Setting out towards choice: taking the first steps in a Great Revisit

This post is part of a longer series on big moments in our lives that I call a Great Revisit. You can read more about that concept in the first post here, and continue on to the next installment here.

My mission as a coach is to help individuals and teams navigate the big moments. These moments almost always feature a really hard decision — the sort that might warrant a Great Revisit, the kind with true consequence. I believe that if you tackle these with consideration (and conviction), you can make the hairy choices and continue to trust that decision once the road inevitably gets rough.

But what does that kind of decision making journey actually look like? Among the wealth of academic and psychological research on judgment and decision making, I tried to find a simple graphic for this post in the compendium of Google Images. To my surprise and dismay, almost all the results focused on the consumer buying decision — the framework used by marketers as they plot how to get you to spend money. Explicitly removing marketing jargon from search terms, the next most common result centered on patient decisions in healthcare. What is an everyday decision journeyer to do?

Here’s my humble offering to you: an extremely basic decision journey that I believe defines a Great Revisit. It’s not scientific, comprehensive, or my attempt to add to the canon. It’s just a simple, though not straightforward, map. In this series, I’ll be breaking down the big beats depicted below, starting with today’s focus on the first steps towards an examined choice.

Step 1: Signal from the noise

The period preceding a Great Revisit isn’t usually peaceful. Even if there’s calm on the surface, something stormy is usually brewing below. This looks different for everyone; there’s great variation between a nor’easter and a wintry mix. Words that might best describe this phase: angsty, discontent, lethargic, checked out, burnt out, or even bored out. Whichever adjective applies, the point is that your status quo is simply not working anymore.

It’s exactly in this stormy internal milieu where a Great Revisit begins. Well before articulating the question you’re grappling with, the journey requires the crucial first step of sorting your signal from the noise. In statistics, from which this notion originates, the researcher gets to decide what constitutes signal or noise and then tunes the data to find the signal. In this case, the researcher is you.

You get to decide what’s important to pay attention to, or not. You get to determine what is behind your deep discontent, and why that matters to you. Only once you have a sense of what’s brewing (and why) can you begin to engage with what you’re going to do about it. Put simply: you can’t solve a problem without knowing what that problem really is.

This is sometimes the trickiest part of a Great Revisit, especially for those of us who may be inclined to find silver linings, glorify long suffering, or look for answers in the opinion of others. If that’s you, or if you’re so overloaded that it’s harder than usual to examine within, here are some suggestions to start identifying the signal vs. noise:

• Do a values check. On a scale of 1 to 10, 1 being not at all and 10 being completely, how aligned are you living with the values that are most important to you? If a value is scoring lower than others, why? What area of your life seems to be in deepest misalignment? Dig deeper there.
• Pay attention to your body. Go about daily life for a week (or more), but try to pay 25% more attention to how you’re feeling in your bones, so to speak. Somatic responses can often cue us into stressful or anxiety-inducing triggers before our analytical brains catch up to that realization. When are you feeling a tightness in your chest? When do you forget to keep breathing? Examine that.
• Ask a person(s) you trust. This is tricky as it can be tempting to outsource this kind of self-insight to the people around you, especially if you find complex feelings too much to handle. Please resist this temptation. Instead, consult the closest around you for their observations. What have they noticed about how you’ve shown up in the past few months? Are there patterns they’re hearing in what you say or seeing in what you do? When are you most ‘bugged out’? Consider this.

Lastly, and importantly, give your findings some room to breathe, settle, and evolve — no matter how you tackled the sorting exercise. You’ll know you’ve found a potential signal when you’ve identified the area(s) of your life that may need to change. And you’ll know you’ve found the signal when you’re still sure of it after a few weeks go by, when a friend or two shows skepticism, and/or despite the anxieties that pile up.

You’ve definitely found the signal from the noise when it’s something you simply can’t shake.

Step 2: The Big Question

Once you’ve homed in on the signal behind your deep discontent, it’s about figuring out what you can and will do about it. This is where the Big Question comes in: the query you’ll carry with you through the entire journey; a significant prompt that itself prompts active inquiry, tough considerations, and ultimately action towards the next Great Thing you’ll have designed.

You might be asking, why a question? Why not a goal, and a SMART goal at that? Questions are powerful because they are inherently generative. Well-formed questions allow the asker to consider and examine multiple choices before committing to one. While there will be room for goals and OKRs and narrower accountability constructs down the line, a Great Revisit is first and foremost about generating broad possibilities to consider as you exercise the ability to choose for yourself.

The act of question forming is what creates the bounds of your exploration; it’s what sets the terrain covered on your decision journey.

