How to Make Difficult Decisions
Discovering the Clarity You Need to Make the Right Call

The 5 AM Miracle Podcast, hosted by Jeff Sanders

Episode #562: How to Make Difficult Decisions: Discovering the Clarity You Need to Make the Right Call

Jeff Sanders
Waiting for certainty is a painful way to live.

Waiting for an epiphany can feel like an eternity.

Waiting in general is not something many of us like to do.

Fortunately, we have the power of choice.

If you're stuck trying to choose what to do next, forget waiting.

It's time to move.

This is the 5am Miracle, episode number 562.

How to make difficult decisions, discovering the clarity you need to make the right call.

Good morning and welcome to the 5am Miracle.

I am Jeff Sanders and this is the podcast dedicated to dominating your day before breakfast.

My goal is to help you bounce out of bed with enthusiasm, create powerful, lifelong habits, and tackle your grandest goals with extraordinary energy.

I am a keynote speaker and corporate trainer specializing in delivering high energy, interactive, and action-oriented presentations and workshops focused on productivity, wellness, and personal and professional growth.

If you want to learn more, head over to jeffsanders.com/speaking.

Now in the episode this week, I'll break down what it takes to choose when you're stuck between a rock and a hard place.

Why waiting for clarity will likely keep you stuck even longer.

And how to move faster through the uncertainty phase of indecision.

Let's get to it.

Let's go back to 2008.

I had a really big choice to make.

An epic, life-changing decision.

Well, that's how others viewed it.

For me, it was actually a fairly simple choice.

Should I or should I not propose to my girlfriend Tessa?

Now, at the time, I honestly didn't really question whether or not I should propose.

It was just how to do it.

My decision to propose was not based on logic.

It was just purely emotional and then justified by logic after the fact.

In this scenario, clarity showed up when we moved to Boston after college.

And our relationship took a whole new meaning, a whole new set of standards.

It was just this incredibly epic time period where I had a big choice to make.

I knew that Tessa was valuable in my life.

I knew she was special.

I knew she was the one.

Frankly, I just, in my gut, I knew it.

And so this question of how do you make a difficult decision was really not the question I had for myself.

It was just how do I step in with confidence to do this thing that I intuitively know is the right call?

And so, yes, I did eventually figure out the logistics.

We had a really nice proposal.

She said, yes, it all worked out.

By the way, she did call me crazy multiple times during the proposal, but she did say yes, eventually.

So, long story short, I knew she would say yes.

I knew it was the right call.

In my gut, my emotions told me this is the right direction to go.

But making choices like this one, they can be tricky.

Let's try another one.

Let's jump to 2013.

This was one year before I was laid off from my job.

And at the time, yes, I had launched this podcast.

I had a side business.

I had coaching that I was doing.

My blog at the time was doing well.

I was building up this sense of momentum for my side hustle.

And I was debating, should I or should I not quit my job?

And it was a really difficult choice.

Honestly, I did not want to stay at my job.

It was not a great fit for me.

But at the time, I also did not have enough money from my business to replace my income.

So, in this scenario, clarity showed up when I got laid off a year later.

Building a sustainable business was now my only option after I was laid off.

But prior to that, when I still had the job, and I was in this indecision phase of trying to figure out, yes or no, do I, shouldn't I, I want to but I can't, all that self-doubt, all those issues we just discussed last week here on this podcast, those issues were alive and well for me.

And I frankly just didn't have the confidence to make the decision.

Practically, logically, it's true, there wasn't enough money to make the choice to actually jump ship.

And yet, I was laid off and I made the choice anyway.

I got laid off and had no severance package, no parachute to land on.

I had nothing.

I just simply made it work.

I forced it into existence.

And it was really difficult.

And frankly, I would never have made that choice independently.

I would have stayed at that job for years and more years and more years until someone eventually told me, "Jeff, this is silly, get out of here."

Which thankfully happened to me.

The company going bankrupt and closing its doors was perfect for me.

Absolute perfection.

No, it sucked at the time, I hated it.

I didn't want it to happen at all.

