Making Tough Decisions
Look to your values to make difficult decisions
/
Ray deliberated quitting his job at a consulting firm for three months, before leaving. No one thing led to his decision. Yes, his work environment was stressful, but he had borne that stress for years without complaint. If forced to identify a trigger for his decision, though, he might point to a family outing in the park.
“After a long time, I was able to spend time with the family,” he said.
“I was watching my five-year-old son out of the corner of my eye, while tossing a football with my eight-year-old. My five-year-old was trying to drop kick a football, the way a goalkeeper might, and kept missing it. Finally, frustrated, he threw the ball at my wife, shouting, ‘I can’t do this.’”
“My wife responded, ‘why don’t you ask dad, he’s right there’? He looked at her and said, ‘Dad knows football?’”
It hit Ray that his son didn’t know him very well. Worse, he wouldn’t address him directly and spoke to him through his wife. “I began to pay attention to what else I was missing,” he said. “I learned that my children were growing up without me.”
Though Ray didn’t act immediately, the experience shook him. “I started looking at everything differently,” he said, “really paying attention. I noticed that sometimes I would even step out to take a client’s call instead of staying and watching my child’s performance. I realized I was making choices and many of them were making me uncomfortable.”
Eventually Ray decided that being present for his family when they needed him, was more important than anything else. He felt he couldn’t do that in his current job so, he had to leave.
Tracy arrived at a similar decision point but came to a different conclusion. “We had just reached a crucial phase of a project I was working on, when I discovered our child was developing an eating disorder. We were at our wits end,” she said, speaking about herself and her husband. “I felt I would be slightly better at being the primary care-giver for our child because I understood him better. My husband seems to press all the wrong buttons with him.”
“I thought long and hard about whether I should step away from my project and found no easy answer. Whatever I did, I felt I would have let some people down. My husband and I decided eventually that I should stay with the project and we would get our child all the help he needed,” she said. “School counselors were the first line of help and they were supported by a therapist who seemed to work well with him.”
Modern psychology has simple, yet compelling guidance for people like Ray and Tracy who are struggling with critical decisions – let your values guide you. But this can be confusing – how do I know what my values are saying to me? Few people will claim family is not important to them; yet many make choices that put family second to a pressing professional demand.
Here’s one way that values can help you resolve seemingly knotty problems. You will need about a half an hour of quiet time for this exercise.
First, identify all the principal domains in your life you value – relationships: your partner, children, parents, but also grandparents, uncles and weekend buddies; activities: the environment, wellness, theater – in short, every domain in your life that takes time and is of value to you.
Then, on a scale of 1-10, identify how important each of these domains are to you. Don’t give multiple items the same score; force yourself to discriminate between them. To help you with your scoring, imagine you are at your own funeral and someone you love is giving your eulogy. Now think of what you would want that person to say about you. The values you want mentioned at your eulogy should get high scores.
Finally, on a scale of 1-10, identify the relative effort you devote to each domain today. This is not a measure of time – taking time out for a religious observance every day, may be a 10, even though the activity itself doesn’t take more than half an hour. Rather, give it a number that indicates how “uncompromisable” it is, currently, in your life.
Making choices that reduce misalignment between importance and effort devoted will lead to greater contentment.
Ray felt the amount of time he was devoting to his young children was inadequate relative to the importance he placed on them, and so he changed jobs. Tracy found that she was broadly aligned in the importance and effort she placed on her professional challenges, and so she didn’t change what she was doing at work.
So, if you find yourself at a such a crossroads, choose the path that’s more aligned with what you value – that’s where you will likely find happiness.
