We rush decisions to escape tension, often guided by fear. A simple reflection process helps you slow down, clarify values, and choose with greater confidence and alignment.
Fast decisions often stem from fear, which narrows perspective and limits the quality of long-term outcomes. A “self-clearness” process uses reflection and honest questions to reveal deeper interests. Under the pressure to decide, our human tendency is to speed up the process and allow what seem to be highly informed and well-meaning internal thoughts take over our internal dialogue. The internal voices are often coming from a reactive place in our psyche, focused on
Author, economist, and Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman showed us how quickly we default to reactive-driven thinking in his ground-breaking best-seller. He describes a shrinking of our perspective at precisely the moment we most need to expand it. It is as if we walk around with blinders to anything other than our tightly held point of view,. With such restriction, it’s easy for us to miss the mark.) offers an alternative that has its genesis hundreds of years ago in the Quaker tradition called “The Clearness Committee”. The process, still used today, embodies two Quaker convictions: Our guidance system comes not from external authority but from the inner teacher in each of us, and a community is needed to help us clarify and amplify the inner teacher’s voice.
In the Quaker tradition, when a community member has a difficult and critical decision to make, they summon a group of seven or eight church members to form a “circle of trust” in which they can formulate open and honest questions about the matter. The process yields great perspective and clarity and guides the emergence of the person's authentic voice. Palmer also suggests that this process allows us to “stand in the tragic gap”—deliberate on the dilemmas that make a decision difficult.
Most often, we seek to resolve the tension of such a dilemma as quickly as possible, inclining us to fast decision-making. The Quaker process slows down decision-making in service to your true needs; it can be utilized by any person facing an important decision or two people party to a joint decision. Below are specific moves you can make to conduct what I call a “self or team Clearness Process”, adapted from Palmer’s method.
Even if you don’t have the benefit of a small and supportive group of people to help you make an important decision, you can conduct conduct the process on your own. You attempt to duplicate the group process using the following approach. Sit quietly for 10 minutes reflecting on the decision you desire to make, then take 10 minutes to journal about it. What is the actual decision you need to make? What tensions reside in the tragic gap? What do you want to feel as a result of the decision? These are traditional questions. Simply sitting quietly and journaling will help abring some clarity, if you do nothing else.
Ask valuable open and honest questions of yourself, much as a clearness committee would do. Regarding whether to start your own business, ask yourself what your future self would advise you, looking back in five years? What values are most important as you weigh the considerations? What considerations might you have missed? Which reactive voices might be in control at this time and why? One of the keys to the process is to notice which of the voices in your head in your head are entering into the decision-making process. Your skeptic voice? Your fearful voice might be screaming loudly at you to stay in your safe and lucrative job and avoid potential financial ruin by starting your own business.
Finally, review your answers to the questions you asked. Step back and look at the big picture. The self-clearness process allows you to remove blinders and invite your
The next time you find yourself facing an important decision, consider slowing down long enough to read your inner compass and find true direction. The process of the Self-Clearness Committee and of holding the tragic gap can slow you down long enough for the voices of the reactive mind to settle and for you to ask the questions . that allow your true voice to emerge. The process can be even more powerful when others are invited into the deliberation, not to offer advice but to help you beckon and listen carefully to your own inner teacher—the subject of a future post.. But for now, perhaps next time you find yourself facing a critical decision, you will choose to suspend the natural desire to quickly resolve the tension of the decision process and, instead, summon the courage to not know for certain yet! Likely the result will be a much preferred outcome in the long term.
was trained as an organizational psychologist and has practiced in that field for over 30 years, serving hundreds of businesses, not-for-profit organizations, schools, hospitals, NGOs, and government agencies/military operations.
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