Five Ways To Navigate Those Big Decisions

I'd like to ship you a free copy of my book, Habits of High Performers. If you come and join the 2026 goal setting workshop, I will ship you one of these today. The link is in the notes. Please come and join me to set up the very best 2026 you could imagine. If you've set up goals in the past or New Year's resolutions and they haven't substantiated, I'm here to help you across all the key pillars of your life, nail your goals. I'll see you there. Welcome to Life on Purpose. My name is James Lachlan, former seven time world champion musician and now success coach to leaders and high performers. Each week I bring you an inspiring leader or expert to help you live your life on purpose. Thanks for taking the time to connect today and investing in yourself. Enjoy the show.

Hey. Hey. A huge welcome to anybody out there who's new. If this is your first time to the Life on Purpose podcast, you're in for a treat. It's your host, James Laughlin. I'm super excited to connect with you and a massive thank you for all of my return listeners. So good to connect with y', all, so hope you're having a great week. I'm actually prepping for a house move in the next 24 hours. Wish me luck. We all know what it can be like to move house, so I'm excited. Got some beautiful things ahead, got an ocean view to look at, so I feel very grateful and I'm excited to be connecting with a lot of you guys this last two months. It's been amazing to hear from some of you guys what you've been listening to, what you've been learning from, how you've been applying it to your lives. And, you know, I've been very fortunate this year to bring in some incredible guests. You know, we've brought in amazing athletes, amazing influencers, cancer survivors, people who are very influential in sport and politics, multi billionaires. It's been phenomenal. Real mix. So today I wanted to really talk about how to make tough decisions. Right? That's real. That's how life goes. We've got to make tough decisions. We can't avoid them. Well, we can. I lie. We can avoid tough decisions. But with avoiding a tough decision comes pain. Indecision is incredibly painful. You're swimming around in those muddy waters of indecision. That's not fun. And you don't want to delay those things. And big, tough decisions come in the form of financial decisions. You know, should we take on that $800,000 mortgage, they come in the form of relationship decisions. You know, should I ask that cute girl or guy out for the coffee or should I be having the conversation that I'm no longer in love with this person? Right. Those are tough decisions. Should I move careers? Should I go from this thing to that thing? That's a big badass tough decision. Now none of us are going to get through life without having to make a tough decision. Fact that is it, right? We cannot run away from tough decisions. And if we do, they will catch up with us. So we've got to learn a bit of a system for approaching the those tough decisions. And I really think you can systemize it. When emotion drives decisions, that's often when we have decisions that we may regret or we may maybe turn back the clock and done them differently. Hey, I put my hand up. There's things big tough decisions I've had to make in the past where I was highly emotional and possibly didn't have great advisors or support around me to help me navigate those tough decisions. And would I go back and change how I made the decision? Yes, yes, definitely. And to me it all comes down to a process when you can trust your decision making process. That's powerful. A great book I read, for those of you who like to read or listen to Audible books, is a book called Principles by Ray Dalio. Phenomenal book. So Ray's one of the world's most prolific hedge fund investors, but just an all around good guy and he wrote this amazing book. It's a biggie, but it's amazing around how to develop principles in life that can help you navigate life in a smoother way. So I definitely say go and give that a read. But we want to come up with a very simple system to really approach these tough decisions. Now I've had tough decisions in the past for sure. Like let's, let's go back and reflect. There's been lots but say one of them was back in 2011, living in Christchurch, New Zealand and out of the middle of nowhere, an earthquake strikes. A big badass earthquake, I mean huge. It was like 7.1 or something like that. And it shook the city and everyone in it. It was crazy. But then what happened is we had like a number of large 7ish earthquakes. And that's on the Richter scale, guys. That's what I'm talking about. For those who have not experienced earthquakes, they aren't fun. And what happened is we'd have like 7,000 aftershocks. So like you get these little mini movements. The house would be shaken or the ground would be moving and you'd be thinking, oh, my God, is it going to be another biggie? Because they start small and they build, but some, most of the aftershocks start small and then they die away. But every now and then you get another big, massive one, right? So I was certainly living in a state of anxiety, 100%. And my former partner Lisa, she was the same. It was tough. Now, what were we doing to cope back then? Well, certainly for me, it was Sauvignon Blanc. Now, New Zealand is renowned for Great Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc. However, it was not serving me very well. And at the time, you know, I'd have been drinking two or three large glasses, possibly a bottle a day, around that earthquake time. That was awful, right? And for me, that was a coping mechanism. And what