Overcoming intense external pressures to decide
Tough decision situations may be hard enough to handle effectively without the normally unwelcome efforts by others to greatly influence your decision. Such intense external pressures may come from family members, or one’s employer, or a host of others with whom we routinely deal. These we typically cannot just ignore. Deal with them we must, but how?

Decision situations of any kind normally include some kinds of outside influences that must be addressed. It is when these influences come from people close to us personally that our options for dealing with them nearly always become greatly narrowed. While we may not really care what others may think about what we decide or or what feelings may be hurt by our decision, it is an entirely different matter when the others are kindred, intimate, or dear to us in some way. Such personal relationships are special.

Fear prevents a decision from being made and/or acted upon
One doesn’t hear this kind of admission in words upfront, but it is usually pretty hard to miss in action. You can usually tell early on whether there is significant personal fear driving the decision situation. Fear is a natural, powerful emotion – one that you feel when you face actual danger, pain, or an unpleasant situation.

This is not the same as simply being unable to choose among decision alternatives or not being sufficiently comfortable with the decision you have tentatively made. This situation response is truly based on one’s personal fear, and that fear is effectively preventing any decision from being made or implemented. Fear as an emotion is real, regardless of whether or not it may be objectively well-founded.

Deciding is not an event – it is a process
Some folks, I have learned, like to make quick decisions and then move swiftly into the action phase. They are by nature action-oriented. For them, the process of deciding what to do is simply something to get out of the way as quickly as possible. Action is where all the fun is.

You will of course easily see where the potential problem with this plan lies. Acting on a quick or pre-made decision may work in a static decision situation – but only so long as the decision about what to do is itself sound. These are two pretty important conditions. While some decision situations are conveniently static for near-term practical purposes, you still need to have a sound decision and action plan in hand. Reality rarely behaves as planned.

Important decision situations can arise suddenly
While it would be most convenient for our important decisions to show up with ample warning and sufficient lead time for us to respond thoughtfully, so often these situations arise suddenly. We are then under great pressure to think and act quickly. Unless we have faced a similar kind of situation a number of times in past, we may have no idea of even where to begin and just how to proceed. In many cases, we feel that we are forced to do something – immediately.

Being forced to think and act quickly can overwhelm almost anyone. There is no time for leisurely, careful thought and planning. What most do under such circumstances is simply to react – instinctively, emotionally – with little or no thought or clear plans.

Fatalistic or a healthy form of acceptance?
While this reaction to a nasty decision situation might be viewed as a fatalistic, it may in fact be saying something quite different. Might it be a statement of frustration at not being able to resolve an important decision situation? Or might it be telling you that you care greatly about what happens but you are fearful about your ability to do anything about it?

You can probably think of many more examples of the feelings behind a person shrugging and saying “whatever happens, happens”.

Creative listening is much more than hearing
Creative listening is not just hearing and remembering most or even all of what a person said. It is much more. Creative listening involves actively processing what you are hearing and trying to develop meanings, implications, understandings, and fresh ideas. Hearing, thinking, and extending. This may sound easy until you really try doing all of these while listening carefully. I have found that it takes years of practice to become proficient..

Why would someone want to listen creatively? It sounds like serious work … and it is. But it can be so wonderfully productive. Providing such look-ahead feedback to a speaker can often redirect and even strengthen what that person is saying or trying to say.

Decision-making is a process, not an event
Many people think that decisions, once made, can move right into some sort of action phase. Good luck with that, as they say. This might work in a static world but our world is rarely if ever static. Things change incessantly, often well beyond our ability to control or even influence to any useful degree.

This fact of life can be quite frustrating to those action-oriented folks who like to “… decide and then get on with it”. Life doesn’t work that way.

Decision coaching. Can anyone truly coaching this very personal process? You can do so with groups – or at least kind of. But for individuals?

When I started out on this latest outreach effort, I had a pretty clear idea of what I wanted to do, but getting into its implementation raised all kinds of questions. Each person decides differently. Especially heart-and-mind decisions which get processed largely in our subconscious-intuitive mind regions. While a bit of rational thought is typically involved, the real decision-making goes on within. How do you go about coaching something that is both intensely personal and deeply buried?