But I also knew it had to happen.

And so the question of how do I decide yes or no, in or out, do I quit, do I stay, can I build this business, will this work?

I didn't know what to do.

But the clarity found me in this scenario and frankly, I wish I had found it.

Now let's fast forward to 2017 for another potentially difficult decision.

Should Tessa and I get fertility treatments to have kids?

Now emotionally, we knew we wanted kids.

We definitely wanted kids.

There was no question about that.

But logically, we also knew we were in new territory.

It was going to be very complicated, very expensive, very invasive, time-consuming, arduous.

Fertility treatments really are difficult.

So for us, clarity showed up in this scenario when we just honestly could not get pregnant on our own.

But we had a few specialists and a few doctors who offered us options that we could actually say yes to that otherwise would not have existed for us.

And so in this scenario, yes, it's difficult to say yes to something when you know going into it, it's going to be hard.

You know going into it, it's a lot of uncertainty, a lot of unknowns and no guarantees.

At the time we said yes, we had no idea what the real issue was at hand and if we could overcome it or not.

But we knew we had to try.

We knew for us the decision to try or not was not a question at all.

It was just simply a question of how.

How is this possible?

What's the avenue we're going to take?

Which road are we going to go down and then hop off and then get on a new one and then try this over there?

It was just we knew the mess was coming and we together said yes.

Making tough choices is never going to be that straightforward.

Even if you emotionally know the answer, even if you logically can map out the answer, it's still going to be hard.

It's difficult decisions are difficult on their face value.

That's what these things are.

So what does it take?

Well, in each of these scenarios, I highlighted when clarity showed up.

Some of these scenarios, the clarity was there the whole time.

I knew it and just had to admit it out loud.

In other cases, the clarity found me and I had to then admit, "Okay, I'm now forced in this scenario.

I have to make a call now because I'm now in that moment.

Here we go."

Confident choices require clarity.

If you are stuck on what to do next, it means you're seeking clarity.

From my perspective, you can sit around and wait for it.

You can hope you get laid off to force yourself into that job.

You can hope that your girlfriend will just nudge you to say, "Hey, propose now."

You can wait for someone to force you into the future you know is coming.

Or you can just go make it happen.

I told that story of the proposal and Tessa called me crazy while I'm proposing.

It was because she had no idea.

She had no clue what was happening, did not see it coming.

I kept the whole thing a huge secret.

Literally, I told no one.

Because of that, in the moment, it took her by surprise.

But I knew intuitively it was going to be a yes.

She had no clue.

It came out of left field for her.

Yet, here we were in this moment, and despite her doubting right there, she still also knew it was the right call.

Here we are 15 years later, married with two kids, a house, etc., etc.

Our life unfolded afterwards.

But in the moment, when you don't know what's going to happen down the road, you don't know how it's going to play out, you have to have some sense of this is the call, and I've got enough tools in my toolbox, enough confidence to play with to say, "I'm going to go through with this despite the fact that it may not go my way.

I'm going to say yes to an IVF series of treatments to hopefully get pregnant, knowing full well it might fail.

Knowing full well the whole thing could be a ginormous waste of time and money that results in nothing that we had expected."

You have to accept all of the outcomes when you step into uncertainty, when you step into an unknown future.

We want confidence.

We want clarity.

We want guarantees.

And the point of this conversation is not to say you have to have 100% of that.

Life is not that.

It's not a guarantee.

Clarity is a guess.

It's an educated guess.

It's a smart guess.

It's a guess based on a new reality, but it's always a guess.

And so the question becomes how do we proactively guess better?

How do we proactively put ourselves in these scenarios to make better decisions with more confidence to get us as close as possible to these outcomes that we are seeking?

So let's break this down.

Here's how you can make difficult decisions and discover the clarity you need to make the right call.

We're going to start with what it takes to choose when you're stuck between a rock and a hard place.

And that's what it means to have a difficult choice.

It means that option A and option B are both bad potentially, both sound bad, or one of them sounds impossible and the other sounds lackluster.

You know what it is.

You know that feeling.

