Ingrid was exhausted when she came to me for coaching. She had been working through a course on a LinkedIn strategy built on high volume, direct outreach, and high frequency. She had put in a lot of energy and noticed early results.
But every day she noticed how drained she felt after working on it. Not the satisfied kind of tired. More like emptiness. And she could feel the project getting harder. She kept going anyway.
She wanted to work with me through her resistance. What we found instead was that she was done with the strategy.
The decision to stop had already been made. She just hadn't admitted it to herself yet.
The short version
A decision is often already made long before we admit it. We just don't see it.
This happens for three reasons: we don't really stand behind it, we don't like the consequences, or we don't know how to justify it.
The most common mistake is confusing the decision itself with the question of how to carry it out.
Separating the what from the how makes it clear how far along the decision already is.
Contents:
Why we don’t admit decisions to ourselves
When we invest time, money, or energy in something, we want to see a return. So we keep investing, even when the cost stays too high.
This is known as the sunk cost fallacy. We think we've put in too much to stop. That's why gamblers keep playing, and why we hold on to strategies that don't fit us.
But there are more reasons than that.
You're not really on board with it
Too often we take advice from people we think know better than us. We follow their strategies blindly.
Any approach works if we make it work and we genuinely want to. There's no shortage of good advice. Whether it fits us is a different question.
Recognizing that takes a real degree of honesty with ourselves. Only then do we know whether resistance comes from a poor fit or from some form of fear or uncertainty.
A solution often makes sense logically and objectively. Just not for us. That's not failure, it's a decision. If we don't really stand behind something, we've already decided against it.
You don't like the consequences
Every decision comes with consequences. And part of that is always something we'd rather avoid. That's the uncomfortable reality we sometimes don't want to face.
It's easier to stay with 'I don't know' when facing the consequences feels like too much.
As long as no decision has been made, we're in a kind of suspension. Everything is still open. There's a certain familiarity to it that feels safe. And we can hold on to the hope that this time there will only be good consequences.
Often we already know what we want. The decision has already been made. Just not officially, so we can keep feeling safe.
You don't know how to justify your decision
We were taught that we need to be able to explain our decisions.
In 1978, Ellen Langer found in her copy machine experiment that people are more likely to comply with a request when a reason follows. Regardless of whether the reason makes sense.
Even for decisions that affect only us, we look for a rational explanation to justify ourselves. A vague feeling is treated as unreliable and set aside.
In doing so, we ignore what experience and intuition are already telling us. And we lose a reliable source of information. We question our decision instead of standing behind it.
Admitting something to yourself and deciding are two different things. So are deciding and acting on it.
The decision is only the first step
When we think about decisions, we immediately jump to execution.
I'm always struck by how little we know about decisions. And this despite making thousands of them every day, large and small. Most are so small we don't even notice them.
We take a moment to pick which socks work today or whether the coffee is still too hot. We go with the blue ones and decide to wait. And it's already forgotten.
Here, deciding and acting are so directly connected that it feels like a single step.
In reality, there are two steps.
Even with those small things, there are two separate things.
- The decision – what
- The execution – how
But because we don't separate them clearly, we make things unnecessarily hard when the stakes are higher.
Deciding can be simple.
When we consciously separate the what from the how, the decision becomes much easier.
We often already have a clear sense of what we want. We just don't like the ideas for how to get there. So we think about execution and assume we're still stuck on the decision.
When we notice we're at that point, we can take it as a sign that the decision is essentially already done.
We crave certainty.
There's also a natural tendency to want to know exactly how something will play out.
Part of us would like to know every step ahead of time. That feels like relief and safety. I call this how-addiction.
The question of how gets in the way of an important realization: the what is already settled.
Every decision frees up energy
Separating the what from the how serves us in more than one way.
For one, we can stop second-guessing the decision.
We stop spending unnecessary energy once we admit what we want.
We can use that energy for solutions.
If we don't like how we'd carry out the decision, we now have room to look for better options. That's different from questioning the decision itself. We know what we're working toward.
We get additional room to breathe.
What many overlook is that a decision doesn't force us to act immediately. We can let the clarity settle before we do anything.
Separating the what from the how keeps us from acting on every impulse.
We know what we want. Now it's about finding the right approach, and for that we only need the first clear step.
When we separate the what from the how, we often find that the decision is already made.