When forming the Big Question, it’s also important to index on durability. The Big Question will not be the only question you will ask and answer on the road ahead, but it will be an undeniable anchor point against which you’ll prioritize and navigate the series of smaller choices to come. If its answer ultimately serves as the true North in forging your path, it’s crucial to articulate it with care.

Some important elements for carefully articulating a Big Question:

• Structure: How a question is structured dictates the scope of answers it will generate. Think about the following questions: Do I pursue X or Y? Do I pursue A? How do I achieve B? Each of these question structures lead to a different option set: the first two primarily toward a ‘yes’ or ‘no’, and the latter towards anything one can reasonably imagine. Structures can be narrow (like leading questions, closed-ended questions) or wide (like open-ended questions) — to unlock the imagination, err towards wide.
• Wording: How a question is worded dictates the kind of answers it will generate. My favorite example of this is from IBM Design Thinking workshops. When you ask a group ‘How might we design a better vase?’, try as you might the answers will be only one standard deviation (max) from the kind of vessels we know now. When you ask the group instead, ‘How might we design a better way to enjoy flowers at home?’, the group literally begins to think outside the box.
• Altitude: How high or low-level the question sits dictates the scale of the answers it will generate. Again, examples are helpful here. Consider the various altitudes covered here and the different answers one might explore: ‘What is my next job going to be?’ vs. ‘What career do I want to build?’ vs. ‘What is my calling?’. As these questions get progressively higher off the ground, so do the scale of the answers — from role, to career path, to higher purpose. While the highest questions are often the most intimidating, they are also some of the most shockingly useful. When you know your calling, you are better able to design your career; when you know the career you want, you are better able to focus your job search.

Here’s the beauty of being in the driver’s seat. You get to decide what your Big Question is, and it just has to be big enough. Not ready to tackle your purpose for being on earth? That’s totally fine. Start where you can; meet yourself where you are.

A sampling of Big Questions I’ve sat with over the past two decades: Am I who they say I am? Who should I help? What does mercy look like? How do I exercise more agency in my career? Where do I go from here? Answering each of these questions has led me in directions that I never would have imagined for myself had I not taken the time to craft and explore them in an authentic and vulnerable way. In fact, I’m still in the thick of my latest Great Revisit — past the signal, past the question, now where my truest answer has taken me: a break from full-time work, digging in with clients who want to make a change, and expressing myself more vocally in the world. As the human in the driver’s seat, every day is both terrifying and brilliant.

Not sure where to start? Here’s a practical approach to forming a Big (Enough) Question:

• Reflect: Start with the signal you’ve sorted from the noise (see Step 1). What is the issue? Why is that an issue for you? What’s getting the way?
• Generate: With those insights in mind, begin to draft questions that you want to answer on the way to changing what’s not working in your life — and draft as many questions as you can. If you run out of steam, try taking a question you’ve drafted and revising it by playing around with the elements I listed above: structure, wording, and altitude.
• Rank: Once you’re at a critical mass, take a look at the set of questions in front of you. Begin to sort them from most important to least important to you. This ranking can be logistically easier if each question is on a post-it, or if you’re doing this digitally; it can be existentially easier if you use your core values as a guide.
• Look for a spark: Take the questions that made the cut of Most Important, ideally a smaller set of 5–7 max. Pose each of them to yourself (outloud or in your head) — which ones spark your imagination or inspiration? If none, then which ones spark your fear? Keep those. We’re looking for the questions that elicit a big enough response from you to generate exploration and action. The question(s) that pass the ‘spark’ test are your working drafts for the one Big Enough.
• Try it on: Put your draft(s) question somewhere noticeable but not in your face. Fixation is not our friend at this point. Perhaps it’s on a piece of paper on the wall in your room? A subtle post-it on your office desk? Even the background on your unlocked phone screen. Then try to put it out of your mind until you next notice it. When you do, check-in with yourself — what comes up for you when you ponder the question? How does it make you feel? What do you begin to imagine or reflect on?

If the question stops resonating with you after a few days or weeks, then revise it. If that revision still has you stuck, then go back to the other contenders that made it past the importance / spark test. Once your question continuously engages your brain and/or your heart, once it prompts deep examination and exciting generation, that’s a very promising sign. Once it’s a question you find yourself thinking about even if it’s not in front of you, then, my journeyer, you’re cooking with gas.

Jodi Chao is a certified professional coach and 2x Chief of Staff who believes that Great Revisits lead to even more Great Things. When individuals and teams show up for the big moments with clarity, conviction, and a little bit of audacity, things never stay the same. If you’d like to learn more about her work as a coach and consultant, you can do so at www.jodichao.com.