The first acknowledgment in this process is that emotion wins every time.

I'm a logical guy.

I love logic.

I love facts.

I love evidence.

I love to be able to calculate methodically my answers.

Here's my checklist.

Here's my to-do items.

Here's my productivity app.

Here's the structure and the framework and the plan, the calendar.

You know me.

You know this show.

That's who I am.

And yet I'm willing to admit the fact, logically, that emotion wins.

And so the question in a difficult decision is always how do you feel?

How do you feel when you are working a job you hate?

How do you feel when you spend high-quality time with your partner?

How do you feel when you drink alcohol?

How do you feel when you work out at the gym with your friends?

How do you feel when you argue with strangers on the Internet?

How do you feel when you pursue a career that fits you in your natural skill set?

All of these questions are about the feeling of the experience.

Logically, I could tell you that working a job you hate is a bad idea.

But emotionally, you may have a different experience.

I could logically tell you from a third-party perspective to coach you through a scenario telling you, you know, I see X, Y, Z in your future.

But that misses the entirety of your experience, your emotional experience.

Now, I'm not saying to make every choice based on emotion.

But what I am saying is that acknowledging the emotion gives you such a heads up to your own intuition, your gut feeling, your tapping into what probably is the right direction to move.

You could use logic to answer all these questions.

But since emotion is who we are as people, we want to understand that that's where we start.

And we use logic as a tool to get us to the right answer with both our head and our heart.

Both the analytics but also our soul.

Both of these things are part of the process.

And at the end of the day, emotion is going to be the stronger force.

It's going to be the thing that keeps you at a job or not, that keeps you in a relationship or not, that keeps you with a habit or not.

Emotion will be the driver of those choices.

Even if logically you could argue that your choice is terrible, if emotionally you're bought into it, you're going to keep doing it.

That's what a bad habit is.

A bad habit is an emotional addiction to what you're doing.

So we have to emotionally change our experience and our state of being to find ourselves on a new track forward.

So after we acknowledge that emotion is the driver behind this, the next step in this process is to ask the question, "What's the worst that could happen?"

If you're stuck between a rock and a hard place, let's just forecast your possible outcomes.

If the worst things were to happen, what would you do?

Would you die?

Would life as you know it be destroyed?

Probably not.

It's likely that you could live with the outcome and pivot and then continue to pursue your goals.

This is a very important question to start with.

We have to ask the question, "When we're stuck between what do we do next, let's just play it out."

If things were to go horribly, worst possible scenario, where does that end us up?

Play that out, really logically map it out, write it down.

Then ask yourself, "Is this even likely?

Yes or no?"

Honestly, it probably isn't.

Then from that, we back it up and say, "Okay, if this scenario is less likely to happen, and even if it did, I'm still going to be alive, I'll still be here, well then it's worth trying.

It's probably worth jumping into to see what could happen."

Then of course, if things go sideways, we'll pivot down the road.

In the future, make a new choice, map out a new plan.

But asking this question up front gives you that sense of confidence to say, "I can step in, I'm not going to die, it's going to be okay."

Third piece of this process, ask this question, "How fast could you test your hypothesis?"

Speed wins in so many scenarios.

Silicon Valley loves the mantra, "Move fast and break things."

Now, you could argue based upon decades of that mantra, they have broken too many things.

That mantra doesn't work.

However, I still like the mantra, I still want to use it in certain scenarios.

Speed can be your friend if you're just not sure what to do.

You can make a test model of your choices, and then do something small and see what happens.

And then regardless of the outcome, move quickly to the next best choice.

Speed will help you get through something that you're just unsure of to begin with.

If you're not sure if this new workout's going to happen, or a new diet you want to try, or if you applied for a job, would you get a yes or a no?

We can just move quickly, apply for lots of jobs, try a diet for 48 hours, and then try another diet for 48 more hours.

You can really make these things happen faster.

Now, in some cases, that's terrible advice, I get that.

But in others, it could break the mold and the stagnation of just simply being frozen in place.

Oftentimes what happens is when you're stuck between two difficult choices, we choose neither.

