Are there wrong decisions?
This week a friend (👋🏼 Jenn!) sent me this quote, asking whether I agreed: “Life is just one long series of decisions, which are ours to make — or ours to blow. Decision-making is so easy to get wrong, but it’s also so easy to fix. We just have to stop, stop, stop following the most common advice, which is to listen to your gut.” (Suzy Welch)
Immediately I wrote back:
“The more I do this work and live this life, the more I believe there are no wrong decisions. Even the ones where I went against my gut taught me the power of listening to my gut.”
Funny thing, I’d actually read Suzy wrong, and I thought she was advocating FOR the use of gut in decisions. What I disagreed with was that a decision could be wrong. Now that I re-read it, I have two disagreements with Ms. Welch:
I don’t believe decisions can be wrong. Decisions are simply information. We take them*, we act on them, we learn things, we do the next thing.
There’s a lot of value in listening to our gut. In fact, there’s been good research that shows that our intuition (gut) has a lot of wisdom, but we have been trained to bypass that wisdom. So it can become hard to know what the gut is telling us. Other research has shown that moral choices are often made through intuition, then backed up with facts (often so quickly that we don’t realize the one-two nature of the process). My philosophy is that what’s true for moral decisions is true for life decisions… following your intuition is a sound approach.
How about you? What do you think about this quote? Can decisions be wrong? Is the voice of the gut to be suppressed? Let me know in the comments.
*The British don’t “make” decisions, they “take” them. This always seemed like a funny turn of phrase to me, but as I think about it now, “take” is the more accurate verb. It’s softer than “make,” which implies a real effort. What if we, along with our intuition, were taking decisions rather than making them? How would that change the weight of them? How might that change how we see them?
**And if you want more on decision making, head over to this week’s newsletter, where I share a light hack you can try to make decisions less fraught.