was I doing there? I was literally numbing the pain. I was enjoying temporary illusionary distractions, right? It was taking me out of the moment and into some other area in my mind. This alcohol was numbing it. Right. Now, as most of you guys know who I'm connected with, it's been about a year, year and a bit I've been alcohol free. A decision that's been relatively easy to make and relatively easy to maintain, to be very honest. It's been great. But going back to then, it really, you know, that alcohol and, you know, trying to avoid the elephant in the room, which was, hey, we've got earthquakes. They're not going away, they may get bigger, they are dangerous. What can we do? So what we decided was at the time was, let's go back to Canada. So my former partner Lisa was from Canada, and so we headed back there and we really loved just being away from the shaky ground. And it was awesome. It was like, hey, here's some stability. The grass is definitely greener here. You know, it's awesome. Maybe should we be living here and run away from the earthquakes? So. So it was a pretty intense time and, you know, obviously still a lot of psychological things we were working through there to kind of compartmentalize that earthquake and put it in its box and realize that we aren't the earthquake. The earthquake isn't always going to be around. How do we move forward? So you might be thinking to yourself as well, you know, what are some of my big tough decisions? Maybe you have a tough decision right now, and if you do, I'd love you to drop me a line. What is your tough decision? I'm not going to tell Anyone, I'd love to know. And by the end of this session, I'm going to give you a process you can go through to help you make that tough decision. And that's what it's all about, right? Being able to make those tough decisions. I don't want you to have to wait for months or spend thousands of dollars talking to people to get an answer. I want you to have your own system that you can trust, a system that you can look back on and go, you know what, I don't regret it because I went through a process and that's what came out the other end, right? So got to Canada and weighing things up now, we were totally in our heads, right? It was all drama and high emotion, as you would expect after a major natural disaster with half your city in ruins and hundreds of people dead. Of course you would expect us to be a little bit all over the place. So what we did, we went through a process. And over the years since then, I've had to make other really, really tough decisions. And this process I've refined and it's almost a subconscious process now, but it's the one that I follow all the same. So if you've got pen and paper there, I'm going to encourage you to write this down. It'll take you a few minutes. That's a five step process, super simple. But step number one is when you have to make a tough decision, you know, whether that's as a leader, a parent, a sibling, a partner, a CEO, a politician. When you got to make a decision, step number one is get radically clear on all of your options. Now if you've got one choice, you don't have options, you've got two choices, you don't have, you still don't really have any options. You've got A or B. I want you to try and figure out two or more options, right? If we can get three plus. Awesome. Now you've got choice. Now you've got options, right? So get radically clear on all of your options. When you make this decision, you might not have to make the decision you think you have to make. Dwell on it for a while, write it down. What are all of my options now? Actually get them on, on the page. And that's the step number two is write them down. That's step number two. How simple, right? Write your options down. That's so important. Someone once said this to me and it was very blunt and quite striking, but it was, when you're in your head, you're dead. I thought oh, that's, that's awful. I don't like that. What does that mean? I'm very positive. I don't like that. Like, but it's true. When you're in your head, you're dead. And what that means is when you have a tough decision, a life, potentially life altering decision, you get in your head and you get emotional and you get lost and you start to think and overthink. So it's really important to get out of your head and onto the page. Write it down, it disconnects you. A better word is actually detached. It detaches you from that decision. So you can be more aerial looking down upon the decision you got to make rather than be in the thick of the emotion, detach from it by writing those options down. And look, going back to Canada, that's exactly what happened. Got a page out and weighed up. Look, staying in Canada, pros and cons. Going back to New Zealand, pros and cons. To me that's incredibly important to do that because it allows you to see it rather than just think it. And often when you think you end up having a bias towards certain things. And that confirmation bias kicks in where someone will say something like, yep, yep, yep, that's exactly why I shouldn't be doing it, or yep, that's exactly why I should do it. You want to remove as many of those biases as possible. So step number three is identify the cost of making the decision versus not making the decision. Or even better, identify the cost of each of those individual options you could take. So option one, I could take this approach. What's the cost of doing it versus not doing it? Option two, I could take this approach, okay, what's the cost of doing it versus not doing it? Really important to just take your time and actually get it on the page. Write up the cost.

