life@work

The Six Easy Steps to Making Great Decisions

We make hundreds of decisions every day, most of them mundane.

• Which shirt should I wear?
• What about breakfast?
• Will I return that call first or send that email?

Most of us make it through these kinds of decision points with minimal angst.

But the really meaty, complex decisions - the ones that strongly impact our lives and affect people we care about - can stop us dead in our tracks, unsure and overwhelmed.

You know the ones I'm talking about:

• Should I quit this job and try to find something better?
• Do I want to change careers altogether, even though I've put 15 years into this one?
• Where do I start with a job search?

Procrastination

Many of my career coaching clients have put off making these decisions for months or even years because they can't figure out how to make them, and because they're scared of making a wrong decision which will haunt them for the rest of their lives.

Of course intellectually they know that it's unlikely that any one decision will haunt them for the rest of their lives, but emotionally it often feels as though a lot is at stake.

The Guide

To help my clients get moving and make great decisions, I walk them through a six-step process that I created.

Now I've put those steps into a coaching guide: "The Six Easy Steps to Making Great Decisions", and you can download it for free when you visit my website.

To create this particular process, I synthesized techniques and approaches I've been using with clients for the last six years with evidence from psychologists and other scientists who study effective decision making.

This coaching guide offers you concrete steps you can begin to use immediately, along with real-world examples of how three of my clients used the six-step process to make their own great decisions.

The guide is a great tool you can use when you're ready to make a key decision but are feeling pretty clueless about where to start. Consider this your free starting point.

Consider it also as a invitation for you to make the very first decision - the decision to make a decision.

I would love your feedback on the coaching guide. Try it out on a key decision that has you feeling stuck, and let me know what happens!

heather@dreambigcoaching.com

Why Deciding to Change Is So Difficult

Why is it so hard to make a career change?

Let me count the ways. We may not have the information, training, education or contacts that we need, just for starters.

Or perhaps simply the act of making the decision to make the career change is a huge hurdle to clear. After all, deciding to make any important change can confound us. But why?

One big reason is that when faced with a decision, we humans perceive the pain of loss to be about twice as potent as the pleasure of gain. The fancy term for this is loss aversion.

It's part of a larger psychological phenomenon known as negativity bias, which as Jonah Lehrer explains in his book How We Decide, means our brains perceive that bad is stronger than good.

Loss aversion is not rooted in logic; psychologists discovered that it's a defect hard-wired in the brain, present in all of us who experience emotion (which is as I see it, most of us). Loss aversion has widespread implications for many areas of our lives, including relationships, how we manage investments, and how we steer our careers.

When we consider changing careers, we naturally imagine all kinds of losses. We fear losing financial security, traction in our career trajectory, close relationships with people we work with now, that feeling we have of being competent at what we do, even perhaps the good opinion of our friends and of society.

Compared to the losses, the possible gains, such as feeling more satisfied, feeling reinvigorated, learning new things and even earning more money trigger a weaker emotional response.

So what can we do about loss aversion? According to Lehrer, "The only way to avoid loss aversion is to know about the concept."

So now you know. You can practice being aware of when you're engaging in the mental habit of loss aversion and then turn your attention to the facts of your situation.

Does this mean that emotions play no part in complex decision making? Absolutely not. In fact as it turns out, making complex decisions requires tuning into our emotions (also known as a "gut check") after we've had a chance to mull over data.

You can overdo the pros and cons list-making, however. Psychologist Ap Diiksterhuis found in his experiments that that the longer people spend analyzing options in complex decision making, the less satisfied they are with their decisions.

Deciding to change is hard because we focus on what we have to lose if we make the change. But when we realize that potential losses may not in fact be a bigger deal than potential gains and decide to do more investigating, we just may make the best decision of our lives.

I'd love to know: Have you ever decided to make a career change, despite fearing what you had to lose?

The Pain of "Point C"

I'm a bit behind in my blog reading.

If you're a Seth Godin fan, this is old news. But I just couldn't pass it up as a point of illustration and commentary.

First you should devote the next 60 seconds to reading this post. Excerpting here just wouldn't do it justice - you need the whole thing. Go ahead, I'll wait...

OK, now what I think is the "take away" for those of us looking to find career happiness and feeling daunted about that for one reason or another, is the explanation of Point C and our reflection on what Point we are at in our lives right now. The graph isn't just for companies, you know.

Point C is the place that people are approaching when they call me up with their 17 reasons why they really want to change jobs and the 46 reasons why they can't.

