Kate's Nuggets

How to Make Good Decisions in Uncertain Times
Episode 16

Podcast Opening over Theme Music:
Hello and welcome. This is Kate's Nuggets, the podcast where I share bite-size nuggets of wisdom about self-leadership. I am your host, Kate Arms. I invite you to listen lightly, let these ideas wash over you. Take what you take and let the rest go. You can always come back and listen again.

Kate Arms:
Everything is changing so fast in the world right now. Depending on where you are, you and your neighbors and your country are at a different place in the cycle of coping with the pandemic. But for everybody, there's a balancing act going on at every level, every day, about, "Are we making progress on making things better? And if we are, do we still need to do more? How long do we need to keep what practices in place? What changes do we need to make? How do we keep ourselves functional, as individuals, as families, as organizations, as companies, as governments, as any role that we might have?"

It's all in flux right now, and we have to find our way through this. I have been speaking with a lot of therapists in the last few days and other people who professionally work with mental and spiritual and physical well-being, and we are all concerned that people keep as healthy as possible.

What we have right now is a massive stressor that hit most people very dramatically, and that is going to go on for a long time. We don't know how long. It is clear that it's going to be months, and a substantial number of people who should know reasonably well are talking about 18 months to two years before there's a vaccine in place or enough herd immunity for this to really stabilize.

Right now, most of the world is in panic response mode. This is not sustainable. So, how do we reduce the panic and make good decisions as individuals, so that we can take care of our mental well-being though this?

We want to be, two, three years from now, at least as healthy as we are now. Those of us who are used to having a lot of freedom, that has suddenly been curtailed, have a massive adjustment that we are going through.

What do we need to do to be able to make decisions quickly, without enough information, not being able to predict the future, and still be building towards a future that we want for ourselves?

There are a few things we really can do. The first is to recognize that, although the external circumstances of our lives are very unpredictable, we have a lot of control over how we feel about our lives. When we can't predict what the future will be, we need to know how we want to feel about our lives and use those as the decision-making criteria.

There are a handful of things that we need for making decisions in circumstances like this that will help us get to those feelings. We need heuristics and rules of thumb for quick decision-making. Things are changing fast. We don't have time to gather all the information. We need to gather a little bit of information, make a decision, notice what happens, and adjust.

So, rules of thumb for decision-making. We need to have one or two. More than that we can't handle, and especially if those conflict, we get into trouble. We need to have a sense of our two most important values. All of us value many, many things. Values can conflict with each other. The decision that you would make to implement one value, may make implementing another completely impossible. And, so, when your values come in conflict with each other, you need to already have a sense of what matters more.

Having done that work in advance and having chosen or identified the two most important values, allows you to look at a situation and go, "All right. How do these two values drive me?" If you're trying to balance five, six, seven values, you're going to be paralyzed by overwhelm.

You also need to have a sense of the impact that you want to have in the world. You need to know what it is that, as a person, you are trying to create with your life. If you know those two things in short, easy-to-remember phrases, you can ask yourself in every given situation, "What thing is in my control right now that I can do, that is in service of the impact I want to have in the world and aligned with my most important values?"

You also need to have a process from shifting from your afraid self to your creative self. We have a nervous system that either functions from fear, which is a cognitive processing, offline, tunnel vision, fight, flight, freeze, fawn, get out of the situation and keep myself physically safe as quickly as possible, system, and a calm, compassionate, creative system.

And the physiological mechanisms of the fear-based system wreak havoc in our bodies. We get adrenal fatigue. We crash, and our bodies can't take it for a long period of time. It is very, very effective for short-term crisis management when we need to run away from a truck that's out of control on the road. When we need to get out of the way of a boulder that is falling off the cliff because of an earthquake, we need that quick burst of adrenaline. We don't want to think about it. We don't have time to think about it. We need to just move.

But because of the long-term impact on our body, we cannot sustain a long-term process with that as our physiology. We need to shift from sprinting to ultra-marathoning. We need to have something sustainable, and what is sustainable in our bodies is from our creative self. So, you need a process for decreasing your activation and your triggered self.

There are a variety of processes, and I don't have time to go into them right now, but one of the things that I spend a lot of time with my clients working on is developing the processes that they can use in a variety of situations.

Three really useful ways of shifting from your afraid self to your creative self are, physical calming, yoga, running, stretching, meditation, whatever works for you for physical calming. Cultivating curiosity. It's impossible to be afraid and curious at the same time. They use different parts of our brains. If you can start asking questions about anything, you start shifting your body.

