Dave Evans: Choosing Well in Life

You gather and create options. This place is great at that. Then you got to narrow them down to a manageable list. Then you got to do the hard thing and make a choice. And then of course, agonize whether or not you blew it. No, let's not do that. Let's let go the options we don't choose and move on. So I'll briefly touch each of these. I mean, going to go really fast gathering. You know how to do that. Narrow down. Anybody ever feel like a little overwhelming choice? Yeah. Interesting. So you got that feeling. Why? Because you don't know how many wood jam to buy. The research shows we walk into some whole food store somewhere, put six jams on the designer table. There are six jams available today. Everybody's walking by. Do you think many people stop and look or not? Too many. A lot of people. Not a lot of people. A lot. About 40%. Not quite. Half of those. How many people actually buy one? A third? No. One in three. Not bad. Okay, try it again. A couple of weeks later, Same store, same provider, 24 jams. Now more people stop. Fewer. More. Fewer, right? 50% more. We love options. Ooh, look at all the jam. Oh my God. Look at all the jam. How many people buy? Newbody can't deal with it. Why? Your brain freezes at 4 to 6. You find yourself standing in front of an option list that's 7 to 12. How many options do you really have? None. What do you do? Cross them off. You have to make your list manageable. Then you got to choose Dan DS Dan Goleman, whose clip we will not watch given away no time that the wisdom of the emotions is a real thing. So Dan Goleman, the original author of the book Emotional intelligence, mostly aggregating other people's work, he's still working on this EQ EI stuff. Identifies neuroscientifically. Now, neurophysiologically, this is how many brain people we got in the room. We've got Tina selig with a PhD in neuroscience. A bunch of brain stuff going on. It's really a fascinating time to be alive. We know a lot about the soft stuff now. Turns out we know a lot of hard stuff about soft stuff. The way your brain works and the way your brain works is there is what he calls the wisdom of the emotions or the wisdom center, actually located in the basal ganglia of your brain, the ancient brain, where in fact all the data on what worked for you and what did not is stored. That valences your decision making. Right? You think it's self evidently objective truth that causes you to make a decision. Because clearly bigger is better, right? Because you want a bigger tumor, not a smaller tumor. No, that's not true. Bigger is not always better. It depends. Bigger is good in IPO and it's bad in tumor is actually an emotional valence on something. Who has to decide that cancer is a bad thing? Now that comes from the basal ganglia, which as it turns out has no connectivity whatsoever to the verbal center of the brain. The verbal cortex has high connectivity to the limbic system, your emotions and your intestines. So the gut feeling is a real thing. Learning how to understand your emotional intelligence, which is a very, very important sophisticated part of you, is a critical aspect of good decision making. Do not confuse inarticulate with unsophisticated. This part of your consciousness is fabulously sophisticated, but it doesn't. It's more like Hawaiian. It uses fewer letters, so you have to learn how to speak its language. Now lastly, let go and move on. I'll just claim what Dan Gilbert, our buddy over at Harvard, works on. Turns out the research shows if you want to be happy, the happiness engineers. Turns out the best way to be happy is not getting what you want, it's wanting what you got. The reversible condition is not conducive to the synthesis of sustainable happiness. Dan would say I won't detail you the research, but it shows that when somebody makes a decision and either themselves concludes or is told it's irreversible and other people make the exact same decision, like what to buy or what to take home, and can reverse the decision even if they don't. Those people end up unhappy or with the exact same outcome as these people who got it irreversibly. Your willingness to own your decision and not be distracted by the other possibilities is a huge impact on the quality of the decision long term. So it turns out actually it's harder than you thought. You don't just have to make a great decision, you have to make a great decision well, a fair decision made well, meaning energetically implemented, letting go the options and moving on, not getting stuck in reviewing regret. A fair decision implemented well beats a great decision made badly. And that keep your options open thing is actually a disaster as a long term strategy. It's great on the front end, it's terrible on the back end. So set yourself up to win by understanding your decision making process and employing not just cognitive knowing, but emotional knowing as well. So connect the dots. Understand how your work view and life view, inform your coherence and have more than one version of the future of your life to pick from. Prototype it. Don't just analyze it, ask for directions. People are willing to help you and make a good choice.