How to Make a Decision When Both Options Feel Right
When decisions are hard, it’s because there’s a conflict in values.
It naturally follows that the way to make hard decisions easier is to know, and be able to prioritize, your values.
Easier said than done.
Values are the silent engines driving your thoughts, decisions, and behaviors. They are personal judgements of what matters most in life and are foundational to who you are. But, it can be extremely hard to actually put them into words and identify what’s going on underneath the hood.
This is exactly why the advice “trust your gut” or “do what feels right” can be so infuriating. If I knew what my gut was telling me, or what “felt right,” I would have already made the decision. Intuition is a vague, abstract concept that can become very muddy while under stress, in the midst of competing external opinions, or the overwhelm of a truly hard decision.
Core values gift you the ability to put words to your intuition and make your gut feeling crystal clear.
Every hard decision is a values conflict in disguise.
If both sides of the decision didn’t represent something important to us, the choice is much simpler to make. If your aunt’s neighbor’s cousin, who you do not know, invites you to a graduation party for their daughter on the same day your child has a soccer game, it’s pretty clear which function you will be attending.
Decisions are not challenging because of the actions they involve but because of the values the actions represent. In the example above, the action of attending a soccer game is actually expressing the core value of family, or maybe love. Attending the graduation party may represent the value of respect or community, which matters, but (likely) not as much as family. It is this core value that must be centered in decision making.
Our values are not all equally important. There are many values we consider important, a few that are very important, and some that are not important at all. They are ranked in our minds on a scale of “this does not matter” to “this is absolutely foundational to who I am.”
As the values implicated in a decision move closer to “this is absolutely foundational to who I am,” the desire to align with that value becomes stronger. This is great when only one side of the decision represents a strongly held value, because making that choice becomes very easy. But when both sides of a decision represent foundational core values, the decision is suddenly very challenging, and can create many feelings of overwhelm, doubt, stress, and anxiety.
The way through these feelings is by carefully examining both choices of the decision, identifying which values they represent, and thoughtfully selecting which value must be prioritized based on an internal ranking system. Then, finding an action that centers this value while also honoring the value represented by the opposing choice.
If you find this challenging, you’re not alone. I do, too.
When my daughter was born, I was constantly in conflict with myself. Do I sleep train or not? Do I breastfeed or formula feed? Should I go back to work or stay home? I had nightly Doom Spirals, Googling every question and trying to find the best answer. I absorbed so many external conflicting opinions from sleep experts and birth doulas and Instagram Moms that my brain was chaos. Every voice in my head was shouting so loudly, and the stakes felt so high, that the whisper of my intuition was drowned out entirely.
I thought I wanted someone to tell me what to do. I actually wanted someone to teach me how to decide for myself.
Spoiler: I looked, but I couldn’t find that either.
So I did it myself. I created a decision making framework called Clarify, Connect, Choose that helps you: explicitly describe the scenario at hand (Clarify), identify your values and how they are showing up in the decision (Connect), and then decide for yourself what action feels right to you (Choose).
The Clarify, Connect, Choose Method is unique in that it will not force you to definitively choose just one option. By stepping back from the actions involved in the decision to focus on the values, you will find that a compromise you feel good about is much easier to achieve. The goal is not to choose one value over the other, but find an action that honors them both in a way that feels smooth and intuitive.
I’ve used this framework for every parenting decision I’ve felt torn over and confused about. It’s how I decided whether (and where) to send my daughter to preschool and how to approach screen time, how I solidified the knowledge that I needed to quit my job. I’ve found confidence and self-assurance in my own ability to make good decisions when Google used to be the holy grail.
I’d like to share it with you now, too. I created a worksheet to walk you through each step to make any decision that feels difficult because both, or all, options seem right for different reasons.
This is exactly what I wished I found when I was searching for answers. I hope it’s as helpful to you as it has been for me.
