From Where I Sit

Jason faced a number of issues in his life but the one that was most debilitating was indecision. Whenever Jason faced a decision that he considered significant, he froze, unable and apparently unwilling to commit to a course of action. This meant that Jason was stuck in an unfulfilling job, living in accommodation that didn’t particularly suit him, stuck in a relationship he didn’t really enjoy.

The picture of Jason’s life was the picture of things that had happened to him. There was precious little in Jason’s life that he made happen. Jason was a passive passenger in his own life. The problem was that every time Jason considered a decision for his own life, he came up against the idea that he might make a bad decision. This worry about making a bad decision was made particularly strong (and immobilising) because the doubt in Jason’s mind reminded him of a multitude of ‘bad’ decisions from the past.

I was intrigued, was I meeting with someone who genuinely and repeatedly made bad decisions, or was there something else going on? Jason and I started exploring his history of “bad” decision-making. He explained about the time he bought a bike to ride to work and how he had an accident that left him with a fractured wrist. There was the time he bought himself a new camera that stopped working correctly and couldn’t be fixed, or the time he spent a lot of money to treat himself to a holiday on a tropical isle and it rained nearly the whole time. Jason went on tell me about a pet dog he had adopted that developed a crippling arthritis, a friendship that had turned sour, a love affair gone bad. He had a long list of ‘evidence’ that he was a poor decision maker.

At first glance it wasn’t looking too good for Jason’s history of making decisions, however all was not as it first appeared. For instance, the bike which Jason had purchased to ride to work had given him several months of pleasure and had helped him get fitter and healthier before he had been injured in an accident. Despite the earlier positive experiences, Jason considered buying the bike a bad decision.

When he spoke about the camera he explained that he’d long had a passion for photography and had been pushed by friends to spend some money on buying a second-hand camera. He had been enjoying taking photographs and was developing quite a bit of skill along the way, however when the camera malfunctioned (through no fault of his own) he considered the purchase to be a bad decision. This was despite the pleasure it had already given him before it stopped working.

The same was true for other decisions he described as “bad”; in each case the initial decision appeared to be sound and thought through, and for a while worked in Jason’s favour. However, each of the cases Jason described involved unforeseen circumstances, and situations beyond his control that put the initial decision in a different light.

It emerged that there was nothing wrong with Jason’s decision-making ability, however his tendency to rewrite history and reinterpret good decisions as bad was not terribly helpful. Jason’s problem was not poor judgement it was an overly strong self-critical voice that altered his perception and understanding of his own judgement.

Slowly, Jason was able to disrupt the self-critical voice, break the habit of rewriting history and build up trust and confidence in his decision-making ability.

This didn’t mean that he was never going to make a bad decision, we all do from time to time, but he was at least able to recognise good decisions when he made them.

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