We sit there and we do nothing.

The point of speed is not actually how fast you're going, it's just to do something at all.

It's to move forward, get results, and then pivot and move from there.

So if you have found yourself literally stuck, you just don't want to make the wrong choice, so you make no choice at all, making no choice is also the wrong choice.

That's not it.

Waiting doesn't work.

I'm a big proponent of being patient for things that make sense, but in this scenario, in this episode, with this content, I'm not arguing for patience.

I'm arguing for proactivity.

I'm arguing for you taking the reins of this scenario and saying, "I'm going to make a move.

I'm going to go learn more, do more, try more, pivot, and then go from there."

That's going to give you more information faster and get you to the end result you want a whole lot faster than just sitting and waiting for likely something to happen that may never happen at all.

And that's not a life I want to live.

Let's break this piece down a little bit more.

Let's discuss in a little more detail why waiting for clarity will likely keep you stuck even longer.

First major point here, no one cares more about you than you.

If you think someone else is coming to solve your problems, they aren't.

If you want a solution, it's on you to put the pieces together, and then clarity will actually come through the actions that you are taking, not someone else who swoops in with the right answer.

I did give an example earlier of me being laid off from my job, and so in that scenario, technically, yeah, an action was taken outside of my control that then forced my hand to make a choice.

But let's be clear here.

Even when that happened, I still chose entrepreneurship.

I still chose not to go get another job, even when one was offered to me almost immediately.

I still made the choice when a scenario took place that I didn't choose, but I had put the pieces together so that that was possible.

In other words, I was already building this thing, preparing for this moment.

Now, should I have been more proactive and pulled the trigger myself?

Absolutely.

But I didn't.

I'm still alive.

I'm still doing my thing.

So there are some scenarios where if you wait, you'll get something that happens.

But my argument is that generally that something will not be on your time frame, will not be the choice you would make, and you have the power to make a better choice on your own.

And that's the direction we're going for.

Because once again, no one cares more about you than you.

And waiting for somebody else to come in and save the day is going to mean you sitting and waiting for a long, long time.

Point number two, waiting will likely get you more of what you're already getting.

You can likely see your future because it's based on the actions you're taking now and the results you're getting right now.

So if you're currently not where you want to be, rest assured that you will also be in this exact same spot one year from today if you don't do anything at all.

This is kind of painful to play out, but this is the scenario for so many people and so many pieces of life, whether it's your job, your relationship, your health.

We want to believe that a year is a long time.

We want to believe that a year from now, things are going to be very different.

Oh, yeah, 12 months from now, I will have pursued all these grand goals and I'll be so much better off.

But will you?

Will you?

I don't know.

Because if you're not doing something right now to change your scenario, you're going to be exactly where you are just one year older.

I know this from experience.

I've been here before where I've thought to myself, next year is the year.

This is when it's all going to happen.

No, it's not about next year.

It's about right now.

If you want to get different results in the future, a year from now, five years from now, 10 years from now, it is all based on your present moment decision making.

So if you want a new life ever, you got to change now.

And I don't mean theoretically now.

I mean, literally now.

Because that's the only time you have.

It's the only moment that matters is now.

Third point, clarity does not come from waiting.

It comes in hindsight after you have done something or something has been done to you.

If you wait for clarity, it is probably the most passive non-decision you can make.

Let's just be clear about that.

Epiphanies don't come from nothing.

They actually come from process that I have called in this show for years now, crunch and release.

Crunch is when you take direct action towards a possible solution and release is the rest period.

Take action, crunch towards something, and then rest.

Crunch and release.

Action and rest.

Repeat this process over and over again until you have crafted the clarity you were initially waiting around for.

Once again, clarity does not come from the waiting.

It comes after the fact because you've done the work, got the information, and then you can put those pieces together and decide what to do.

Clarity is a thing that happens afterwards.

There's not many other ways I can explain that.

That's just what this is.

We want to believe that if we wait, clarity will just show up.

It'll just, out of nowhere, poof, oh my gosh, I got an epiphany.

But epiphanies are crafted.