Then fourth step, what is your desired outcome? Right. That's one thing a lot of people don't think about is what is the ideal situation that I'm trying to move towards, what is I'm trying to achieve. That's something, you know, if you want to make a decision, please don't make a decision until you've really thought through your desired best outcome, right? And that's in the perfect world. You want to think about your perfect world, best outcome and work towards that. Because once you know what your desired outcome is, that actually helps shape the decision you've got to make, right? So think through, what is it going to feel like? And guys, we are feeling beings, right? We feel Things. We feel sad, we feel excited, we feel, feel happy, we feel joyous, we feel overwhelmed, we feel sad, we feel elated, we feel all those things. So ask yourself, what's the desired outcome going to make me feel like? What's it going to look like? You know, we like to picture things in our mind's eye. We like to look out towards beautiful vistas. So what's my desired outcome going to look like? And write it down. What it might look like for you and the people around you. What it might feel like for you and the people that's affected by that decision. But get radically clear as well on your desired outcome. Really important. So I'm just going to review those four steps before I share the final one. So number one, get really clear on all of your options. Number two, write them down. Number three, what's the cost of doing versus not doing? Number four, what's your desired outcome? And look, last but not least here, number five, the decision with the greatest upside and least downside is the logical choice. I'll repeat that. The decision with the greatest upside and the least downside is the logical choice. Now you've removed emotion. You've sat above the situation. You've got out of your head and onto the page. You've weighed up the pros, the cons, the costs. Now you can look at, okay, which decision will help me get as close to my desired outcome as possible with the least amount of collateral damage to myself and to the people around me who are going to be impacted by this decision. Now that in itself is a decision process. That's a decision making process. Now having something like that is powerful because it removes that. I think I'll go with this because this is how I feel. Yeah, we get lost in our feelings and they often encourage us. These feelings encourage us to take really quick, irrational moves. I've done it myself in the past. There's been decisions I've made where I'm like, man, oh man, I'd love to go back, press pause, go through my decision making process. But I was so emotional that I ran and did this. And it's only as time passes that you realize having processes in life are so important to having a beautiful life. And by having a beautiful life, I mean a beautiful experience. Because we're all experiencing, right? We're going through this filter of what the world is and what our lives are and where we fit in. So for me it was like getting clear on a decision making process helps me sleep at night, helps me reduce collateral damage to to the people I love and the people that I serve and the people I work with. So really important to come up with a process. Now if this process doesn't work for you, I'm going to encourage you to develop your process, take time to think what was a tough decision I once had to make? How did I navigate it? What were the processes and could I systemize that, could I replicate that? Because that becomes one of your life principles. And guys, I'm happy for you to take this and call this yours. You, you can call this process one of your life principles, right? It's my thoughts, it's my experiences. But hey, I'm one of like almost 8 billion people. So take it, run with it, use it, adapt it, share it, do what serves you and your life and your loved ones. And I'm so excited for you guys to just think about how to navigate these tough decisions. Because if you don't have a tough decision on the horizon, I promise you, in the next six to 18 months, you will. It'll come up in your career, in your studies, in your relationships, in your finance. Somewhere it's going to come up and it's really beautiful to know you can get your notepad out and go to your decision making process. Now it may become cellular at a certain level and you just do it and you know how to do it and you've got this process that happens. But often when there's heightened emotions, it's good to have something written down. Here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to go go find my favorite cafe, get my favorite hot drink, or for some of you, it may be a cold beverage. I'm going to sit down, pen and paper or my iPad and I'm going to go through this process and I'm going to get to the other side. And when I get to the other side, I'm going to know what the best decision is. Now there's a difference between best and right. The right decision, okay, that's very, very subjective. All you can do is make the best decision with the information that you currently have on hand. If you do that, you should be proud of yourself because that is more than most people can do. Most people get caught up in emotion. That's not to say that they're worse or better than us, it's just, it's what they do. And if you can remove the emotion. As a leader, when I say leader, I mean like family leader, community leader. You know, you could be a scout leader, you, you could be a leader in your workplace, and you don't need to be the CEO to be a leader at all. Never think that you can be amongst your peers and lead and influence them in a beautiful way. So use this process as you see fit. And I'm so excited you connected again today. So please do me a huge favor. If you enjoyed this, share it with a friend that might benefit from it. Maybe a friend that's going through a tough time and trying to make a tough decision. Send it to them. And do me another massive favors. If you're on Apple podcast, please leave me a rating, star rating, and a review. Honestly, it helps me so much to impact more people and it gets the podcast in front of more people's eyes. And one last thing, please get out there and live life on purpose.

Sam.