Important decisions provide opportunities for us to explore our competing motivations and values. Making difficult and meaningful decisions are times when our needs, feelings, and values must be allowed expression. When we are able to see our conflicted or distressing feelings as important information about the choices we are facing, we can increase our tolerance of these disruptive emotions. Value based decision-making is based on an awareness of the connection between our emotions, needs, and values.
Conflicted choices are opportunities to expand our self-awareness and should not be made quickly and impulsively just to reduce tension, doubt, or frustration. Distressing or poorly understood feelings are the leading edge of our deeper motivations and values. When we fail to develop awareness of these emotional forces, we risk making decisions that are limited, cutting us off from critical needs and desires.
Topics below:
Recognize that a decision needs to be made
Being conflicted is not pathological
Self-awareness
Deciding is a process
Recognize that a decision needs to be made
Our emotions emerge from our needs and motivations. A disconnection from our emotions can obscure this connection. When we avoid troubling feelings or thoughts, we may be masking the need to take action in our lives. For example, if we are feeling bored when alone and then act compulsively to check our social media, then we impede the emergence of whatever emotions underlie the boredom. Perhaps the boredom masks feelings of loneliness. If we pause to explore the underlying feeling of loneliness, we can recognize the power of our inherent needs for belonging or attachment. Jumping immediately into the distractions of modern life may afford quick relief; but an opportunity for self-development leading to deeper satisfaction in the future may have been missed. Focusing awareness on our emotions and values brings forward our deeper needs and desires. Experiencing these longings and passions is the first step to satisfying them.
The emotions associated with our needs are predominantly visceral: guilt, shame, anticipation, excitement, fear, anger, longing, passion, and desire. These emotions frequently compel us into action. Recognizing these visceral feelings as an expression of our deeper needs and motivations, provides a context for us to explore those feelings. This can help us restrain the pressure to act, providing time to focus on the meaning and purpose of these motivating emotions. If we fail to connect these visceral emotions to the deeper layers of the self, we may find ourselves taking action without having really made any decisions.
The failure to make actual decisions can also arise when we experience only a limited range of emotions. If we are unaware of our disparate needs and desires, we may pursue a single need or goal. A myopic focus in life can develop over time as a result of habitually avoiding our needs and desires as they emerge. This often happens when we have been so focused on one aspect of our lives that the other aspects are all but forgotten. We set them aside, often pretending we will deal with them later and for quite sometime this strategy may work. Such a singular pursuit neglects a wide range of our inherent needs and can result in emotional pain and distress. The consequences of this lack of making decisions that meet our wider needs often look like a major life crisis; however, the avoidance can also manifest in anxiety, depression, or being ill at ease.
Another form of avoiding making a decision is rumination. Although it may appear as a decision-making process, in reality, rumination is a form of self-soothing. Rumination attempts to drown out pain and is analogous to the processes of addiction. Rumination and thinking are not equivalent. Unlike thinking which involves the cerebral cortex, rumination arises in the brain’s sub-cortical structures associated with habits and obsessions. Activity in these sub-cortical brain centers actually precludes thoughtful deliberation. When ruminating, we approach the decision by merely going over and over the readily apparent choices and consequences; we are not engaged in active deliberation.
Rumination and the associated procrastination are particularly pernicious patterns of avoiding decision-making. Occasionally, we may have a decision on our mind for some time, without actually committing to it. Such procrastination is a form of avoidance that masks the distress associated with actually making the decision. In some people, the procrastination alternates with impulsive enactments.
Impulsive decision-making is not always the result of procrastination and can also result from following the old adage: the heart wants what the heart wants. Here an action is evoked by a predominate driving emotion. Strong emotions hold valuable information about the needs and desires associated with the decisions we face. However, without thoughtful deliberation, strong leading-emotions may preclude considering other meaningful feelings that are being drowned out. A decision made under the influence of an isolated, singular emotion will not include important, possibly contrary, latent needs and values. These unheard needs and values will then emerge after the emotion-fueled decision has been made, often problematically. Such non-deliberative decision-making often results in the repeated reversals of the decision.
Sometimes avoidance is fueled by fear. It can be frightening to accept that we must become proactive and make a meaningful choice. When we fail to explore the sources of our discontent because of fear, we magnify the very distress we hope to elude. Paradoxically, by looking at the need to make a decision, we end the accumulation of angst stemming from the avoidance.
Owning-up to the circumstances and making a decision can be empowering. Empowerment comes from knowing you have choices and can shape your future. Seeing yourself in control of your life is empowering, but it can also be painful. Sometimes we avoid taking ownership of our decisions, giving up empowerment, in order to escape disappointment and remorse. For example, the decisions of the past, that did not work out or were patently mistaken, can stir up feelings of regret or self-recrimination.
Our life-long journey of making important decisions is a manifestation of our deep needs and values. The myriad decisions made in life reflect the diversity and complexity of our nature. With such a perspective, remorse and regret need not lead to self-recrimination. Disappointment and regret may remain, but self-reproach can be replaced with self-understanding and compassion.
The decisions we made in the past shape today’s decisions. And, today’s decisions affect the decisions to come. Accepting our life-long chain of decision-making creates in us a sense of agency that allows us to exercise control of our life.
Being conflicted is not pathological
The internal conflict we feel when facing a difficult decision is a manifestation of our disparate needs and desires. Because our needs and desires are expressed in our emotions and motivations, having difficulty making a decision is not pathological, but reflects our inherent complexity. Although laboring to make a complex decision is not a defect, people often feel a tremendous amount of self-recrimination while struggling with a decision. We sometimes see the difficulty we face as resulting from our prior mistakes or shortcomings. This self-reproach clouds our understanding of the current situation, interfering with the ability to make a value-based decision.
