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.
My recommendation here would be to break your decision-making into two steps. The first step would be to figure out what may be the right choice for you, external pressures aside. The second step with your personal choice in mind would be to bring into consideration the evident concerns and feelings of the primary-others in your situation.
While you can’t always please everybody, you may be able to accommodate to some degree at least the most important and essential of these external feelings and concerns. This is why you need first to determine what is best for yourself. This will in turn determine how your personal choice may affect the primary-others who populate your decision situation.
Dealing kindly and compassionately with your situation’s primary-others
Note here the focus – at least to begin with – on your “primary-others”. These are folks who you feel absolutely obliged to carefully consider as part of your situation. People who you dare not ignore except where completely unavoidable. You also need to know these individuals well enough to be able to understand their concerns and their likely willingness to cooperate at least somewhat. These are often referred to as “friends and family”.
This step in your decision process involves first figuring out, as best you can, how your first-step tentative decisions-and-actions might affect them and how each person might respond. As always, I would encourage you to enlist the support of a non-involved third-party who may often be able to give you separately some invaluable perspectives, alternatives, and feedback. Close family and friends would be your likely first choice here if they are truly “non-involved”.
Since your close friends-and-family are likely to be close also to one another, you may need to deal with them as sub-groups rather than separately as individuals. This process will almost certainly be iterative in the sense that your going-in decisions-and-actions may affect both each person individually and then their various sub-groups. Here is where your knowledge of each person and their relationships will become vital. Guessing in such situations can often be quite risky.
Dealing with your “hard cases”
Inevitably, you will have one or more “hard cases” in your friends-and-family group. These are people who are very likely to be unbending, actively-resistant, or generally trouble-making. If you do not have any such people in your decision situation, you are indeed fortunate.
I would suggest leaving such individuals alone for the moment while you figure out how best to accommodate those in your group who are mostly likely to be at least somewhat flexible. When you reach a point at which your evolving, tentative decisions-and-actions seem able to be acceptable to this cooperative group, you should be able to consider ways to deal with your remaining “hard cases”.
Options that you have will likely include a simple “take-it-or-leave-it” position that the majority has accepted or seems certain to accept, or instead a challenge to come up with a better approach that might also satisfy the majority. Some back-and-forth here seems necessary if these hard cases have enough power to block you or to make your life extremely difficult post-deciding.
My old cowboy-self (… see My Story on this site" …) would refer to this final step as “horse-trading” where almost anything goes. Your own personality and concerns will probably guide you reliably as to how far and with which means you are willing to accept to arrive at some conclusion where nobody is happy but all are eager to end it.
