The Simple Way to Make Decision

As a coach, one of most important jobs is to point you to your own wisdom and insight to decide what is best for you. I may lay many cards on the table in front of you, but ultimately our your inbuilt GPS will guide us as to what is right for you.

One of my teacher's, Michael Neill, has taught me many things with regard to being a 'super coach', but this one lesson has struck with me the deepest, and has become the biggest gift I now share with my clients.

A very long time ago, a Greek poet called Archilocus wrote a poem that was roughly translated to:

"The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing."

Foxes are cunning and are able to devise hundreds of strategies for catching unsuspecting hedgehogs off guard, but the hedgehog has but one defensive strategy - to curl up until the predictor gets tired and leaves.

So when it comes to making decisions, it seems we have the same choice: to devise a thousand strategies for happiness and success, or find one that really works and do it a thousand times.

The question then.. is what is that one strategy?

Michael as a coach of individual and groups of all works of life for over 30 years can say with confidence that the people who do really well over time are often not:

• the smartest
• the best read
• they may be introvert
• they may be extrovert
• they may be confident
• they may be insecure

What they all tend to have in common is that they have an unusually high degree of trust in their own sense of knowing, and a willingness to follow that sense right up to (and even over) the edge of an apparent cliff if that's what it is guiding them to do.

In other words, they have a deep trust in their intuition, their gut feeling, their wisdom to guide them in their life.

The fact that so many of us are so out of touch with that inner knowing - especially when it comes to the diet and wellness industry - is simply the result as what Michael calls it, a 'lifetime of fox training.'

We've been all innocently taught from the time we were born that the right answers to our most important questions are out in the world around us, waiting to be found. So we search and we seek, and sure enough there are thousands of people only too willing to share their best advice on how to find happiness, get everything we want, lose weight, get healthy, and to even outfox all the other foxes out there.

But meanwhile, our inner knowing is quietly whispering words of guidance, common sense and direction in our ear.

Sometimes that guidance seems like a no brainer and our decision making is effortless. More often than not, we experience a feeling that tells us when to hold back, and when to jump in.

But how do we know when it's speaking? How do we know it's some kind of inner wisdom as apposed to fear?

Here's some helpful guidelines:

• wisdom is every present and always kind (our habitual thinking usually is very unkind)
• wisdom is sometimes soft but always clear
• it has an obviousness to it when you do hear it, even if its been invisible to you until you do
• it often comes disguised as common sense

It is right there to guide you, just waiting for you to allow it to guide you. You need only be quiet and listen, and when you relax in to it, you will almost always know what to do.

So why is decision make so difficult for most of us so much of the time?

Because we get caught up in a whirlwind of thinking that our future wellbeing is dependent on making the right decision now, and that in some way, we should or could know in advance how things will turn out.

But.. the future is an incomplete equation.

What if...

• you could never make a mistake, because you can't ever know how things would have turned out if you had done things differently?

Read that again. You will never know.

Here's the thing. You (and me) are always doing the best we can given the thinking that we have and looks real to us in any situation.. in any moment.

So, the secret of effective decision making then is simply this:

There is no such thing as a decision. You either know or you don't.

Consider this. Did you decide which butt cheek to sit on, when to take a breath, which foot to stand on? What about the thousands of decisions you make in each and every day?

The fact is, we're always making decisions each and every day, and most of the time we're not even noticing.

So then when what we call decisions are just those difficult looking things we see when we drop out of the flow of our inner knowing and get caught back up in our habitual thinking. In any given moment, you either know what to do, or you don't.

How best to live more in the flow of our own inbuilt GPS? You simply just need to listen for it. It might be the little flute playing quietly in the band, barely noticeable above the noise of your own thinking. But when you let that thinking settle and start to give the flute more of your attention, it becomes louder and louder, and you will start to trust it to play the songs you like to listen too more and more.

I once explained this to a client and then said, I'm sorry if this isn't the answer you were seeking. He said to me that was the strongest and best advice he had ever heard. I had given him permission to listen and to trust his own GPS.

And I give you this permission too. It will never let you down.