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You are the sum of all the decisions you’ve made in life to this point.
Some decisions are easy. You make them in an instant because it’s necessary.
Other decisions take longer because there are more factors to consider that can have long term impact.
Or, you are merely dealing the decision because it’s too hard to deal with, you are afraid of the outcomes, or you may feel amateur at making certain decisions.
Regardless, I’d like to start talking about this topic more as I see myself falling into dealing decision-making behaviors in some areas of life while also being willing to take the next step in other situations.
Recently flies reminded me of what happens when we finally make a decision.
Tune into this episode to hear the story!
Episode 115 Transcript
This is Rebecca Clark Episode 1 15. The decisions. This podcast is for anyone that knows, they haven’t yet found and offered up their best work but are compelled to seek it out and do it. Are you ready to move your desk? Yeah. Mm, mm hmm. Okay. I had an interesting experience yesterday. Some flies have been bothering me in the house and I just let them be because I wasn’t going to be in the rooms that the flies were in very much for the last few days. And so I thought I’m a human, I’m big. I don’t have to let these things get to me. And I tried for a minute or two to chase them around and it wasn’t successful and like forget it. Yeah. But yesterday was the day that I came back to occupying the rooms more where these flies were and the flies came in from a party where the kids were going in and out. And so they came in. I remember saying in my head, I don’t want these flies like we’re done. and within five minutes of making that decision, most of the flies were dead. I killed them. Now you can think what you want of me because you can always think of what you want of me, right? I have friends that are very loving and go get glass jars and take bugs outside. Don’t kill them all the things for me. I’m not there yet. I don’t know when I’ll be there because I’m not working on it. Because my goal is if an insect is outside, I let it be, that’s their habitat. If they’re inside, they bugged me. And so I eliminate them very quickly. No pain involved, right? Think what you want. Like I said, but that’s how I am right now. The beauty of this experience for me was it showed me how quickly I sprang into action when I realized I did not want the flies anymore. A few days before I was like, no problem, I’m just bugged a little. I’ll just be in a different part of the house. They’ll die away on their own, whatever. And I didn’t do anything right after initial attempts, I’m like, just let it be. But the minute I decided it truly annoyed me, I wasn’t going to put up with it and I was going to take care of the problem. The problem was taken care of very quickly. I wanted to share this before I shared a quote and I don’t know who said it because it’s not attributed to anyone. But it says when you have to make a hard decision, flip a coin. Why? Because when the coin is in the air, you suddenly know what you’re hoping for. Isn’t that an interesting quote? Have you experienced that? I have so many times and so often I waffle and indecision. Which is a new experience for me really because in work and life in years past I feel like I have been a fairly quick decision maker. Yes. Sometimes I’ve waited to gather more information. Yes. Sometimes I have waited for a deadline to make a decision because I wanted to make sure it was very informed because the impact would cross people money, other resources that needed to be used. But as I have changed course into different kind of work the last couple of years I’ve noticed that my decision making skills are not fine tuned. They are less than they were. But that’s okay when you’re delving into something new, you don’t yet have the confidence to make decisions on certain things right? Because you may feel inferior, less informed and incapable of making decisions in an area that you know less about. But if you take a look at those areas in your life where you do know lot about something than in those moments, hopefully you are making faster decisions from a place of more wisdom, from a place of more skills and experience and insights. I was a little pond this last week where my son was swimming with some other people and he is uninformed when it comes to swimming. He thinks that after two weeks of swim lessons, that he is an Olympian and he is not, he can’t yet do quite a few things. And so he kept going further into the pond and in that moment I thought, OK, when you are in a teaching situation, in a safe environment, you can allow certain risks, right? I allow it the pool. I allow him to go under a few times and get tired and then I grab his arm to make sure he comes up, right when he might be experiencing some pain going, oh shoot, I can’t save myself. But in a pond I cannot afford to allow the same learning experience. So I was not in my swimsuit or anything and I barged out through that water up to about my waist, pulled his arm in and had a good talking to you because that was not a place to take a risk. I made that quick decision based upon experience of knowing the difference between having a safe environment to practice an environment that wasn’t safe where we don’t know where the drop offs are. And I had to explain to him in a very painful conversation that if there’s a drop off in a pond where I can’t see, it becomes very hard to search for someone that is under water and cannot get up. And so we all have experiences with decision making or sometimes it’s okay to languish and take a long time and let the flies sit there for a few days and sometimes it’s not. But what is important is to continually practice making decisions and getting good at taking those risks of deciding in the middle of flipping the coin what the choices and I guarantee you, even though I shouldn’t guarantee you things right, that if you start making the decisions, then the answers will come after you make the decision. You’ll know, oh this feels terrible, this feels terribly wrong. I made the wrong decision. Let me change my choice. Or once you make it like I’m so glad I did that because I’m feeling like I want to keep going in this direction, I think it’s the right thing to do. I’m going to take another step. My hope is to talk more about decision making with you from the perspective of coaching and mindset, but also from the perspective of work. Whereas you have experiences and skills that you bring to the table that allow you to make certain choices in the workplace. So as a final example, I would like to talk about in some future discussions about how you make certain decisions at work, what takes priority and why and in each environment there will be different factors that impact that, but it’s important to know those factors and if you’re a leader or in a position of influencing decisions to inform people of those factors so that they can make better decisions that help the business. So, for example, sometimes I had a long list of two DUIs, but I’d often say what to do on this list helps the most people get working so that we can be working in parallel and getting something done, even though this is high priority for me, for other resources that are on the clock, it might be important for me to stop what I’m doing, prepared to give them requirements and expectations and the go ahead so that they can get going and be working in unison with me. Just a small example, decisions are important. You are the sum of all of your decisions. Are you making them today? Are you languishing? Are you letting the flies buzz around? It’s time to take action. Okay. I hope you have a great day and decide to do something today that you’ve been languishing on, Talk to you soon. Thanks for listening to the show today. If you enjoyed it. I’d love if you’d write a review and share the show with your friends, sign up for a weekly nudge at move your desk dot com. Mm. Mhm.