And cultivating the part of you that witnesses, the part of you that sees everything that's going on, without judgment, just noticing, that's okay with everything, that just sees that the world is the way that it is, and it can't be any other way, and that is perfect. There's a part of each of us that observes the world from that place, and if we can get that part of us to be the part that's running the show for a while, we get our afraid self to stand down.

Now, we can't stay living our lives from the place of the internal witness if we want to take action. We need to activate our inner doer, our leader, our go-getter, without also activating our afraid self. And the way that we do that is, we make a decision about what we're committed to, and we make a commitment that is strong enough to pull us into action. When we are committed enough to something outside ourselves, we get into action, despite whatever potential fear-making things are going on around us.

The classic example of this is the sorts of things that a mother will do when her child is in danger. And we all have things that we are sufficiently committed to, that they stop us from doing things, and they get us doing things. They may be family members. For some people, it's protecting the environment. For some people, it is creating beauty. For some people, it's solving a complex mathematical problem. Whatever it is for you that you are committed to, where the commitment is strong enough to get you into action, that's the direction to point your life if you want to not live in fear.

If you want to deactivate your triggered self, if you want to find equanimity, choosing or finding something to be more committed to than your fear, you cannot just decide this intellectually. This has to be a gut-level commitment to something that is so deep and intense that it pulls you into action. You need a motivating enough goal or purpose, and only you know what will be motivating enough for you.

In order to act quickly when things are changing, you also need an accurate awareness of your strengths. Most of us are aware of our weaknesses more than we are aware of our strengths. Most of us are completely unconscious about our greatest strengths unless we've done real work identifying our strengths.

Now, strengths-based assessments have been popular for a while now, so lots of people have a sense of what their strengths are. And, at the same time, it is fascinating to me how often people I think are self-aware, haven't truly accepted that the things that other people recognize as their genius, really are their genius. So, getting help from other people seeing what your strengths really are is incredibly valuable.

In quick-changing times, you need to be acting from your strengths and recruiting other people whose strengths can compensate for your weaknesses to be your allies, because developing weaknesses into strengths takes time and, when things are changing rapidly, time is not a luxury that most of us have. We have to maybe keep an eye out for this as an opportunity to stretch into something that might be a little bit difficult for me, but only when we've got energy and only when we've got a little bit of time.

Most of the time, we need to be starting from our strengths and making our strengths stronger. We don't want to be well-rounded people. We want to be wild specialists in our strengths, with great relationships, with people who are different enough than we are, that together, we have far more strengths than each one of us had individually.

And the other thing that really, really matters when things are changing fast is you need a frequent process for reflection and reassessment and willingness to change which direction you're going in, because circumstances are changing, and if you don't change in response to circumstances, at some point, you're going to be acting as though the world is one way, but actually, the world will have already become something different.

The reason that two weeks is a timeframe that decisions are being made, in terms of governmental response to the pandemic, is that epidemiologists have established that two weeks is a reasonable timeframe for reassessment. It gives you long enough to see whether public health changes are actually having an impact, and it's short enough that if they're not having enough impact, you can make changes without suffering too much of a consequence because of delay.

So, think about what values you want to be using as your decision-making processes and what impact you want to be having on the world. What seeds can you plant in this moment right now, that will be moving the world towards coming out of this more like the world that you want to see? What can you do right now, in this moment, that is an expression of your values and that has the impact that can make this world right now a little bit more like the world you want to see?

If you have trouble figuring out what those decision-making criteria are, what the purpose is, what you're committed to, what your values are, find help. There are lots of books. There are lots of journaling exercises. I have a five coaching-session process that I walk people through that helps them with that.

If you know that there's just one of these pieces that you're struggling with, in the show notes for this episode, there's a link to book a half an hour with me, and we can address that.

We are in this for the long haul, and I am in this in service of well-being and accomplishment. My goal is to help you be mentally healthy and getting things done. Even in this time where everything is in flux, both of those things are possible. And there are lots of things to be concerned about and taken into consideration, but you don't have to live in fear. You can live from your creative self, even in this period of wild social and economic and medical disruption.

End Theme and Credits:
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To take this work deeper and learn how I can support you personally as your coach, email me at kate@signalfirecoaching.com to schedule a free consultation.
Here's to Thriving! Catch you next time.
Kate's Nuggets is a Signal Fire Coaching production. The music is adapted under license from Heroic Age by Kevin McLeod.