Point C is where mid-career folks can hang out because they are ready to let go of Local Max (go read that excerpt if you haven't yet!) but haven't yet reached Point D and Big Max. There's just no escaping at least bits and pieces of Point C. Being at Point C can feel like boredom, insecurity, selling out, and plain ole failure.

All of this has caused me to reflect on when I've been at Point C in my life and what it took to get to Point D. I'm still wondering about Big Max and when I've been there. (I believe most of us go through this graph several times in our lives, in different contexts).

It's also crystal clear to me that I spend a lot of time with clients who are either dreading Point C, fearing the lack of continued financial and other kinds of security they depend on if they take a risk to try to get to Point D, or are right in the middle of Point C, flailing away.

Here are some quick thoughts if you are a stone's throw from Point C right now:

• Recognize where you are.
• Be OK with where you are. Many Americans believe that starting from preschool they should be able to plot their lives directly on an upwardly directed diagonal from left to right, with no deviations, where one axis represents age and other represents accomplishment. (I don't know how to insert fancy graphics into a blog post, but imagine your basic line going up to the right.) This is simply bunk. I believe our lives can be plotted on an upward moving spiral, but that's another post.
• Identify what Point D and Big Max are to you. What will be the glory of getting there? Only then can you decide what you're willing to tolerate in the journey. You won't tolerate much discomfort if you have no sense of eventual payoff.
• Consult both your gut and your head to map out the risks you're willing to take.
• Gather your resources to weather Point C. Who are your people? It's time to mobilize them. It might be a drippy enough day for your rainy day fund. Find your sources of strength and inspiration and stay connected to those.
• Commit to grit. It'll get you through.

Oh, and sometimes you are simply plunged into Point C without the benefit of deciding first. In which case, skip directly to "gather your resources to weather Point C."

You may be satisfied with being at Local Max in your career. But if you're drawn to the possibility of something bigger, consider your path through Point C, and buckle your seatbelt for the journey.

www.dreambigcoaching.com

Changing Careers: Research Before You Dismiss

Yesterday I read a story about boomers who are retiring early to fulfill longtime ambitions, and I realized that I know quite a few people who are making changes to fulfill ambitions without retiring early first.

Many people I talk to who are thinking about making a significant career change feel alone in this. It seems to them that everyone else is happy enough toiling away at their current job, or have dismissed ideas of change because, "I can't afford it" or "I'm too old" or "What would I do, anyway?"

If you notice that you keep imagining yourself doing something else, you owe it to yourself to look at that carefully and give it due regard.

This doesn't mean you have to follow every whim. But if you pay attention to the truth in your gut and have the courage to research the possibilities, it could be one of the greatest gifts you can give to yourself.

Why does it take courage to research? Because for a lot of folks, there are large psychological barriers to making a career change. We want to stay in our comfort zone (remember homeostasis from science class?) We are used to a certain income per month. Certain people count on us to continue to be what we are. Facing risk is just plain scary.

When we quickly dismiss our ideas, we get to stay in our comfort zone. When we research, we may find a way to move forward, and we can feel pretty ambivalent about that.

But when you take your ideas seriously and take the time to research the possibilities - talking to people in the field, talking to companies and organizations and researching professional associations, salaries and job openings online - you can experience some relief from the persistent nagging in your gut that you've been ignoring. (Note: "Research" does not mean merely taking one person's opinion as the Gospel Truth).

Through research, you might discover a way to pursue what you want to do "on the side". You might decide that going back to school for a Master's degree is feasible after all. You might resolve once and for all that acting professionally was a pipe dream, and then be ready to put all your energy into something that is going to work for your life.

Doing the research isn't sexy, but it can lead to all kinds of options.

When I talk to a new client who is tentative about sharing her desire to go from, say real estate agent to kindergarten teacher, I've noticed she likes to hear about what changes other people are making. So here's a partial list of the recent changes that people I know professionally and personally have made:

• From mechanical engineeer to attorney to manager at a start-up specialty beverage company
• From college athletic coach to self-employed personal trainer
• From journalist to law school student
• From full-time instructional designer to contract instructional designer
• From laid off administrative employee to self employed retailer
• From technical writer to TV production
• From hi-tech manager to at-home parent
• From corporate training manager to self-employed consultant and professional speaker
• From working for corporations to working in two-person partnerships in law, management consultancy and architecture
• From full-time high school teacher to part-time curriculum designer
• From biotech marketing to self-employed chef-for-hire
• From community college dean to e-learning consultant and retiree

What's your gut nagging you about? What questions need to be answered so that you can do more of what you want to do?

What are you waiting for?

www.dreambigcoaching.com