A powerful pair of phrases to use when making decisions: Part 2

Last week, I talked about a phrase I often start with when I’m making a decision—and how that helped me in my CEO life as well as in my personal life. I recently moved to Brooklyn and when I was contemplating moving, I used the sentence structure “If I do X, I might not be able to/won’t be able to do Y” to think about my choices and trade-offs. For example:

“If I move to Brooklyn, I won’t be able to afford as nice a house as the one we live in now.”

Sitting with this and exploring what this brings up is so important, and once you feel like you have unearthed some of what’s under that, you can use the second part of this two-part phrase:

If I do X, then I will be able to do Y.

This helps consider the options and what will happen if you do X—so for this example it was:

“If I move to Brooklyn, then I will be able to live in a place where we can walk and get places more easily, and where our time together at home is spent more just sharing spaces.”

After having examined all the internal thoughts and reactions that came up around the first sentence, I now could think about could happen and what that would be like. As someone who knows that a) I feel better when I move my body and when I get outside and b) I don’t necessarily do either of those things unless there’s a reason to (like walk to school, or go to the corner store). I started reflecting on how my kids spent time at our house, and how often they liked to be on top of me and each other (sometimes literally)--so while we would sacrifice the amount of space, would it really change how we live?

As humans, our brains can be hard-wired to see the problems or challenges, which is why the first phrase is so helpful—it plays into what we’re hard-wired to do, and helps us distill our fears from this amorphous blob into a succinct phrase.

Then, once we’ve entertained that concern and fear, today’s phase helps us to think about what could be. Last week, I used this example from my professional life:

“If I hire a coach for myself, it means I might not be able to staff up mid-year flexibly if I need to.”

As I mentioned, when I sat with this it allowed me to think about the stressors I anticipated, and my fear that I wouldn’t have as many resources at my disposal to sit with it. After exploring that, I could go to today’s sentence frame, and think about:

“If I hired a coach for myself, then I will be able to lean on that person for advice and perspective when navigating those unknown stressors.”

A lightbulb went off almost immediately! I realized that I had a lot of fear about investing that money in a coach because of what options may be limited moving forward—but hadn’t really spent time thinking about how my time and investment in the coach could mean that I would have a better toolkit developed as a result of my work with the coach, and I would have that coach in my corner, as part of how I could attack any challenge that came up in the time we’d be working together.

What do you think about this two-pronged power phrase?

Comment below and let me know times you might use this framework in your life!

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