The 3 Step Decision Making Framework That Actually Works!

Welcome to the Decision Triangle Workshop. This is where we're going to learn a simple 3-step approach to making decisions better. You are in the right place if you signed up and indeed have showed up for this workshop. You are in the right place if you're ready to make decisions better by starting from the assertion or the assumption that there is no such thing as better decisions because decisions are not outcomes. What I recommend you do next is get yourself ready to take some notes and more importantly, apply this framework when we get off the call. And at the end of the public presentation, we'll be going into an exclusive Q&A with members of the Solopreneur Success Circle community, which are simply the paid subscribers to the Purpose Driven Prosperity Model Substack. I've dropped links in the comments for those of you that decide that— if you decide you'd like to join us. So let's go ahead and dive in. One of the core assertions that I have about solopreneurship, independent business ownership, is that if you a purpose-driven person that is running an independent business, that the best way to make a bigger impact is to learn how to make better decisions. Difference makers are decision makers, but we have to remember that decisions aren't outcomes, that we can make good decisions that don't turn out well. We can make bad decisions that do turn out well. And there's a lot of confusion that can be created around that, that has a big impact on our ability to consider consistently make decisions better, make decisions with clarity, make decisions with integrity, make decisions with intention. So what we're going to learn in this workshop is a simple but profound process, time-tested, uh, with roots in Stoic philosophy but also other ancient philosophical and spiritual traditions that I have reframed as 3 questions that you can return to any time that you are faced with a decision-making moment in your business or indeed in your life. And so you're in the right place if you are doing work that matters with people that you care about and that you sometimes feel overwhelmed by the number of choices and distractions for what you can decide and do next. And if you're, you're in the right place if you are ready to stop overthinking or just winging it with your decision-making and start to make decisions with a little bit more intention and integrity. This is not mindset stuff. I am on record as not being a big fan of mindset coaching. I think that the best way to change your mind or to transform your mindset is to actually become the kind of person that has the mindset that you want to have by deciding and doing things. That the— my assertion is that mindset doesn't inform posture. Posture actually informs mindset. You change your mind by changing the way that you do things. If you keep doing things the way you've always done them, you'll always get the results you get. If you change the way you do things, you will change the way that you approach things. What we are talking about is a very simple 3-step process. I am fond of saying that the process is actually the shortcut. If you practice these things, it will become instilled in your way of being, and you will become a more decisive difference maker who makes decisions better. What you're going to do in this workshop, a repeatable way to slow down just enough so that you can see yourself and your situation clearly, you can zoom out and stay grounded while you're framing your next step, and that you can stay centered and maintain the integrity of your values and the way that you want to show up in the world by applying this process. So the promise of this workshop is that you won't control outcomes because that's impossible, but you will control how you show up, stay present, and make decisions that align with who you really are, what really matters to you, and what it is that you are working toward, and stack the odds in your favor over time. If you consistently make decisions better, it will have a compounding effect over time, even when you don't get the outcomes that you're looking for. So the big idea here is that difference makers are decision makers, right? If you are a solopreneur, you are presented with decisions and challenges all day, every day in your work. And what we have to do is realize that as solopreneurs, we're not just solving problems, but we're shaping outcomes through the decisions that we make, through the actions that we take. So if you want to make a bigger difference, you have to make decisions better. And here's the catch. As solopreneurs, we can find ourselves getting paralyzed and stuck in spinning cycles, trying to make the quote-unquote right decision and staying stuck because we want to guarantee outcomes that are not possible to be guaranteed. And by looking for the right decision, we will end up staying exactly where we are and just repeating the things that we've been doing. So the reality check here is that we have to accept that there's no such thing as a right decision, that there's no way that we can have any absolute control over what happens next after we decide and do a thing, and that we can't guarantee how other people will respond or even if they will notice the integrity and intention of the decisions and actions that we take. But what we can do is we can accept that we can make a bad decision and get a good outcome, and we can make a good decision and get a bad outcome. So this is what's called the decision-making matrix, and this is where the confusion comes in. If you make a good decision and get a good outcome, that makes sense. If you make a bad decision and get a bad outcome, that makes sense. However, very frequently we will find ourselves making the best decision that we were capable of making in a moment and not getting the kind of outcome that we expected or desired. And we can make a bad decision in the moment and get a good outcome. And this is where the confusion comes in, especially not just when we're applying this tool, the decisions that we're making, but when we're comparing and measuring where we are as solopreneurs against other people. And in the digital world, when we're looking at social media, it's really easy to look toward the online gurus and the digital marketers and listening to them with their, you know, dogmatic tactics and tools and strategies that they're peddling to grow a business. And it looks like they are doing— they are getting the kind of results that you want to get. And your assumption is they must be making better decisions