says it often, which is “we’re always heading into a storm, in a storm, or coming out of a storm”. I actually don’t love the way that sounds as it seems pretty ominous, but it also seems to be true for most of us. I’ve been in my own storm for a while on a variety of topics, some work, some personal. Point here is not to get into my individual storms (Marriage/kids are good), but a bit of an epiphany I had after breakfast with one of my mentors this past Wednesday. Really brought some clarity to me for future decision evaluation. Similar to the buffalo vs. cow story, the better systems I can have for evaluating choices that need to be made to get out of storms faster, the better I’ll be for it.
I had my monthly breakfast with Dave, he’s in his 80’s, he’s seen a few scenarios come his way. I was explaining a few of my storms and he simply said “I try to evaluate how this decision is going to impact me 3 or 5 years out. Also when you look at the best and worst case scenarios, usually the worst case scenarios aren’t as bad as you think”. Fast forward and I’m staring at my celling at 2:00 in the morning Wednesday night thinking of choices/decisions I need to make. It dawned on me for every decision you make, you’re obviously deciding not to do something else. You’re always going to be on one side of a decision or the other. My aha moment was ranking each decision on best and worst case scenarios and realizing the upside and downside of each decision. I was prioritizing one decision over the other until I realized the downside of one was categorically worse than the other.
This is very much in alignment with the concept of our relationships and decisions falling into two camps, glass balls, and rubber balls. A glass ball relationship/decision is much more important than a rubber ball relationship/decision. I was originally willing to drop a glass ball for a rubber ball until I realized exactly what I was doing by going through this evaluation of the highest high vs. the lowest low exercise. As an emotional person (which I know a lot of you are too) the more check points I can have to not make an emotional decision vs. gaining clarity through exercises like this, the better.
This might sound silly/simple to some of you but at 47, I’m still learning and happy to have gained this clarity in the last week on how to evaluate decisions I need to make.
Side note-Kim the editor said “people are either going to get this or wonder what the hell you’re talking about”.