We often struggle when making important decisions, because we are wrestling with multiple competing motivations. The greater the disparity between them, the greater the struggle to make a decision. Our motivations express themselves through what we feel, believe, and value. By observing how our values and emotions are wired together, we are able to glimpse into our deeper motivations. When we recognize this connection, we can tease apart our conflicting needs and desires.
Understanding that our disparate needs and desires are fueling the conflict can help us tolerate feeling the shame or frustration that often accompanies our struggle to make a decision. The shame is decreased when we recognize that struggling is intrinsic to making a conflicted decision. This awareness can help us transform the self-attacking feelings into compassionate appreciation for challenges we face. As a result, we can begin to experience the decision-making process as a challenge. The shift from feeing shame to feeling challenged can be empowering. Making difficult decisions builds psychological resilience, if we are able to tolerate the distress without self-recrimination.
When we are actively involved in decision-making, we are proactive in our lives. Grappling with making a decision can have a profoundly positive effect on our self-efficacy. Making decisions is a self-enhancing event.
Self-awareness
Making value-based decisions requires us to manage our feelings, and remain thoughtful even while upset. Without the ability to tolerate distress, people often rush to make a decision. This rush to decide precludes the active deliberation, which is the foundation of value-based decision making. Deliberation includes being aware of our feelings while we are thinking about a pressing decision. The depth and breath of our deliberation is determined by our ability to integrate our thinking and feeling.
Effective deliberation requires self-awareness and an understanding of the nature of the self. Since the 1970s, research has consistently shown that the notion of a unitary self is illusory. The self is a construction, imposed upon diverse motivational and cognitive systems. These diverse systems are psychobiological in nature, emerging as evolutionary solutions to the challenges inherent to our societal existence. When we recognize the self as a construction, we can explore conflicting needs and values without feeling that there is something fundamentally wrong or irreconcilable.
The motivational and cognitive systems that comprise the self are modular and disparate, serving unique and sometimes, opposing purposes. For example, our motivational system for attachment and for sexual desire are distinct; however, both often arise under similar circumstances. When these two strivings cohere, they result in a loving relationship with strong feelings of love, accompanied by passion and sexual desire. However, there is not always a coherence between attachment and sexual desire. A lack of coherence in these two motivational systems can give rise to interpersonal conflict. For example, if our sexual motivations feel incompatible with our attachment motivations, then the more we get attached the less sexual desire we will experience for that person. Subsequent suppression of sexual desire, or directing those longings to another person, could then threaten the attachment.
Conflict can arise between any of our diverse needs and desires. For example, the interactions between our need for novelty can conflict with our need that seeks group loyalty. Among our several motivational systems, is a motivation to explore and seek out novel experiences. Sometimes our need for novelty conflicts with our feelings of group loyalty. Such conflict can be experienced as feeling trapped, stifled, or unfulfilled because of group ties. On the other hand, we may feel guilty for seeking out new experiences independent of the group. We may try to manage such internal conflict by embracing either the loyalty needs or the novelty-seeking needs. However, when we make a choice based on only one aspect, the feelings of the other aspect emerge later, confounding the decision or resulting in acute distress.
Understanding that there are powerful, psychobiological systems driving our motivations and values, gives us a context, within which to struggle, manage, and eventually resolve our deepest conflicts. The way our motivational and value systems manifest will be unique for each of us. The expression of these systems is determined by our stage of life, our developmental history, and our current psychological functioning. Without this wisdom, we will make decisions fueled by powerful internal forces, of which we have little understanding or control. Awareness of how our unique conditions interact with our values and motivational systems will help us make optimal, value-based decisions, and flourish.
When we appreciate our multifaceted nature, conflicts will take on a new dimension, a dimension of personal growth. This results in a greater understanding of our nature, and decision-making becomes an opportunity for enhancing our self-efficacy.
Deciding is a process
Identifying the motivational and value systems related to making the decision helps us understand the nature of the struggle, and provides a context for focusing our deliberation. This identification of needs and values is an ongoing aspect of the decision making process. As we engage in deliberation, there will be shifts in our awareness of various underlying values and motivations. Often we may take our shifting attitudes as a sign that we are fickle or capricious and unable to wrestle with the decision-making process. However, in actuality that deliberation is a process that allows for the expression of the deeper or latent aspects of our nature.
Engaging with the diverse thoughts and emotions evoked by the decision-making process reveals the underlying forces fueling the need to make a decision. This deliberate decision-making process increases self-awareness and emotional resilience. If we are able to organize our diverse emotions along the motivational and value systems inherent to our nature, we can create a scaffolding for decision-making. This structure supports a connection between the thoughts, needs and desires, wants and fears, that arise while making a decision. Through such integration, decisions are less likely to suffer reversals or evoke regrets.
They say practice makes perfect, but this is not true, only correct practice makes perfect. Just doing something repeatedly does not necessarily make us better at it. When we practice making decisions using the right tools, then in time we are rewarded with wisdom and good judgment. Good judgment is inherent to the way our nature has evolved; however, we need the skills to allow that nature to express itself. Complexity is part of our humanity. We are not simple programmable systems with limited purpose and only one or two functions. When we try to constrict our nature to eliminate doubt and tension, or constrict our passions and desires, we are reducing our human potential. Holding in mind our inherent complexity when making decisions allows for the fullest expression of our human nature.