How to decide which choice to make
The decision to completely change your life is never an easy one. Whether it is the decision to quit your job and become self-employed; to take the kids out of school and start home educating them; or to move out and start living completely off-grid. These and a multitude of choices are hard to make. We need to know that what we are doing is right, both for ourselves and for our family.
So how exactly do you make these decisions? There is an old proverb which says this
“Deliberate often, decide once”
It is good advice. When making a life-changing choice it is good to spend a considerable amount of time weighing up all of the options. A simple tool to help us do that is a pros and cons list. If I make this choice what could be better? What could be worse? What are the risks and opportunities.
I don't find pros and cons lists particularly helpful. The advantages of one thing are often the disadvantages of the other. They can lead me into a circular thinking where every objection is balanced by something else. Life is rarely two dimensional - I need to take a deeper look.
The mixing desk analogy
Forrest Gump says life is “like a box of chocolates”. I say it is more like a mixing desk. There are multiple different areas, each like its own slider. To get the perfect mix we move each individual slider up or down. The problem with attaining the perfect mix is that every change we make affects all the others. To make matters worse, the music of life itself gets louder or softer. External factors influence our decisions. Sometimes we can get the life change we need by tweaking a couple of the sliders. Sometimes we need to reset the board and start again. How do we know which it is?
To start with I suggest making a list of all the areas of your life. It may include some of the following. There may also be areas that are important to you which I have not included - for example particular hobbies or activities which you value, or even negative aspects which you are seeking to eliminate such as addictions or phobias.
- Relationships and/or Family
- Home
- Job
- Income
- Health
- Fitness
- Your personal values, faith or moral code
- Friends or community
- Leisure and hobbies
- Mental Health
- Happiness
Comparing states
Once you have chosen your 'channels' take a moment to arrange them in order of importance to you. Next make three columns and write them into the first. I suggest that you do this on paper, or on a whiteboard. Whilst I love spreadsheets (genuinely!) there is something about physcically using a pen which may help you connect.
In the second column place a score against each item to say how well you think this aspect of you life is going currently. For example if your family life is excellent, give it five out of five.
In the final column give it your best guess at the score that you think it could get to if you succesffully make the change that you are contemplating. Be honest in this, it is possible that some areas may go down in order for others to go up. For example if you are thinking of leaving work and starting your own business, your leisure time might suffer. Equally it can be easy to assume that a change of scenery will improve our mental health, or family life, without taking into account the other stresses it may introduce.
You may find it hard to put numbers in every channel for the third column. This will show you where you may need to do a bit more research or ask some questions before making a decision. Hopefully as you fill the numbers in it will start to give you a picture of whether the choice is right for you.
Breaking the choice down
Of course not all choices need to be big ones. If you are crossing a river, and there is no bridge or boat to hand, the old-fashioned way was to make stepping stones. Perhaps your list shows that you are not yet ready to make the big change, but it has highlighted the area of your life which is most out of balance. Hopefully you found the excercise useful. Either way, in the next couple of posts I'll be talking about a couple of other models which I have found useful.
When we started to live off-grid it was not as big a decision as you might have expected. By that stage we had investigated dozens of options, and made many small steps which had moved us in a direction which made the final choice easier. Actually for us, the decision happened before we had realised it - but more of that in later posts.