Happy Easter to you and your family from ours! Easter is a time of renewal - a chance to reflect, reset, and listen more closely to the deeper truths in our lives. It’s a good moment to talk about decision-making.
Are you looking for a new job, thinking of buying a house, or considering going back to school? Careful, deliberate reasoning can get you only so far in good decision making. You also need to know how to listen to your inner voice—your gut. How does it work?
What the science says
Our understanding of the mechanisms of “gut” and brain is still incomplete, but tests of the quality of decisions made on intuition as opposed to conscious analysis yield suggestive and useful results. Researchers have found that for simple decisions, it doesn’t matter whether we rely on intuitive feelings or on reasoning to reach a verdict. But for complex decisions, a gut-based decision is more than twice as likely to lead to an optimal outcome compared with one based on an analysis of the details. This finding suggests that it doesn’t matter how you decide something straightforward, but when you have multiple options, using your intuition to evaluate the choices may be the best course.
What I think
None of this is too mysterious. Your “gut” is basically just your experience plus the information your brain is gathering below your level of consciousness—that’s a LOT of data, so no wonder it is so useful.
Three specific gut feelings should command your attention as you evaluate your opportunities, because these emotions can strongly predict your future satisfaction: excitement, fear, and deadness (or perhaps, emptiness). Take the example of deciding between several potential jobs. There is no way to get perfect information about a professional opportunity in advance. You might make a mistake in seeking a position—I have, more than once in my career. But a reliable way to raise the odds of a good choice is to look for a lot of excitement, a little fear of danger, and as close to zero deadness as possible.
What you can do
Being able to recognize the three key feelings in your gut is vital to making any important decision. For example, if you find yourself looking for a new job, ask yourself:
- Does it excite you? Excitement should never be absent when you’re considering a job. Another way of defining this sort of excitement is prospective happiness, or joy about having a better future in sight. This should be HIGH.
- What kind of fear are you feeling? Fear comes in two varieties: danger and dread. Dread is always negative, but fear founded on a reasonable degree of danger can indicate that you’re sensing an imminent challenge of a difficult but doable task. This should not be overwhelming, but it should be PRESENT.
- Do you feel deadness? Deadness is a sensation associated with such feelings as boredom, loneliness, numbness, despair, and hopelessness. So if you feel dread, ask yourself whether it portends this deeper deadness—because this living death is exactly what you should avoid in a job, notwithstanding whatever pay, power, or prestige it seems to offer. This should be as close to ZERO as possible.
Life never offers any guarantee of success. But your heart—and your gut—will usually steer you in the right direction.
Arthur