than I am. They must be making good decisions. And even if it doesn't feel like that's the kind of way that you want to be in the world, you can get seduced into purchasing these programs or buying these online tools or applying these tactics and finding yourself getting further and further away from alignment with the person that you are, the person that you want to become, and the way that you want to present and show up in the world. So again, based on the, the idea that we— if we accept that we can make good decisions and get bad outcomes, or bad decisions and get good outcomes, then we can embrace this idea that decisions are not outcomes, but they are moments of agency. It's an opportunity for you to frame yourself and your situation as it really is, see all of the possibilities, and then make a reasoned decision about what you decide to do next based on your personal values and guiding principles. So again, this is not a workshop about making better decisions, but about making decisions better. And it comes down to a very simple 3-step process that is based on some ideas from Stoic philosophy and The ideas come from what's called the 3 Stoic disciplines. The 3 Stoic disciplines were first discussed by Epictetus and then are repeated in Marcus Aurelius' Meditations several times, but they are the, the disciplines of perception, action, and will. And so when we're talking about perception, action, and will, we're talking about how we see ourselves, our situation, and other people, our actions, what we decide and do next, and then will, willing acceptance of whatever the results are that, that happen, willing acceptance of the outcomes, but also the pursuit of defining, refining, and elevating the content of our character. For the Stoics, the only thing that mattered was your virtue, the practice of your values in public, and that if you consistently showed up with temperance, with courage, with a sense of justice, that you would be cultivating the content of your character, which is the only thing that you can actually control, which is the only thing that's necessary to live a good life. So what I've done is I've taken the 3 disciplines of perception, action, and will, and I frame them into 3 questions. What's now? Meaning, what is actually happening in this moment that I am? Who am I really? Knowing thyself. What is actually going on in this moment? And you can take into consideration the other players involved, the other people in that situation. And once you get clear on what's actually happening, we can answer the question, what's next? And when we're answering the question, what's next? What we want to do is we want to look at all of the choices for what we could do next. And we want to make a decision about what we decide and do next based on our values and guiding principles, based on our aspirations, our aims, our goals for the future, and making sure that we eliminate choices that don't align with those values or desired outcomes, and that we make decisions based on whatever evaluation we can make about the risk or reward of getting closer to what it is that we want in life or business. And the final question is, what matters? Meaning, what matters is, again, your values, your guiding principles, the cultivation of, of wisdom and acceptance and equanimity. And equanimity is too big a word, um, you can just think of that as peace of mind. So what we are talking about here is a process that cultivates us being very self-aware of who we are and what we want and how we want to show up in the world, what we are aiming for or aspiring to accomplish, and making sure that we frame our decisions or the possibilities and assess them against who we are and who we want to become, what we want to achieve, and what impact we want to have on other people that are involved. And that we want to do that by maintain— and maintain alignment with our values and guiding principles, but also our pursuit of being the kind of person that can engage in uncertainty and adversity through meaningful work, through service to other people, and maintain a sense of flourishing, joy, peace of mind, etc. So here's the process. Again, this is a simple, repeatable process based on the 3 questions: What's now? What's next? What matters? And What we're going to do is we're going to simply walk this path. Now, I want to just quickly share the framing of the process as a triangle because the 3 points of the triangle obviously are the 3 questions here. And although it looks sequential and oftentimes we will apply it sequentially— what's now, what's next, what matters— in practice over time, this process allows you to consider all of these things all at once. And in many ways, that last question becomes, for the Purpose Driven Difference Maker, it becomes the most important question. Because what matters ultimately is, am I the kind of person that can accept willingly whatever's going to happen, even if it's not what I expect or what I want, knowing that I put forth my best effort in alignment with my values, my guiding principles, my core skills and talents, and the impact that I want to have on the world, and knowing that I did my very best in the moment to make the best decision? So although it looks like steps 1, 2, 3, it's not really a step-by-step process, although you can approach it that way. What you're doing is you're, you're taking all of these things into consideration before you decide and do the thing that you're going to do next. So I've already talked a little bit about how these things are based on these timeless principles: perception, action, and will. The other thing that I'll share here, and I know there's a few folks here that, that are aware of the Stoic roots of cognitive behavioral therapy and rational emotive behavioral therapy and other therapeutic applications. These are time-tested principles that apply to modern psychology. They've been scientifically tested, scientifically vetted. So this is not just some woo-woo thing that I invented out of thin air. This is something that has actually been a process that's been applied for millennia, and it has been codified and is taught in various scientific and therapeutic traditions. So again, not just some sort of mumbo jumbo that I've come up with on my own that I'm trying to sell you on. It's just, this is a process that has worked really well for me, really well for a lot of the folks that I've been coaching. And I think it will work really well for anyone that applies this to your day-to-day decision-making. So we're going to walk through now the 3 steps, one at a time.