On deciding between things

A process for finding flow

When I have a decision to make, I turn to a process I’ve been honing.

It begins with something

Sarah Wilson

of

This is Precious

introduced to me in our conversation a few years ago for my podcast, Routines & Ruts: 

“I use a question from psychoanalyst James Hollis as a way to make decisions: will it enlarge or diminish life?”

Asking this question—does it enlarge or diminish?—will often provide the nudge I need to make the bold choice, to stop dithering in indecision, to move my life along.

Yet sometimes, I still find myself caught in a spiral of indecision. How do you decide between things when both options have the potential to enlarge your life?

I want to pause on what a delicious problem this is to have—to not only have options, but life-enlarging ones. 

So why is it that instead of being excited by such possibilities, we might become stifled and stuck in the crutch of the fig tree, as Sylvia Plath would put it?

In such moments of overwhelm, I want to tell myself to stop overthinking it, to lighten up, just reach for any fig and relish it—but I’ve found it’s a process.

For inspiration, below I’ve compiled the further questions and steps I move through to get out of the indecision spiral.

A five-step process for finding flow