Epiphanies are built.

They come from something.

They come from something to allow them to be true.

The reason why you get an epiphany in the shower, for example, is because you've already been putting those pieces together before the shower took place.

You were already working towards something, asking difficult questions, doing research, talking to people.

You were in the game.

And then you paused, took a shower in this example, and when your brain rested, the creative juices began to flow, and all of a sudden those connections were there.

It's incredible how our brains operate, but they tend to operate in this way most of the time.

The stress hormones, the cortisol, the intensity, the fighting for something, in those moments our brains kind of shut down creatively.

It's when we relax, when we rest, when we pause, that our creative brain begins to really show up, and those connections are made.

So the clarity that you want from those epiphanies in that rest period are a result of doing the work first.

They come after you pursued the thing you wanted.

All right, the third and final phase episode this week, let's discuss how to move faster through what I'm calling the uncertainty phase of indecision.

In other words, you have a choice to make, you're not sure what to do, and you are wildly uncertain about which direction to go.

You're at a fork in the road, and we want to pick up the pace.

We want to move a little faster, leverage that Silicon Valley mantra.

Let's move forward, hopefully not break too many things.

But what does that look like in this phase of just feeling like, "I just don't know what to do, and I want to do it now"?

What does that in-the-moment choice look like?

Let's start here.

First, make a list of three quick actions you could take today, literally today.

Don't overthink this step.

Make it very simple.

Just jot down a few small tasks you could easily complete, in the next 24 hours, that would move you towards an answer.

So once again, three quick actions you could take today, that could be completed in less than 24 hours.

The goal here is quick action.

It's to get yourself moving, doing something that moves you towards the thing that you want.

A lot closer to that clarity you're seeking.

Step two, tomorrow, do it again.

That's right.

Make another list of three things you could do to get completed in the next 24 hours or less.

And then do them.

And then guess what?

Do it again.

That's right.

The intention here is a bunch of quick actions, day after day, to build a snowball.

We want to build momentum.

We want to get ourselves in the game every day, doing something that adds up to a bigger something down the road.

The process of doing tiny things every day will morph into a much larger project.

And you will quickly find yourself doing something of value every single day to help answer the questions that bug you so much.

It's these tiny actions that will add up to the significant growth.

And then in hindsight, you'll look back and say, "Wait a minute.

I did all these things.

Tons of little things over the last couple of weeks, couple of months, couple of years.

And because of all that work, look at what I've got.

I've got more knowledge.

I've got more experience.

I have more clarity now.

Whether I realize it or not, I'm way better than I was back then."

And that process to move faster through this phase of uncertainty is this commitment to daily small steps.

Really fast, really quick.

Make a phone call, send an email, buy a book, whatever it is.

Just do the quick little thing to get you in the game.

I'm telling you, this is how stuff gets done.

Anything big only ever happened because of little tiny choices that you made right here today.

That's all this is.

Okay, so that's all I've got.

I hope this was helpful for you.

If you've been stuck between difficult choices, I get it.

I'm there all the time.

I know what it feels like.

Life can be complicated.

It can be messy.

It can be a big pain in the butt.

Let's just be real.

And so because of that, we're going to have to navigate through these tough choices frequently.

We're going to want that clarity and seek that control.

And I'm telling you, the best way to ever achieve anything that looks like that is you've got to get in the game and do the work.

You've got to be in there.

And once you are, yeah, it can be hard, it can be tiring, it can be all kinds of things.

One thing it definitely is is helpful.

One thing it definitely is is it builds traction for you to then grow from and do more work in the future.

This is your path forward.

It works.

Just work it.

And for the action step this week, make a difficult decision today.

Whatever you're on the fence about, make a move.

Whatever is holding you up, choose a path.

Remember, you can move fast and break things.

Just try to break fewer things.

I'm not a fan of permanent damage here, but there is wiggle room to learn from your experience and pivot quickly from there.

Whatever you choose, just choose something.

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And that's all I've got for you here on the 5ammiracle podcast this week.

Until next time, you have the power to change your life, and all that fun begins bright and early.

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